"Saudade," a feeling of longing and missing, is perhaps the most famous Portuguese untranslatable. In Brazil, there's another related untranslatable, born out of the Afro-diasporic experience of kidnapping and enslavement, "banzo." During slavery, "banzo," longing for home and personhood, would make Africans and their descendants sick, with many committing suicide. Banzo speaks of a (seemingly) unhealable spiritual wound. In "lovership," "banzo" appears four times. I chose to translate it as "Afro-diasporic longing" until the last stanza, where I reintroduced "banzo," marking that the poem is informed by this specific form of melancholy and desire. Banzo is a word to name a feeling often dismissed by anti-Black rhetoric. Natália Affonso on "lovership" |
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"An Anchor as I Lost My Son"
When journalist Josie Glausiusz found comfort for herself and her dying son in poetry, she decided to share its power with everyone. "I started my own poetry group on WhatsApp, calling it 'Poetry Is Medicine,' and invited friends to join. I had found, during earlier crises, that the rhythm of poetry can soothe my anxieties. With just a word or a phrase, a poem can reach the hidden places that prayers or well-meaning advice cannot."
via THE WASHINGTON POST |
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What Sparks Poetry:
M. L. Smoker on "Heart Butte, Montana"
"It is then next to impossible for me to ignore the echoes that reverberate from beneath and across the earth’s surface. There is both a human and non-human story here. Such places formed by millennia, marked by water and ice, light and dark. Of shifting rock and the new formation of land, plateau, mountain range. Humans were taken in and the land cared for us—we were gifted survival and song by our plant and animal family." |
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