[autofocus]

The title is key to this poem. To an American reader, the word autofocus will bring to mind a camera, and a relationship of two people—one behind the camera and the other in front of the camera. We will have to think harder in order to see what Brazilian readers will immediately get: the self-referentiality autofocus suggests. In addition, Portuguese pronunciation of “autofocus” sounds like “out of focus,” so for a Brazilian reader familiar with English, they might also read the poem with the idea of “out of focus” in mind. Gathering all these senses, the poem plays with ideas of focus, unfocus, self-focus, and self-and-other.
The second-to-last stanza is particularly interesting, and offers many creative possibilities for translation. It introduces the idea that this poem especially would be a good candidate for multiple translations. Because the two lines are chomped versions of the first two lines of the poem, the straightforward response is to use chomped versions of the English lines. But the original “o remordi é al” also evokes, to an English speaker, the word “remedial,” which can be broken down into interesting parts on its own to create another version of this stanza that resonates with its own meaning for the poem:

re me
di al

What we find in the end is a poem that is circular, eating itself, an ouroboros. autofocus/uroborus.

rilke shake

Besides the book's larger issues represented by this title poem, two challenges in translating the poem were conveying the entirety of its content—dancing, drinking, eating, masturbation, sex, poetic inspiration, and love—and deciding whether to leave the English phrases (toasted blake, sunny side) in English, or foreignize them for the anglophone reader.

[o que é um baibai?]

This poem uses English and Spanish words in addition to Portuguese. It also uses lusitanized English, some of which is part of the Brazilian lexicon (bipe, pronounced like “beepee”), some of which—the titular baibai—seems to be invented by the poet. The ostensible purpose of the poem is to explain the meaning of baibai.

I translated bipe into “beep” but did not choose “bye-bye” for baibai. In English, “bye-bye” has different usages and meanings than the specific type of “baibai” being described in the poem. The poem asks, o que é um baibai? (what is a baibai?); the indefinite article suggests the term's specifity, rather than the universal application that “goodbye” usually has. Baibai seems to be the baibai of finality at the end of a romantic relationship, the baibai of dumping. (Such a baibai, like all aspects of dating, has its own kind of protocol—or as the poem says, baibais...seguem modelos.) Baibai may also be the final baibai of suicide. Baibai is clearly not equivalent to an English/USAmerican “bye-bye,” as demonstrated by the need to use the three major languages of the Americas to explain it (baibai es un adiós/un farewell).

I translate the original English “farewell” into the French “adieu.” Since the Rhine River appears in the original poem, I allowed myself to extend linguistically to continental Europe. The lorelei in the last line makes several references. As a woman’s name, it may be the woman calling the submerged cell phone, a woman so unwanted that she repeatedly hears a personalized recording to leave a message; perhaps she is the woman who got dumped or baibai-ed at the beginning of the poem, and perhaps she threw her phone into the river out of frustration, or threw her ex’s into the river in retaliation. Lorelei is also a famous rock on the east bank of the Rhine, which according to legend takes its name from the beautiful maiden Lorelei, who because of an unfaithful lover, comitted suicide by jumping off the rock into the Rhine. The water around the Lorelei is particularly perilous, and it is said that the maiden transformed into a kind of siren whose voice lures boats to shipwreck. The word lorelei literally means “murmuring rock”—a clever metaphor for a cell phone.

The lorelei also reveals another instance of the canon rearing its head. The German poet Heinrich Heine's “Die Lorelei” is a well-known example of imitation folk poetry. Domeneck includes Heine in his lineup of Freitas' “anti-lineage” poetic predecessors.

End Notes

1) The publisher is budget-conscious, and thankfully design-conscious too. The books in the series are all identical grey softbacks. A different colored sticker with the title, author, ISBN, and author’s photo is added to each cover to distinguish the books from each other.

2) Ricardo Domeneck, “This executioner's songs: The work of Angélica Freitas and her refusal to settle for authoritarian poetics,” Hilda. http://hildamagazine.net/angelica_freitas/. Domeneck, a Brazilian poet living in Berlin, is one of Freitas’ co-editors at Modo de Usar & Co.

3) Although batidas can be found in some parts of the US, the word is not yet so commonplace here as “milkshake” is in Brazil. Also, the Brazilian batida tends to be a cocktail, whereas the Mexican batida (the type more common in the US) is more like a fruit smoothie. To avoid confusion, I decided to translate batida in my translation of “Rilke shake.” I chose “frappe” in an attempt at assonance and consonance with “surpass.”

4) Coincidentally, Freitas' home of Pelotas is known for its gay population and boasts an official slogan that puns on the reputation: “Venha a Pelotas, comer nozes.” (“Come to Pelotas, eat nuts.”) The slogan advertises the city's annual nut festival. (Many regions of Brazil have invented folkloric food festivals to attract tourists.) In Portuguese, the pun is on the homophone of nozes (nuts) and noses, a slang pluralization of nós (us). The slogan's second meaning, then, is “Come to Pelotas, eat us.” My point is only that Freitas is not alone in the city in her interest in gay wordplay.

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