Paraguayan Sea
310 Nassau Avenue, #205 Brooklyn, NY 11222: Night Boat Books, 2017. Perfect Bound Soft Cover. 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.
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.
. This is a new book. Item #60
ISBN: 9781937658748
Price: $15.95