It’s been a while since my last (mis)translation. Not for the first time, I have traduced a Brazilian.
Leda Beatriz Abreu Spinardi (often known by the mononym Ledusha), is a poet, translator and journalist. This poem comes from her self-published second collection Risco no Disco (‘Scratches on the Record’), which first appeared in 1981 and was republished in 2016. Risco no Disco also later became the title of her poetry column in the Folha de Sao Paolo newspaper in the late 1990s.
This collection was the one that made her name, and characterised her, and perhaps a generation of young urban Brazilian women who were emerging from the Seventies towards the equal rights they would finally achieve with the Citizen’s Constitution of 1988.
Ledusha’s poetry, both feminist and feminine, reflected a women’s perspective within the movement of marginais poets and musicians who came of age and defined a generation in the Eighties.
Reticence
my love away from you I come upon disrespectful poems away from you my desire destroys doors and quotations away from you I cover myself with such mischief you could only compare it to how unfaithful some metaphors can be.
