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Education by Stone: Selected Poems by João Cabral de Mélo Neto, selected, translated, and with an afterword by Richard Zenith, Archipelago Books, 2005, $16.00 paper, ISBN 0974968013.
A long-overdue bilingual edition of João Cabrai de Melo Neto's poetry has just been published by Archipelago Books, a young literary press based in New York. Winner of many international prizes, Cabral first became known to English-language readers via a group of translations edited by Elizabeth Bishop in the classic An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972). This new volume, exquisitely crafted by Richard Zenith, is a fine heir to that tradition, continuing the efforts of the now out-of-print Selected Poetry, 1937-1990, edited by Djelal Kadir (1994).
João Cabrai de Melo Neto, one of the most influential Brazilian poets of the twentieth century, was born in Recife in 1920 and died in Rio, where he had resided the last years of his life, in 1999. Despite having spent decades abroad as a diplomat, his poems remain firmly rooted in the arid landscapes of the northeastern backlands and the hard life of its inhabitants, a "hardness" also present in the...