The Clean Shirt of It

by Paulo Henriques Britto, Idra Novey (Translator)

Overview

The Clean Shirt of It marks the first English translation of a full-length poetry title by acclaimed Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto. As translator Idra Novey writes in her introduction, “No other contemporary Brazilian poets write like Britto. At least not with such a keen sense of the relationship between form and content, or pop culture and high art.”

Paulo Henriques Britto has received Brazil’s most prestigious prizes for literature and translation. He lives in Rio de Janeiro, where he teaches at Catholic University.

Idra Novey lives in New York City. She received the 2005 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781929918942
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	07/01/2007
Series:	Lannan Translations Series , #10
Edition description:	Bilingual
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)
Language:	Portuguese

About the Author

Paulo Britto was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1951. His poetry awards include two of Brazil's most prestigious, the Biblioteca Nacional award, and the Portugal Telecom Prize. Britto is also one of Brazil's principal translators of British and American literature. He currently teaches at the Catholic Universityof Rio de Janeiro. Idra Novel is winner of a 2005 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poetry appears regularly in journals and anthologies, and she publishes book reviews and essays in Crossroads, Jerusalem Post, Review of Latin American Literature and Art, and elsewhere. She has taught in Columbia University's Undergraduate Writing Program and at the Catholic Universityof Chile in Valparaiso.

Editorial Reviews

Esteemed in Brazil both as a poet and the translator of English and American writings from Lord Byron to Jack Kerouac, Britto deserves a firm hearing in the States: on the deft evidence of Novey's translations, the author is consistently thoughtful, humble and observant, both about the great themes of love and knowledge and about the rooms and cityscapes he depicts. Britto's long sentences and short lines carry more than a hint of Elizabeth Bishop: in "Scherzo," "enormous uncomfortable clouds/ rolled past the window/ like lazy pachyderms/ and sprawled out, unfettered." He wonders, often, whether he can portray any truth beyond the merely personal; the tactful, self-suspicious poem "Snake Charmer" seeks "a slender, venomous truth." In the more recent poems, his humility extends to self-abnegation: "no silence is ever enough." Yet he can also display virtuoso technique. Novey removes the rhymes from his many sonnets, but preserves the repetitions in a sestina, and keeps, too, the wild range of styles that differentiate the segments of his "Nine Variations on a Theme of Jim Morrison." This brief book makes an ideal starting point for what should be an international reputation. (July)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly