What's in a Name

by Ana Luísa Amaral, Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

Overview

Winner of the Premio Reina Sofia for Poetry

Poems of effervescent grace from one of the best-known and best-loved poets of Portugal

With the elliptical looping of a butterfly alighting on one’s sleeve, the poems of Ana Lui´sa Amaral arrive as small hypnotic miracles. Spare and beautiful in a way reminiscent both of Szymborska and of Emily Dickinson (it comes as no surprise that Amaral is the leading Portuguese translator of Dickinson), these poems—in Margaret Jull Costa’s gorgeous English versions—seamlessly interweave the everyday with the dreamlike and ask “What’s in a name?”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811228329
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Winner of the Premio Reina Sofía for Poetry, Ana Luísa Amaral (1956-2022) was born in Lisbon. She was highly acclaimed not only for her poetry, but also for her plays, children’s books, books of essays, and a novel. She was widely regarded as the finest translator into Portuguese of Emily Dickinson and William Shakespeare. Her books have been translated into many languages and her awards include the Premio Internazionale Fondazione Roma and the PEN Prize for Fiction. In 2019, New Directions published her What’s in a Name to rave reviews and forthcoming is her new work, World.

Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated Javier Marías and José Saramago, lives in England.

Read an Excerpt

“How solid is a name if answered to,” Amaral answers, but “like the Rose—no, like its perfume: ungovernable. Free.” There is much freedom within Amaral’s poetry, room for mysteries to multiply, and yet her beautiful lines are as clear as water:

And that time of smiles Which does, incidentally,

really exist, I swear, as does the fire

And the invisible sea, which with nothing will agree

Editorial Reviews

01/21/2019

Amaral offers provocative reframings of familiar texts, from Old Testament stories to Shakespearean tragedies, in her second book to appear in English. As she revisits narratives from a predominantly male literary tradition, Amaral gives voice to female characters who existed on the peripheries of these stories: Lot’s Wife considers her “namelessness”; Juliet imagines a life that is “ungovernable”; and a female speaker indicts Janus for his privilege, the “luxury of looking.” Amaral’s persona poems gradually defamiliarize canonical texts, shifting their focus and intent. Through poems made up of orderly looking lines and stanzas, Amaral carves a space for fragmentation, uncertainty, and meditative silence within the repertoire of inherited forms. In “Things,” Amaral considers the arbitrariness of the signifier, challenging the very foundations of the social order: “That’s why, and despite all, I speak of names:/ because I cannot find/ a better way:” By ending the poem with a colon, gesturing toward the page’s blank space, Amaral invites the reader to complete the philosophical work that she has set in motion. In this accomplished volume and translation, Amaral’s subtle experimentation makes strange an artistic repertoire we thought we knew. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Ana Luisa Amaral's poems read as intimate conversations between the poet and reader, in either the early hours of morning or the late hours of night, where small, everyday moments quickly spiral into great cultural, historical, and even cosmic significance. Brilliant."

The Arkansas International

"With the original Portuguese to the left and the translated English to the right, this collection of poems beautifully weaves together myths, histories, voyages, and language with elegant ease. Amaral wears her attentiveness on her sleeve, deftly considering her place at home, in her city, and in the wilds."

Drawn and Quarterly

"In a limpid, poised poetry Ana Luísa Amaral evokes interlinked substances (a book, a mood, a mosquito, color itself, love and trust as central, being a mother, domestic moments and their metamorphic transformations) and affirms Being in the world with both a bedazzled clarity and a notable patience with mysteries and divisions. The strong poems of visitations by the muse herself evoke lyrics of Sappho, while Amaral’s modernist side-glance takes in the oddity of the intersection of us and the cosmos of atoms and chance. Here is a lucid, forthright poet charmed by the paradoxes of each poem, by the tiny gestures and traces of life faceted within each poem, and by the vocation of poetry itself. "

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

"Brilliant: her words celebrate the hidden potentiality inside every woman—and the spontaneity of life itself, even in the contemplation of sudden death."

Asymptote

"Inspired: while Costa is particularly adept at bringing into English these moments sought by Amaral of beauty and significance amid the superficially prosaic, she is equally at home with re-creating the texture and density of Amaral’s restrained and aphoristic Portuguese, saturating each word and truncated line with meaning. Amaral’s poetry possesses an intimacy that grants it a sense of timelessness. Yet it speaks to the moment we find ourselves in today."

Translation and Literature

"This bilingual volume, pairing Costa’s translations with Amaral’s Portuguese originals, relies on humble imagery and plain language to plumb complicated truths."

The New York Times Book Review