[entro na livraria do bobo]

The poem begins with a joke: a livraria do bobo literally means “the idiot’s (or fool’s) bookstore,” but it also references a proper name, the Livraria do Globo, Porto Alegre’s major bookstore and literary publisher, with its heyday from the 1930s to the 1970s.

The fourth stanza presents especially interesting challenges to translation. The speaker of the poem makes a prayer-like appeal to her imagined ancestors for help freeing the books from the shop:

ajudem-me, maragatos
nesta hora afanérrima
de uma libertadora paupérrima
de livros.

The speaker calls on the maragatos, the group of Rio Grandenses who began the state’s Federalist Revolution in 1893. In the rugged countryside and gaúcho (cowboy) culture of Rio Grande do Sul at the time, the federalist maragatos were known by the red handkerchiefs they wore around their necks. Their opposition, the republican Pica-Paus, wore white handkerchiefs. The maragato movement later became a regionally-influential political party, the Partido Libertador. Calling herself uma libertadora, the speaker invokes her political predecessors and at the same time plays on the idea of the shoplifter as a liberator of goods. Naming herself uma libertadora also tells us the speaker is female; in English, the poem loses this definitive gender identifier because “liberator” is gender-neutral. The superlative suffix –érrima creates two translation challenges in this stanza. Afanérrima, a word of the poet’s invention, has as its root the verb afanar, “to pinch,” as in “to steal.” The hora afanérrima would thus be the “most pinched hour” or the “most stolen hour,” or perhaps, to be inventive, the “pinchedest” or “stolenest” hour—all sound awkward in English. Paupérrima, a state of extreme pauperage, is used as an adjective that by its placement bears two meanings. Uma libertadora paupérrima is an extremely poor liberator, one with no money. But add in the next line and you have uma libertadora paupérrima/de livros (my emphasis), a liberator poor in books, one who lacks books. Unable to find a spare, elegant way to convey the lack of both money and books, I chose the word “destitute.”

The last two stanzas contain a few more interesting issues in translation. Salgueiro is one of two main samba schools in Rio de Janeiro. (The other is Mangueira). A bateria is really the whole percussion section of a samba school (picture the carnaval parade); the bateria is the rhythmic backbone of samba music. “The salgueiro percussion section” would have been a mouthful in the poem. “Drum line” ’s two beats echo the two repeating beats of “pound” and share the n/d/m consonance. Suor em bicas is a colloquial expression that means literally “to sweat in springs (or fountains).” I went with the colloquial equivalent in English, “sweat buckets,” which has the advantage that “buckets” sounds like bicas. “Buckets” does not, however, rhyme with “sissy,” my translation of maricas. Freitas’ poem not only rhymes bicas and maricas, but also has the rhyme of vazias and maricas in the last couplet. To preserve some semblance of rhyme, I went for the slant rhyme “empty/sissy” in the final couplet. Maricas is a masculine noun with a usually feminine ending, which matches its literal meanings of “sissy, coward, or a man doing a woman’s work” (see the Michaelis Dicionário); it is used most often as a slang word for gay—roughly, “fag” in English. I chose “sissy” to make the approximate rhyme with “empty,” and to convey the trapped books’ perception of the speaker as a coward for not liberating them in the end. The insult’s gay connotations seemed less important in the context of this poem, although as the poem’s final word, maricas may serve to foreshadow lesbian references that appear later in the book.

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