National Poetry Month 2021, Week Four: Adelaide Freitas’s “In the Bulge of Your Body”
April 30, 2021
Continuing to explore the poets and poetry of the Azores and its Diaspora, this week I’m featuring a poem by the late Adelaide Freitas, a wonderful Azorean poet, novelist, and essayist deserving of more attention.
Freitas was born 20 April 1949 in Achadinha, on the northeastern coast of São Miguel Island. She attended school in Ponta Delgada before moving with her family to the United States, where she attended New Bedford High School in Massachusetts. In 1972, she graduated with a BA in Portuguese from the Southeastern Massachusetts University (now UMass Dartmouth) and went on to earn a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York and a PhD in American Literature from the University of Azores. She lived in Ponta Delgada with her husband, Vamberto Freitas, and was a professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of the Azores.
In 2018, Adelaide Freitas was honored by the Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region of the Azores with the Insígnia Autonómica de Reconhecimento (Commendation of Recognition), just a few weeks before she passed away after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.
“Adelaide Freitas had gone silent years ago through the devastation of illness,” wrote one of her translators, Emanuel Melo, on his blog. “Her husband, Vamberto Freitas, himself a man of letters and important literary critic in the Portuguese diaspora, with enduring love and faithfulness kept her by his side, even writing about her, but above all loving her with steadfastness. In one of his blog posts he wrote how in the middle of a sleepless night, with her resting in the next room, he would take her books from the shelf and read her words to himself when he could no longer her the voice of his beloved wife.”
Her novel, Smiling in the Darkness, is an intimate portrait of what life was like on the Azores during the latter half of the 20th Century, and follows a young woman who struggles with the absence of her emigrant parents—who left her behind when they went to America—and her desire to explore the world beyond her island home. It was recently published in a translation by Katherine Baker, Emanuel Melo, and others. You can order a copy (and you should) from Tagus Press here: Smiling in the Darkness.
Here is her poem, “No bojo do teu corpo” in its original Portuguese and my English translation:
“No bojo do teu corpo”
No bojo do teu copo
olho translúcido o teu corpo
Vibra a alegria da tua emoção
e em mim se dilui a sua gota
Ballet agita o copo
treme a boca da garrafa
A mão abafa o vidro morno
cala-se enterrada a ternura dos lábios
A folha verde voa etérea
pousa no líquido desfeito
Dela nasce uma flor
e o mundo nela se espelha
branca a luz se intersecta
refrecta o whisky beijado
Guardanapo assim molhado
refresca a tua fronte
Gentil ela se inclina
no Outro se confunde
No tchim-tchim da efusão
treme bojo do teu corpo
—
“In the bulge of your body”
In the bulge of your glass
I see your translucent body
Vibrating with the joy of your emotion
and your drop dissolves in me
Ballet stirs the glass
the mouth of the bottle is trembling
The hand stifles the tepid glass
the tenderness of the lips is buried, remains silent
The green leaf flies ethereal
lands in the dissolved liquid
From it a flower is born
and the world is mirrored in it
white light intersects
refracting the whisky kiss
Such a wet napkin
refreshing your brow
Gently she leans
into the Other, gets confused
In the Tchim-tchim![1] of effusion
the bulge of your body trembles
—Adelaide Freitas (translated by Scott Edward Anderson)
[1] Tchim-tchim! is an expression like Cheers! An onomatopoeic phrase that connotes the clinking of glasses. I decided not to translate it here, although I could have gone with “cling-cling!” or something similar.
Jardim Botânico José do Canto, Ponta Delgada, Azores. Photo by SEA
I first encountered Logan Duarte through Christopher Larkosh’s “Writing the Moment Lusodiasporic” event last June. A two-day event sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and the UMass Dartmouth Department of Portuguese, it brought together Luso-North American writers from throughout Canada and the U.S.
The event was originally supposed to be held in April at the Casa da Saudade Library in New Bedford, but due to the pandemic, it was moved to Zoom in June. The event featured a combination of presentations by writers and cultural agents like Irene Marques, Humberto da Silva, and Emanuel Melo, along with a generative writing workshop led by Carlo Matos.
(Larkosh, who tragically died this past December, served as Logan’s professor and adviser at UMass Dartmouth, and I’d like to dedicate this post to his memory.)
I next saw Logan when we both read for Diniz Borges’ Filaments of the Atlantic Heritage symposium in March 2021. I was impressed with Logan’s poetry, enthusiasm, and scholarship.
One of the poems Logan read during that session was “My Statue,” which he described to me as, “an act of homage towards a man who is the lifeblood of my açorianidade, and a testament to those who have gone before; those whose presence grows stronger in physical absence and gives us the confidence to smile in the rain.”
Logan is an Azorean Portuguese American writer currently based in Taunton, Massachusetts. His family came from São Miguel Island in the 1960s, which makes him first generation American; although he sometimes jokingly refers to himself as “0.5 generation,” having called Lisbon, Portugal, his home for part of his life.
His writing centers around cultural identity in the Luso-American diaspora and has been a runner-up for the Disquiet International Literary Program’s Luso-American Fellowship (2019) and featured in the Legacy section of the Tribuna Portuguesa (2020). He has a forthcoming set of poems in the upcoming issue of Gávea-Brown, a bilingual journal of Portuguese American letters and studies published by Brown University.
Logan is expected to graduate with a master’s in teaching from UMass Dartmouth in 2021, from which he also received his BA in Portuguese. He also studied at Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Universidade de Lisboa and has taught Portuguese at Milford and Taunton high schools and at Escola Oficial Portuguesa. He will be a graduate Teaching Fellow at UMass Dartmouth beginning his second masters in Portuguese Studies in the upcoming academic year.
Here is Logan Duarte’s “My Statue”
My Statue
Rain pelts the cobblestone calçada. A utopia turns to a warzone.
Tourists scatter…I walk
Knowing all too well the dangerous potential of a slick calçada.
Some of them slip. Now they know.
Walking, thinking, unperturbed by the hail of crossfire in which I am caught, I lift my head to see a statue.
I stop, my eyes examining its unique character.
It stands firm; the quintessence of gallantry; completely untouched by the bombardment letting loose on the city.
All else assumes a deep gray despondence, battered by the bombs that fall from the clouds. The streets are barren; a wasteland.
But the statue stands unscathed.
Only light shines on this singular obra-prima perfectly guarded in a safe corner of the universe.
A man stands chiseled out of the finest marble.
His eyes look directly at me…no one else.
Below him, a plaque:
“Ocean-crosser, storm-braver, fearless warrior”.
Who could it be?
A hero to the people? A national figure? The sacred one-eyed man?
No. This is no ordinary statue. This one is only mine.
I continue walking, still thinking. I still see a statue…
My statue…my avô.
The corners of my mouth raise nearly to my ears at the sight of my statue, and the rain clears. Tourists emerge from their hideaways; some still rubbing their bruises.
Their selfies one shade darker now,
But my statue remains unscathed.
It guides me through the warzone—a beacon amidst brume.
So that when others run, and sometimes slip,
I walk and think of my statue who in life sacrificed so much
So that I may not fear the rain.
And that I may turn my warzone into utopia.
—Logan Duarte
(This poem, used with permission of the author, originally appeared in Tribuna Portuguesa, in a slightly different version.)
There’s a particular light one experiences on the islands of the Azores. A combination of atmospheric and environmental factors contributes to creating this light, including aspect of the sun, the way the sun’s rays cut through the ubiquitous cloud-cover and pervasive sea mist, the reflection off the surrounding sea and refraction through a sometimes-oppressive humidity that lingers, at various times of the day and the season.
It also depends upon the perspective of the individual—how they are feeling, what they are longing for, who they are becoming. You know it when you see it—almost I want to say, you feel it. And the variety and diversity of the light on the islands is remarkable: just as no two people can see things the same way, the way we experience island light will be as various as our very nature.
“Luz insular,” Elaine Ávila calls it in her poem, “Grandma’s Embroidery,” describing it as “a light so/ particular, it floats,/ promising miracles,/ as if only somewhere else/ will relieve/ a thousand deprivations.” And in this sense, it has a double meaning: island light and an interiority of light, a light from within, a light that “should tell the truth,/ like Grandma’s embroidery.”
Better known as a playwright, Elaine Ávila is an American-born Canadian of Azorean descent, the granddaughter of one of the first photographers from Ribeiras on the island of Pico, who emigrated to America.
Ávila told me in an email that she first experienced this island light in her grandfather’s photographs. “They had this blurry light, looking like the ‘holy spirit,’ floating through the photos,” she wrote. “I assumed it was because his brownie camera leaked light, but when I took pictures in the Azores, I noticed that light shows up in contemporary photographs and in the sky when you are there.”
Her Azorean grandmother, also from Ribeiras, trained as a tailor and milliner. On her mother’s side, her heritage is mostly a mystery, a product of the hidden history of women who surrendered children for adoption in the days before Roe vs. Wade.
Ávila’s father was a mathematician who worked for NASA and her mother is a painter. This caldo of cultures and intriguing, enigmatic history makes for a rich broth from which Ávila draws in her poetry.
Her plays, which have a decidedly biographical and historical predilection, prompted the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks to describe Ávila as “a wonderful writer, tremendously gifted, reliable and innovative.”
Her latest play, FADO: The Saddest Music in the World, is a musical following a young Portuguese Canadian woman “on a multicultural journey back to Lisbon’s meandering back alleys and lively cafés, winding through fados of resistance, emigrant fados, queer fados, in the hope of reclaiming her heritage and retrieving her own true song.” It has just been published by Talonbooks in Canada.
Here is Elaine Ávila’s poem, “Grandma’s Embroidery”:
Grandma’s Embroidery
In full bloom
Grandma’s blue hydrangea
tumbles through space
shining, alone, overturned,
while Grandpa’s boat
beckons, with sails of gold
unfurling on a white-blue sea.
She’s done it, broken the patterns
made something original
found American threads so brilliant
she can capture Azorean light.
In the Azores, we call it
“luz insular,” a light so
particular, it floats,
promising miracles,
as if only somewhere else
will relieve
a thousand deprivations.
Luz insular should tell the truth,
like Grandma’s embroidery.
If you leave
you may discover yourself
tumbling, overturned
out of proportion, alone
yet, able,
stitch by stitch,
to make Azorean light
dance.
—Elaine Ávila, used by permission of the author
National Poetry Month 2021, Week One: Ângela de Almeida’s “comecemos o dia a oriente junto às ravinas”
April 5, 2021
One of the pleasures of reconnecting with my ancestral and familial roots on the Azores is learning about the community of writers, artists, and musicians who are active on the islands and in the Azorean diaspora.
Photo by SEA
This year for my National Poetry Month posts I’m going to focus on the poetry of the Azores and its diaspora. In part, because I don’t know when I’ll get back to the islands, and in part because there is, both on the islands and around the diasporic world, an incredible diversity of poets working today.
Indeed, it is part of a renaissance of Azorean creativity. For example, on São Miguel over the course of a week in the summer, there were many cultural activities—from outdoor concerts in the Largo do Colégio to stilt-walking pop-up street theater performances, from book launches at one of the several bookshops to readings at the Public Library.
Add the other islands into the mix—from events and festivals organized by Terry Costa’s MiratecArts organization on Pico to the Maia Folk Festival on Santa Maria island and the “Festas da Praia” on Terceira—there’s an incredible cultural revolution happening on the Azores.
Just how extensive was this revolution (or my own revelation of it anyway) really hit home—literally—during the pandemic year of 2020: it seemed like every night there was an opportunity to participate in some Zoom event from the Azores or the diaspora, whether it was the Arquipélago de Escritores conference, the Colóquios da Lusofonia run by Chrys Chrystello, or events put on by the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at Fresno State University.
There were book launches, readings, and video interviews from bookstore-publishers like Letras Lavadas, Livraria SolMar, and Companhia das Ilhas, as well as musical performances by Sara Cruz, Cristovam, and others. (To be honest, this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s happening on the islands—there’s more going on there than in Brooklyn!)
One of the contemporary poets whose work that has come to my attention through all of this over the past year is Ângela de Almeida.
Born in Horta, on the island of Faial, Almeida studied in Lisbon, earning a PhD in Portuguese Literature by defending a thesis on the symbolism of the island and Pentecostalism in the work of one of the Azores’s most renowned literary figures, the poet and essayist Natália Correia. Her poetry collections include Sobre o Rosto (1989), Manifesto (2005), A Oriente (2006), as well as the poetic narrative, O Baile das Luas (1993), which critic David Mourao-Ferreira called “a small masterpiece.”
The poem of hers I’ve chosen, “comecemos o dia a oriente junto às ravinas,” comes from her book, Caligrafia dos pássaros (The Calligraphy of Birds), which she published in 2018; the poem is dedicated to Ricardo Reis, one of the heteronyms of the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa.
Ricardo Reis has “a very particular poetry and philosophy with which I identify myself very much,” Almeida told me. “He is against suffering and I am always.”
Indeed, Reis is a modern epicurean who urges us to seize the day and peacefully accept fate. “Wise is the one who does not seek,” he wrote. “The seeker will find in all things the abyss, and doubt in himself.”
Here is Ângela de Almeida’s poem in its original Portuguese and in my translation:
comecemos o dia a oriente junto às ravinas
com as mãos envoltas em anéis de água
e olhemos o azul e acetinado manto
e fiquemos ausentes e livres
e suspensos
e com as mãos envoltas em anéis de água
abracemo-nos simplesmente
e continuemos a olhar o azul e acetinado manto
como se o tempo fosse este momento
assim liso e pasmado
e afinal não nos abracemos, mas olhemos
simplesmente os fios de água na pele
deste dia diferente e fiquemos assim
contemplativos e ausentes
enquanto a água corre e não morre
–a Ricardo Reis
#
let us start the day in the east by the ravines
with our hands enfolded in rings of water
and look at the blue satin blanket
and let us stay absorbed and free
and suspended
and with our hands enfolded in rings of water
let us simply embrace each other
and continue to look at the blue satin blanket
as if time were this moment
so smooth and astonished
and in the end, let’s not embrace, but simply
look at the trickle of water on the skin
of this different day and stay like this
contemplative and absorbed
while the water flows and never dies
–to Ricardo Reis
Poem reprinted by permission of Ângela de Almeida. Translation by Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson
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