Christal Cooper
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The Friendship of Poet
Salgado Maranhao and Translator Alexis Levitin:
The Impossible Translation of Tiger Fur from Portuguese to English Through Friendship, Language,
& Love
/catalog.php?id=280 published the bilingual
Portuguese-English collection Tiger Fur written in the original
Portuguese by Salgado Maranhao https://
com/Salgado-Maranhão-730706050352609/, translated to English by
Alexis Levitin Introduction by Alexis Levitin http://www.alexislevitin.org/alexislevitin.org/Home.html, Afterward by Antonio
Cicero Above Top Right
Tiger Fur was first published in
the Portuguese in 2009 by the title A Pelagem da Tigra.
Professor Luiz Fernando
Valence, left formerly the chair of the Department of Portuguese at Brown
University, introduced Alexis and Salgado to one another. In an interview, Luis described that
introduction.
“I had the pleasure of
bringing Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin together during ”A Moveable
Feast,” a festival of poetry in Portuguese, held at Brown University in the
spring of 2007. That introduction was far from fortuitous. I had known and
worked with Alexis since the early 1980s, and had always been impressed by the combination of
precision, elegance, and creativity displayed in his superb translations from
the Portuguese, both in prose and in verse. And I had been an early admirer
and, indeed, the first person in the United States to have taught and written
about Salgado’s poetry. I believed that it was high time Salgado’s poetry
became available to English language audiences. And I was convinced that only a
translator with deep sensitivity to the nuances of both Portuguese and English
poetic language would be able to do justice to the intricate syntax and imagery
that is the hallmark of Salgado’s poetry.”
In an email interview
with Chris Rice Cooper, Alexis right in April 2015 described their friendship as a decade of good
will, collaboration, poetry, language and understanding one another’s home country
and its culture. 
Alexis translated Salgado’s works Blood
of the Sun and Tiger Fur from Portuguese into
English through his friendship with Salgado, observing Salgado’s personality,
the way he spoke the Portuguese language, both verbally and on the written
page, and with the support of his friend Valente.
“I found Salgado's
poetry very difficult at first and would not have dared to try to translate his
work without the fervent support and encouragement of Prof. Luiz Valente of
Brown.”
The poem that compelled
Salgado into writing Tiger Fur was a poem about his
ex-wife called “Boundary Five/War Heads” from his earlier poetry collection Blood
of the Sun. https://milkweed.org/book/blood-of-the-sun
On April 19, 2016 both
Salgado and Alexis conducted a Portuguese and English poetry reading from Blood
of the Sun and Tiger Fur at Lake Community College
in Eugene, Oregon. Above Left.
During the reading Alexis described Tiger
Fur as a poetry collection trying to explain the possibilities and
impossibilities of passionate relationships.
He further stated that the attempt to explain these passionate
relationships is not found in the passion itself but in the words that describe
the emotion that deal with the passionate relationship.
This passionate relationship itself could refer to humanity
and the elements of the earth; two people in love; language; elements of the
cosmos and earth; animals; and the mythological god Eros.
Humanity and Elements of the Earth
Alexis stated at the
poetry reading that his brother chides him on his chosen life of a bachelor and
questions why he chooses impossible women.
Alexis’s response to his brother was that he built his life on
impossible women: “I am the sailor who loves the horizon.”
Terror, lightning, fog
spread
an ambiguous landscape
before my eyes.
In “Sea of Flames
1” the speaker of the poem speaks of his need for his ladylove even
before he meets her. When he finally sees her, the pupil of his eye
literally goes through a transformation along with his libido.
or the flagrant moment (the flirtations look!)
in which the pupil
coagulates the gesture, the gestation.
Language
The poetry collection Tiger
Fur sings and sites words of passion to language itself.
what makes the lyric fertile (beneath
splinters of immutable
moons) I sing
to the sundered solitary heart.
Excerpt, “Sea Without Waves 1.”
Elements of the Cosmos (the sun) and Earth (lake)
By attachment, there will follow, to the
intimate lake (of mirrors)
this sun that breathes
stilettos, that lays waste
within, carnivorous
as a kiss.
Excerpt, “Sea Without Waves. 3.”
Animals
There are numerous animals mentioned in these poems: dragonflies,
dogs, birds, dinosaurs, jackals and serpents but the one animal that tops the
list is that of the tiger which is depicted in numerous poems throughout the
collection. Right Attributed to Marlene Thyssen CCB2.5
a sharper’s shimmering coat—
eyes that flow with couplets of light
and a blade beneath the fur in which it hides.
Excerpt, “Claws in the Iris”
Could it be the work of Eros
that has set the desert
there before us?
Excerpt, “Sea Drift VIII”
The last three lines of the poem “Tiger Fur”
describe the impossibility of humanity trying to understand the impossibilities
of these passionate relationships. The
last three lines could also be a warning to humanity to quit trying to figure
out the impossible and just marvel and be in awe of the impossible.
If we keep on trying to figure it out, as the
last three lines state, we will only experience exasperation, dissatisfaction,
and humiliation. Right The Lovers attributed to Ralph Magritte FU
The tracks, no more,
of some forgotten tale
of treasure that
bewilders us and takes us in,
so winning it we only
win chagrin.
Instead the mantra of Tiger Fur can be found in “Solitude,” where we are told to always have our own individual beginning, different from every one else’s.
Mine is just a beginning
no footsteps to be
followed.
We
as individualas have our own impossibility, our own awe that can never be
explained but forever will amaze, just like the words that describe the
impossibility.
