YAD
from Consecration of the Alphabet by Leonore Scliar-Cabral
Translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin
Extended arm, a hand like a reprieve,
mouth’s roof, a tongue against its cartilage.
Papyrus spreading wide its foliage,
then, one by one, the loss of all its leaves.
An arm of violence raised up in space,
or else a soothing image of a hand
pressed to the earth, a rigid ban
to passage, or an arabesque’s embrace.
Or hands in desperation, offering pleas
for clemency, the same sign being stripped
of frills and all its former fripperies.
A simple stroke. That’s all. A line alone
that serves as mirror to extended lips,
a slash that cuts across unbending stone.
Leonor Scliar-Cabral is Professor Emerita at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. At the age of 94, she continues to work as a psycholinguist in the field of literacy training. Her poetry has appeared in Brazil in the following collections: Sonnets, Memories of the Sephardim, Of Erotic Senectitude, The Sun Fell on the Guaíba, Consecration of the Alphabet, and José. A good number of poems taken from her collection Consecration of the Alphabet have appeared in literary magazines in the United States, such as Per Contra, Blue Unicorn, Home Planet News, Measure, and Poetica Magazine. A bilingual presentation of that book will be published next yearby Ben Yehuda Press in the United States..
Alexis Levitin: his 48 books in translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. More recent collections include Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord, both from Milkweed Editions. His translations have appeared in well over two hundred literary magazines, including Agni, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, The New York Times, New Letters, Partisan Review and Prairie Schooner. The Last Ruy Lopez: Tales from the Royal Game, a collection of chess-related stories he wrote during the pandemic, has just been released by Russell ]Enterprises. His study W.H. Auden at Work: The Craft of Revision has just been published by Lexington Books.
Amethyst Review 