Ana Cristina Cesar - one of Brazil’s best known avant-garde poets. After her suicide in 1983, her innovative, mythic, and dreamlike poetry has greatly influenced subsequent generations of writers. A queer, feminist poet, César produced poetry that represents a critique, in important ways, of the traditions, in Brazilian and more globally, of poetry as it has developed. Sometimes her poetry doesn't look like poetry at all

Ana Cristina César, At Your Feet, Trans. by Brenda Hillman, Helen Hillman, and Sebastião Edson Macedo, Parlor Press, 2018.


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Ana Cristina Cesar (1952-1983) has posthumously become one of Brazil’s best known avant-garde poets. After her suicide in 1983, her innovative, mythic, and dreamlike poetry has greatly influenced subsequent generations of writers. At Your Feet was originally published as a poetic sequence and later became part of a longer hybrid work— sometimes prose, sometimes verse—documenting the life and mind of a forcefully active literary woman. Cesar, who also worked internationally as a journalist and translator, often found inspiration in the writings of other poets, among them Emily Dickinson, Armando Freitas Filho, and Gertrude Stein. Her innovative writing has been featured in Sun and Moon’s classic anthology Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain—20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets (2000). Poet Brenda Hillman and her mother Helen Hillman (a native speaker of Portuguese) worked with Brazilian poet Sebastião Edson Macedo and translator/editor Katrina Dodson to render as faithfully as possible the intricately layered poems of this legendary writer. At Your Feet includes both the English translation and original Portuguese.


Several years ago I came across the poetry of Ana Cristina César (1952-1983), and was immediately struck by how different they looked and sounded in Portuguese, to much of the Brazilian poetry I had been reading. Or they looked different primarily because I did not yet have a context for them. As I read more and studied up on César, I learned that there were, in fact, a number of poets (Cacaso, Chacal, Francisco Alvim and Paulo Leminski, among others) with whom and with whose work hers was in conversation, though that did not diminish the singular quality of her poems for me. I also learned that she was and is still considered one of the most important Brazilian poets of the 1970s era.  A native of São Paulo, she lived in Rio de Janeiro, studied and spent time in London, and later resided in Brasília. What I was detecting in the Portuguese was a poetry that, whether written in verse or prose, often unfolds like a conversation or dialogues, the intimacy enhanced and mitigated by Cesar's quiet, often irreverent, sometimes quite dark humor; a wide range of references, allusions and irony; and above all by her attentiveness to the power and limits of eros.  A queer, feminist poet, César produced poetry that represents a critique, in important ways, of the traditions, in Brazilian and more globally, of poetry as it has developed. Sometimes her poetry doesn't look like poetry at all; it approximates what another poet I've am drawn to, Nicanor Parra, has called anti-poetry.  At the very least it raises the question of what is poetic, what is literary, and who has the power to designate it as such. American literature and culture was particularly important to her at one stage in her life, and one her strangest little poems comprises nothing more than an index of names of figures she considered significant to her life and art. It is, appropriately, titled "Index of Proper Names" ("Index onomástica"); I include it below.
As the dates above suggest, hers was a brief life, though she began publishing her poetry in childhood, and by the time she was in her 20s, she had gained public notice as an avant-garde pioneer, ranking among the best of the Poetas marginas (Marginal Poets). She was also queer, and her work espoused a discernible feminism. Her fame inside and outside Brazil has steadily grown since her death, by suicide, at the age of 31. During her lifetime she published several collections, including the acclaimed Luvas de pelica (Kid Gloves, 1980), and A teus pés (At Your Feet, 1982), as well as the prose work Literatura não é documentação (Literature Is Not Documentation), on the politics of documentary filmmaking.  I have translated a number of her poems, and featured a rough translation of one (with a companion poem by another Brazilian poet favorite of mine, Leminski), on this blog back in 2010.  Although there is a fine British selection of her poems, Intimate Diary, translated by Cecilia McCullough, Patricia E. Page, and David Treece (Boulevard Books, 1997), I don't believe an American one exists. A fellow translator told me the other day, however, that a very famous American poet is now translating Cesar, so her translations will probably appear in book form before any of mine do. At least I have this blog. -
John Keene, "The Hillmans' New Translation of Ana Cristina Cesar's At Your Feet + Poems: Ana Cristina Cesar." J's Theater, 23 May 2018.


RIO Night  

Dialog of the deaf, no: friendly in the cold. Sudden brakes
on the wrong side of the street. Sighing in the intersection. I introduce
you to the most discrete woman in the world: one who has no
secrets.

 

independent youth

For the first time I broke the golden rule and i flew away and didn’t even
measure the consequences. Why do we refuse to be prophetic? And
what dialect is this for a small evening audience? I flew up and now, heart, in a car on fire through the air, with no grace, crossing the state of São Paulo, at dawn, for you, and furious: and now, against the traffic.

EXTERIOR. DAY. Exchanging my pure indiscretion for your dated story. My breaking in to your conjunction. SEA, BLUE, CAVERNS, CAMPS & THUNDERS. I lean against the walls of the little streetcar and cry. I catch a cab that travels various tunnels of the city. I corner the driver. I dribble my faith. The newspapers don’t call for war. Twist, son, twist, even far away in the distance of the one who loves and knows he’s a traitor. Drink a bitters in the old corner pub, but think of me between flashes of happiness. I love you strangely, slyly, with other scenes mixed with the flavor of your love.

Ana Cristina César, Intimate Diary, Boulevard Books, 1997.          


Set in London and paris, Intimate Diary is the imaginary journal of teh tragic and billiant Ana Cristina Cesar.


Maria Manuel Lisboa's review


Ana Cristina Cesar (1952-1983) has posthumously become one of Brazil's best known avant-garde poets. After her suicide in 1983, her innovative, mythic, and dreamlike poetry has greatly influenced subsequent generations of writers.