“Cubist” poetry by Gertrude Stein published for the first time in Portugal | Books
Tender Buttonsa book of poetry by the American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, published over a hundred years ago, will be published for the first time in Portugal, translated by João Concha and Ricardo Marques to be published in February by ) editions.
Dated 1914, Tender Buttons (contest buttons) is composed of prose poems that work like small cubist paintings, in which the eye travels through each element in order to form a (or more than one) narrative, explains the Portuguese publisher.
The book consists of three parts – objects, Foods and bedrooms – and it is written in a very particular way: the poet uses an experimental language, resorting to repetition, abstractions, onomatopoeias and what has been called “verbal cubism”, to the point that this cubist literature is classified as a masterpiece of literature. cubist.
Tender Buttons” is among the works most deeply influenced by Cubism “takes fragmentation and abstraction to the extreme”, notes the (no) edits. “The texts are based on observation and also on various body movements or movements of inseparable objects, cooking modes and gastronomic habits from the movement of the body or the look inseparable”.
After more than a century, this book of poetry, which you can now read in Portuguese, continues to finally cause a scandal, which is linked to Gertrude Stein’s erasure of poetic conventions. “Bringing language to the bone, the author playfully shows how poetry is, above all, music. – download, transformation and all that together”, says the editor.
patron of the arts
Gertrude Stein was one of the most important personalities for the promotion of art at the beginning of the 20th century, having been associated with exponents of modernist art and literature, from Picasso to Ernest Hemingway, passing through F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound or Henri Matisse. From her circle of friends there are still names like Georges Braque, Derain, Juan Gris, Apollinaire, Francis Picabia and James Joyce.
Born on February 3, 1874, in Pennsylvania, into a prosperous American family of German origin, Gertrude Stein spent her early years in Vienna and Paris, moving with her family to the United States in 1879, where he started attending school.
Revealing to be a student, study and medicine, she did not finish any of the courses and, at the age of 29, she began to stand out in Paris, where she began to write in form and developed a side of collection and arts, especially the Cubists.
He remained in Paris at the end of his life, making his house one of the most mythical artistic salons of the 20th century, and he left behind a vast and “deeply original” work, which includes, in addition to tender buttonstitles like three lives (1909) and The formation of Americans (1925) or even Paris, France (1940) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklastwo titles available in editions of Relógio D’Água.
Novels on the back
With covers and drawings based on paintings by Juan Gris, Tender controls will be published in Traditore, a collection dedicated to poetry translations by (non)editions.
In this same collection, another book by the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson was published in October 2021, distinguished last year in Spain with the Princess of Asturias Award for Letters 2020, and whose only Portuguese translations are being done by (not ) editions. Glass, Irony and God thus joined the books Husband’s Beauty and Autobiography of the RedAnne Carson’s first books to be published in Portugal.
With translation by the poet and essayist Tatiana Faia, Glass, Irony and God is a work in which the author mixes several poetic threads, ancient and contemporary, in a set of six texts: five long poems and a final essay in prose. Here it is included The Glass Testabout the end of a love told from readings by Emily Brontë, TV menwhere Heitor de Tróia, Artaud and Sappho, among others, appear as television characters, or the fall of romeabout a road trip to find out and his attempt at a terrible alienation he felt there.
Anne Carson’s poetry has been written by critics as essays, short lectures or narratives in verse written in a singular.
Red’s Autobiographypublished in 2017, with translation by João Concha and Ricardo Marques, it is a “novel in verse” lightly based on the mythological episode concerning the work of Hercules, in which this demigod has to kill a red winged monster, which lives in a red winged monster. red island grazing red cattle.
Husband’s Beautypublished in 2019 and also translated by Tatiana Faia, it is a fictional essay in 29 tangos, as the author herself calls it, which takes as its starting point the notion of the 19th century English poet John Keats about the truth and power of beauty.
