Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes

by Corsino Fortes, Daniel Hahn (Translator), Sean O'Brien (Translator)

Overview

Concerned with giving voice to Cape Verdean life, Fortes writes in Cape Verdean Creole - and not just standard Portuguese - a powerful statement reinforcing the islands' distinctive African nature. However, his poems are often written from the perspective of an exile - and themes of exile and redemptive return recur in his work. This collection introduces English readers to Fortes, and the poet's beautiful and unique use of language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780914671114
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	04/21/2015
Series:	Pirogue
Pages:	150
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Corsino Fortes is a poet and a diplomat. Born on the Cape Verdean island of São Vicente in 1933, his early work appeared in Claridade (Clarity), a journal that defined Cape Verdean literary identity from the later 1930s to 1960. Fortes' first full poetry collection Pao & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme) was published in 1974. The poet's use of Cape Verdean Creole - and not just standard Portuguese - is a powerful statement reinforcing the idea of the islands' distinctive African nature. Fortes studied in Portugal and spent much of his life abroad on diplomatic service - most notably in Angola and Lisbon.

Editorial Reviews

11/17/2014
Originally written in a Cape Verdean/Portuguese Creole, the words of this Lisbon-educated lawyer, ambassador, and poet are available for the first time in English. Fortes elevates the natural world to folk mythology, and his poems focus on place and connection—home and exile, blood and earth—to such an extent that those elements feel as if they have an agency even greater than the people that inhabit them. In “Root and Face,” the speaker addresses Cape Verde directly, expressing the deep pull its residents have toward it and vice versa: “If you, island!, on your horse of stone/ Open the throat, extend the limbs/ And breathe/ As a tree breathes the sea air/ The salt-beds bleed.” This desire for and alienation from the natural world is further complicated by the poet’s post-colonial consciousness and educated, globalized perspective. Portuguese speakers can get a feel for the Creole with the originals provided en face, and English speakers can finally experience how Fortes addresses the exile’s status common to so many around the world: “my body’s shadow is a cross/ Far from the sun of my home/ running to Africa/ running to Europe/ running to America/ running across the map/ running across the globe.” (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Cortes’s Cape Verde is full of tongues: all of nature speaks and sings. His language is fleshly. This visceral quality comes from abstractions made tangible through Fortes’s dense, at times opaque, symbology of bread, coin, sun, sea, guitar, and so on ... But it is also the translators who perform these transformations by—essentially by writing like poets. The alliterations I “see” in the en face Portuguese (which I do not read) are matched in English, enhancing the sense that language is not simply for understanding but for seeing, hearing, and touching. I would recommend this magnificent, generous, and bilingual presentation of Corsino Fortes’s work to anyone who enjoys grappling with the poignant, the sensuous, and the esoteric." - Asymptote Journal

"Concerned with giving voice to Cape Verdean life, Fortes writes in Cape Verdean Creole – and not just standard Portuguese – a powerful statement reinforcing the islands’ distinctive African nature. However, his poems are often written from the perspective of an exile – and themes of exile and redemptive return recur in his work. This collection introduces English readers to Fortes, and the poet’s beautiful and unique use of language." — Portuguese American Journal

• "Author of works like Pão e Fonema [Bread and Phoneme] (1974) or Árvore e Tambor [Tree and Drum] (1986), his work expresses a new awareness of Cape Verdian reality and a new reading of cultural tradition from the archipelago." - Antonio Miranda

From the Publisher