Mapping The Tribe by Salgado Maranhão

Brazil’s northeast is a dry and ancient land. Little visited, it has come to be known outside the country for producing some of its best writing. Alexis Levitin has given us a perfect English rendering of Salgado Maranhao’s deft expression of the tonality of this people and land.
Gregory Rabassa Alexis Levitin’s translation of the Afro-Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun succeeds in negotiating the quirky experimental richness of Maranhão’s Pre-Columbian, Amazonian, and Yoruba influences with his traditional rhymed lyrics and jazz-like syncopations. Levitin skillfully alerts us to the presence of a complex and offbeat poet whose work merits a wide audience.
Colette Inez The poems of Salgado Maranhão are born of a commitment to language not merely as a tool, but also as a force, a physical, visceral entity. They enact a kind of ecstatic struggle aimed at chasing the sound and the sense we associate with language to the place where it becomes a living presence, one with heft and agency, one that can move not just the mind or the feelings, but flesh itself.
Tracy K. Smith , Poet Laureate