lunduzinho

tatiana nascimento

Translated by Natália Affonso

BLACK STUDIES, FEMINISM, POETRY, QUEER STUDIES, TRANSLATION  |  $14

December 2022
Read an excerpt

whales (v. 17) 

in the revolution / of the rebolado
in the strategy / of the jeitinho
tactical counter attack / of the cutucação
kinda like schematic but
in no way systematic, more
like symptomatic
diagnose
(‘n loneliness:
technology in social networks of watching,
sharing, & liking / loneliness) 

calls it victimism
lives in bygonism / foregonism / yesterdayism
imprisons in denuncism
brings the foreman to the reaction
whoever thought stasis is
balance
has never done tightropism  

misgui-dodged / in the inter-action  

i prefer:
archeological excavation
like organo-botics
of the future
I prefer cyborgs
of diasporic skin
pos-utopian waveletic
sashay away in the harbor
insecure (they are) 

ancestral
curative technologies
ancient
orgasmative technologies
from long’ago
contraceptive technology
(the good old tipping the velvet is pure
[girl-friend] technorgy)
animal digestive technologies / palatal /
gustatory,
taste buddies [papillicking]: 

[…]

lunduzinho is tatiana nascimento’s living testament, demiurgic engine, and praise poem to the boundless possibilities inherent in a queer Afro-Brazilian poetical philosophy.

Akilah White

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.

Included in the Señal 2022 Bundle.

About the Author

tatiana nascimento is from brasília, Brazil, she’s 41 years old, she’s a wordsmith: she invents poems, prose, songs, essays, translations, and handmade books. she has published almost two dozen books of her own, and more than 50 titles of other black/sexual dissident authors through padê editorial, her publishing house specialized in artisanal cardboard publications. Her research/production dives into silences, memories, noises, melodies, to disarchitect words and assemble a re-engineering of the senses, especially in the themes of affection, blackness, the brazilian savannah, the sea & her beloved daughter irê.

Praise

lunduzinho is tatiana nascimento’s living testament, demiurgic engine, and praise poem to the boundless possibilities inherent in a queer Afro-Brazilian poetical philosophy. Her revelatory linguistic artistry travels through Natalia Affonso’s potent translation into English as ecocentric technology for renewed, renewing, renewable ways of being. In defiance of a rigid colonial blueprint, nascimento splits, remixes, and reforges words not to discover but reclaim epistemological lineages released from capitalist temporalities into a fluid, circular time that encompasses a wider natural world of shared knowledge and futurity. Affonso brings a detailed, sensitive, and rebellious English as portal for nascimento’s unified sexual, spiritual and intellectual vision of literary activism. The lines throb, dance and pulse with a unique vitality rarely captured. Avoiding an anthropological transparency, her translation conveys transnational realities inherent in the work without sacrificing the truth of who nascimento is and where she exists on the page.

Akilah White

nascimento's provocative Afro-futurist poems demand to be read out loud, felt in the body in their own terms, like the lundu dance from the title. In Natália Affonso's brilliantly inventive translations, they sing in multiple languages and dialects, from Black Portuguese and Cuíer lingos to Spanish and English, to form a language all their own. A stunning chapbook to cherish and reread.

Bruna Dantas Lobato


Praise for Previous Work

In the absence of utopia, one can only imagine it in terms of what it is not (yet). Nascimento’s Afro-futurist linguistic experiments—near [Cuír's] centerpiece—perhaps gesture to the impulse behind 'Cuíer'’s formation: to know another 'with no need for armor, / anticipating no answer, / no need to learn how to punch nor / map the space before entering.' A place of silence beyond translation.”

Alex Tan

About the Translator

Natália Affonso is a translator, teacher, researcher and activist who sometimes commits (to) poems. She’s from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she created the award-winning literary salon Sapatão & Ficção. She studies Caribbean and Brazilian sexual-dissident literature and is interested in how these can make decolonizing love together. She’s pursuing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, where she is one of the head editors of Interversar, a graduate-student-run interdisciplinary Latin American Studies journal. Her translations of tatiana nascimento’s poetry appeared in Cuíer (Two Lines Press, 2021).

In the News

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-11-8
Chapbook
48 pp, 5.25 x 8.25 in
Publication Date: December 15 2022
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Señal #18