even more. Brazil and the rest of Latin America have their batidas, and Freitas tosses that word as a synonym into the title poem. “Nothing surpasses the batida of rilke with ice cream,” she writes, and she’s right. Ice cream, that universal beloved, with Rilke, her border-crossing muse—such a drink by any name would taste as sweet.(3)

Envisioning its themes of word play, Rilke (as both himself and a representative of Poetic Tradition), and the quotidian as a shake, the book demonstrates that these disparate interests are deeply connected. The question of home is a fixture throughout. The speaker seems at home in locations around the world, but at the same time shows her rootedness in Rio Grande do Sul through references to local culture—such as the Livraria do Globo and the maragatos in [entro na livraria do bobo]—and moreover through language. Freitas is a voice of the south of Brazil.(4) She uses the “tu” form (a hallmark of southern speech), and her frequent use of Spanish is no surprise given Rio Grande do Sul's proximity to Argentina. Regional expressions also crop up, for example the saying “acabou-se o que era doce” in “o que é um baibai?” The shake provides a way to make the difficult questions of the relationship between the local and the global, the specific and the universal, the self and the other, go down very, very easy.

Freitas often employs simple or colloquial language, then strategically inserts complications into this everyday linguistic atmosphere. She also often creates different physical atmospheres or environments in the poems, from a bookshop whose heyday was in the 1940s (the Livraria do Globo aka Bobo) to an imitation 1950s soda shop (“salta um rilke shake” resonates as a line that might be shouted into the kitchen of a place like Joe's, a popular, Johnny Rocket's-type student hangout in Porto Alegre around the time Freitas would have been in college there). Freitas’ familiar language and settings make a poetry that is accessible without sacrificing its innovation. The strength lies in the clever allegresis of the kind of philosophical and poetic issues we might expect to encounter only in “difficult” poetry.

My challenge as a translator was to convey the linguistic border-crossing, globalization, appropriation and reappropriation that is found in the phrase “rilke shake” and that comes across in the book as a whole. Additionally, I aimed to serve the other flavors in Freitas' “shake.” I tried as thoroughly as possible to make poems that embody the book’s unique poetics. I tried also to make poems that stand alone, and need not be held up to the originals at all times. I treated each poem autonomously and dealt with the particular issues it presented, but because I also view the book as one piece rather than a compilation of unrelated poems, I allowed my sense of the author's project as a whole to aid my translations of individual poems.

I began by choosing what to translate. The book's poems are quite different from each other. This difference is one sense of the shake, and I wanted to sample this diversity while showcasing some of the collection's major poems. I settled on six: the first three poems of the book, the title poem, and the two that follow it. My selection includes three untitled poems and three titled poems. (The book has 11 untitled poems and 34 titled poems.)
I see the shake as involving the following aspects, which became my purposes and aims in translating the individual poems:

     •    To capture the lyric and structural elements of the poems, including rhyme, sonority, alliteration, assonance/consonance, rhythm, and meter.

     •    To preserve the puns and wordplay. Where possible, I tried to mimic the original plays on words. However, in the spirit of wordplay, I felt free to create equivalents where English required it. The poem “autofocus” is a good example of the challenge Freitas' artful wordplay presents. The scene and the meaning of the poem hinge on the relationship between the first word, “remordimento,” and its root, the verb “morder” (conjugated as “mordendo” in line 4). But the English “remorse” and “bite” do not have this same relationship. Using just “remorse” and “biting” in my poem would have let me preserve the spare lines of the original, especially the one-word fourth line. But that choice would abandon the connection of the two words in the original. I added the word “morsel” to my poem in order to convey a link between the action of biting and the feeling of remorse. In comparison to the original, my version is very awkward, but this was a place where I decided the sentiment of the poem was more important than the form. It was a tradeoff in words.

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