Bloodaxe Books | Adélia Prado: The Mystical Rose @BloodaxeBooks | Uploaded January 2019 | Updated October 2024, 7 hours ago.
Adélia Prado was “discovered” when she was nearly 40 by Brazil’s foremost modern poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who was astonished to read her ‘phenomenal’ poems, launching her literary career with his announcement that St Francis was dictating verses to a housewife in the provincial backwater of Minas Gerais. Psychiatrists in droves made the pilgrimage to Divinópolis to delve into the psyche of this devout Catholic who wrote startlingly pungent poems of and from the body; they were politely served coffee and sent back to the city. After publishing her first collection, Baggage, in 1976, she went on to become one of Brazil’s best-loved poets, awarded the Griffin Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.
Adélia Prado’s poetry combines passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. Her poems are about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one’s body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life; about living in two worlds simultaneously: the spiritual and the material. She also writes about ordinary matters, insisting that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. For her these are not contradictory: ‘It’s the soul that’s erotic,’ she writes.
Neil Astley filmed Adélia Prado with her translator Ellen Doré Watson in Newcastle upon Tyne before their reading for Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts on 13 November 2015. Here they read these poems in Portuguese and English: ‘Day’ (English translation first, then Portuguese), ‘The Mystical Rose’ (English first, then Portuguese), ‘Dénouement’ (English only), ‘Responsory’ (Portuguese first, then English translation), ‘Seduction’ (Portuguese first, then English), ‘The Dark of Night’ (Portuguese first, then English translation), and ‘Human Rights’ (English translation first, then Portuguese). For more details please see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-mystical-rose-271
Adélia Prado was “discovered” when she was nearly 40 by Brazil’s foremost modern poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who was astonished to read her ‘phenomenal’ poems, launching her literary career with his announcement that St Francis was dictating verses to a housewife in the provincial backwater of Minas Gerais. Psychiatrists in droves made the pilgrimage to Divinópolis to delve into the psyche of this devout Catholic who wrote startlingly pungent poems of and from the body; they were politely served coffee and sent back to the city. After publishing her first collection, Baggage, in 1976, she went on to become one of Brazil’s best-loved poets, awarded the Griffin Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.
Adélia Prado’s poetry combines passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. Her poems are about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one’s body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life; about living in two worlds simultaneously: the spiritual and the material. She also writes about ordinary matters, insisting that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. For her these are not contradictory: ‘It’s the soul that’s erotic,’ she writes.
Neil Astley filmed Adélia Prado with her translator Ellen Doré Watson in Newcastle upon Tyne before their reading for Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts on 13 November 2015. Here they read these poems in Portuguese and English: ‘Day’ (English translation first, then Portuguese), ‘The Mystical Rose’ (English first, then Portuguese), ‘Dénouement’ (English only), ‘Responsory’ (Portuguese first, then English translation), ‘Seduction’ (Portuguese first, then English), ‘The Dark of Night’ (Portuguese first, then English translation), and ‘Human Rights’ (English translation first, then Portuguese). For more details please see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-mystical-rose-271
