Paraguayan Sea - Softcover

Bueno, Wilson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1937658740 ISBN 13: 9781937658748

Publisher: Nightboat Books, 2017

Synopsis

Originally written in Portunhol―a Spanish-Portuguese mix from where Brazil and Argentina border Paraguay―with Guaraní, Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea is a homage to life, to being embodied, to border crossing, and to language itself. Who is its Paraguayan narrator who has loved two men, old and young, in a hot/cold beach town in Brazil? A woman, as she says? A gay man switching pronouns? Paraguayan Sea is a river-to-the-sea of identities and migrations, its Portunhol translated into Frenglish by the polylingual poet Erín Moure.

About this title

About the Author:

WILSON BUENO was one of Brazil’s most influential and beloved contemporary writers, editors, and journalists. His Mar Paraguayo is a sensation constantly republished in Latin America since its first appearance in Brazil in 1992. ERÍN MOURE is a poet and translator. She has published over 30 books of poetry, essays, memoir, and translations from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. She lives in Montreal.

Review:

Reader, open this book and you’ll be ensorcelled by a signal linguistic music, through which the sounds of national, intra- and cross-national languages scurry pell-mell alongside and through each other, oh world with its borders thrown open, giving rise to one of literature’s unforgettable poetic seductions. The curious noises that issue (silently or not) from your reading lips, the novel muscular contractions of your throat and mouth, will startle your being into thrilled wakefulness. The poet-translator born to invent Wilson Bueno’s work in a version satisfying enough to infect English with living, visionary generosity and such intimate foreignness is certainly Erín Moure. (Forrest Gander)

Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea is a heady, hot-tongued ballad of desire and decrepitude. It made my eyes go wide and my mouth gasp in delight. The feverish ramblings of Bueno’s “marafona floozy” recall the dark deliriums of Hilda Hilst and João Gilberto Noll, and the mixed-blood trickster humor of Mário de Andrade. Erín Moure’s daring translation transmutes Bueno’s South American borderlands mix of Portunhol and Guaraní into a winking waving gyrating QuébecFrenglish that maintains the singsong incantations of the original Guaraní. Her translation of Bueno's elucidictionary of the Guaraní langue is not only a resource for grasping the book’s indigenous elements but also a virtuoso lexical poem in itself. My mind is exploding with the new possibilities for translation that Moure has opened up. This is a dazzling, important work! (Katrina Dodson)

What Paraguayan Sea utters may be a pre-death eulogy or a tentacular lament, the hiss of a tarantula poised to strike or a multilingued moan of mourning, in which our narrator, the marafona, aka Ariadne the floozy, is crocheting the web of her life, i.e. language, the wet sexe of désir, the messy, exuberant, tormenting, astonishing fait of being sentient flesh, even when life is añaretã, i.e. hell, while keeping vigil for the satyr of her existence, aka the oldguy (who may or may not be dying, whom she might or might not have killed), as Bueno’s plurilingued prose hemorrhages into Moure’s poetic echolocation, so that when, panting, à bout de souffle, you reach the end of this virtuoso tour de langue, you want to start reading it all over again. (Oana Avasilichioaei)

About this edition

• Publisher: Nightboat Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1937658740
• ISBN 13: 9781937658748
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128