•    To capture the poem's messages (ie, what a particular poem is “about” or what the poem “does”). To make a translation poem that achieves the same things narratively and conceptually as the original, in the same (or somewhat equivalent) ways that the original does. To translate the purpose/action of the poem, as I understand it, down to its occurrence on the level of words. In “rilke shake,” for example, I had to consider the weight of difference and synonymousness that the words “shake” and “batida” bear in the original, which is the weight of being both particular and universal. Could I choose words in an English poem that convey this tension of the particular and universal? If I couldn't achieve it with the words for “shake” and “batida” themselves, could I imbue the poem with that message in other ways?

     •    To tackle linguistic and lyrical issues particular to translating Brazilian Portuguese poetry into English poetry. These include traditional Portuguese rules of versification such as rima soante and rima toante (roughly, ways of counting end rhyme and syllables), word sound and wordplay in Brazilian Portuguese (for example, see the discussion of “autofocus/out of focus” below), the pronunciation and spelling of lusitanized English words, Brazilian Portuguese plays on Iberian Portuguese, and the cadence of Brazilian Portuguese.

     •    Time and again I faced the question of how to translate non-Portuguese words within the poems. Do I leave them in their original languages? Change them to other languages to give American readers an experience of strangeness similar to that a Brazilian reader would encounter with the original? I made different choices depending on other factors in each poem. But this leads me to another question I always considered: Do Freitas' “universal” canonical influences serve to make her work more universal, more legible to an international readership? If so, then what is the place of translation?

Some notes on the poems

[dentadura perfeita, ouve-me bem]

This sonnet opens the book. The “perfect teeth” being addressed may be an isolated set of teeth, a metonymy for a person, or the speaker’s own teeth. At issue is the sheltered life of the subject, just as teeth are sheltered within the mouth. The speaker seems to be saying to the teeth/addressee, “All you want is things that are easy to chew.” Papo has two meanings: chat, and double chin. It was hard to get both across in English, so I went with the syntactically indicated “chat.”

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