EVENT CANCELLED

ROSA ALICE BRANCO, PORTUGUESE POET, AND TRANSLATOR ALEXIS LEVITIN,
TO READ FROM NEW BILINGUAL COLLECTION CATTLE OF THE LORD AT UALBANY

NYS Writers Institute, Friday, April 21, 2017
4:15 p.m. Reading | Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown campus

EVENT DETAILS:
Rosa Alice Branco, award-winning Portuguese poet, and her translator Alexis Levitin will present a bilingual reading from Branco’s latest book of poetry, Cattle of the Lord (2016) on Friday, April 21 at 4:15 p.m. in the Standish Room of the Science Library on UAlbany’s Uptown Campus. Poet and translator will also discuss their collaboration following the reading.  Free and open to the public, the event is cosponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and UAlbany’s Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. 

PROFILE
Rosa Alice Branco is one of today’s premier Portuguese-language poets. For her 2009 book, Cattle of the Lord, she was awarded the Espiral Maior de Poesia given to the best book of poetry from Galicia, Portugal, Angola, or Brazil. Her more than ten collections of poetry have enjoyed wide translation and publication around the world, with editions in Spain, Tunisia, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Brazil, Venezuela, and Francophone Canada. The English translations of her work, developed in collaboration with renowned translator Alexis Levitin, have been featured in Greywolf Press’s New European Poets anthology and have appeared in over thirty magazines, including Atlanta Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner and The New England Review. An English edition of Cattle of the Lord was released by Milkweed Editions in December 2016, which Book Riot applauded as “a fascinating offering from a talented Portuguese poet” who “explores both the sacred and the profane….slams together the earthly and the heavenly in order to show how the latter lives within the former: liturgical words turn into lovers’ invitations, chickens help us understand the resurrection, etc.”

Author Miriam Kotzin numbers Branco among the “foremost contemporary poets,” crediting her “brilliant poetry [which] offers a profound vision of the human condition, both dark and engaging, with bright veins of tenderness.”  Kotzin adds that thanks to the “deft and sensitive translation by Alexis Levitin…. Cattle of the Lord deploys a remarkable range of images and symbols.” Kevin Prufer, Pushcart-winning poet and author of several collections, interprets this range of images and symbols by calling Cattle of the Lord “a wild and sneaky book, filled with intelligence, wit, and theological anxiety….inhabit[ing] a lush, often pastoral world—a world of not-quite-trustworthy dogs, shuffling cows, village feasts, occasional angels…. [where] the enormity of God and questions of mortality and spirit are set against the noise and rhythms of daily life.”

Like Kotzin, Prufer also holds translator Alexis Levitin in high regard. Prufer refers to Levitin as “one of this country’s best translators of poetry,” who “offers an inviting rendering into English.”  Levitin has published 20 books of translations and his work has appeared in over 30 anthologies, and close to 200 literary magazines. He is a two-time winner of the NEA Translation Fellowship.  According to Translation Review, Levitin’s work on Cattle of the Lord is “sensual, clear, concise, lyric, luminous, and earthy. . . . Levitin’s brilliant translations seem to echo the nature of the originals.” George Monterio of World Literature Today considers the poems “excellent versions in English,” of  “the most fetching lyrics in modern Portuguese poetry.” In addition to his long and illustrious career as a translator, Levitin is a Distinguished Professor in English at SUNY Plattsburgh.

For additional information, visit the New York State Writers Institute on Facebook, online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst, or email [email protected], or call 518-442-5620.