lunduzinho

tatiana nascimento (trans. Natália Alfonso)

lunduzinho is a bilingual chapbook of selected poems by Brazilian poet tatiana nascimento, translated by Natália Affonso. This selection is meant as a celebration of tatiana’s acclaimed Lundu (2016) and of her Afro-brazilian, sexual dissident, silence and sea-led poetic craft. “Lundu” is an iteration of music and dance brought to what is now Brazil by enslaved Bantu people. Through her elaborate syntax, bending and breaking standard Brazilian Portuguese, nascimento threads the complexities of the formation of Brazil and the uncapturable African ancestrality of lundu. She creates neologisms and uses elements of Pretuguês (Black Portuguese), Spanish, English, pajubá (an Afro, Indigenous, Cuír Brazilian dialect), and Afro-Brazilian cosmologies to conjure poetry that is deeply rhythmical, spiritual and ancestral. lunduzinho presents us with the contradictions of big urban centers and how Black, queer bodies move across those landscapes. A sea of transnational, Afro-diasporic, sexual dissident affection in the ebb and flow between original and translation, and all the tongues in between.