Down Deep

Abstract

Down Deep Luís Miguel Nava (bio) Translated by Alexis Levitin (bio) and Ricardo Vasconcelos (bio) Keywords Luis Miguel, Nava, Alexis, Levitin, Ricardo Vasconcelos, poetry, translation, Portuguese poetry, memory A nail in one’s gum,down deep, so deep one mightthink that nothing but soul was there, that’s how trees grow withinour memory, where their rootsmake them burst forth, that’s how the leaves that serveas skin at timesstir within our spirit, where skin sinks as on a screen,skin, behaving like a tree witha mirror tangled in its roots, skin that bound shut our eyes, that served usas blindfold and as memory,the whiteness of the sheet struggling against the dark, sister of that rootclinging to the screen, of that gumforgetting that it once was in your mouth, now tied onlyto the soul, over whichit seems to lean, to bend. [End Page 330] Luís Miguel Nava luís miguel nava’s Poesia came out in 2020, twenty-five years after the young poet’s shocking death. Nava’s poetry relies on a fearless visceral depiction of the body, accompanying surging seas of memory and desire. His work, well known in Portugal. has also appeared in French and Spanish. Poems drawn from his forthcoming collection in English have been accepted by Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, Bitter Oleander, Hollins Critic, Metaforologia, Metamorphoses, Mid-American Review, Osiris, and Puerto del Sol. Alexis Levitin alexis levitin has published forty-seven books in translation, including Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent translations from Portugal include Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales (Tagus Press) and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord (Milkweed Editions). He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal, The Catholic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil, and has held translation residencies at the Banff Center, Canada, The European Translators Collegium in Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. Ricardo Vasconcelos ricardo vasconcelos is a 2020–2021 Fulbright U.S. Scholar and Professor of Portuguese at San Diego State University. His scholarly work on modern and contemporary Portuguese literature, including Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queirós, among other authors, has been published in several countries. He is the author of Campo de Relâmpagos—Leituras do Excesso na Poesia de Luís Miguel Nava [Lightning Field—Readings in Excess in the Poetry of Luís Miguel Nava], and in 2020 he published a critical edition of Luís Miguel Nava’s Poesia. Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc