Category: Brazil

Zé Maria da Fortaleza’s “Adventures of Robin Hood” (2007): A Brazilian Outlaw Poem| Stephen Basdeo [Trans.]

Zé Maria da Fortaleza’s Adventures of Robin Hood (2007) retells the outlaw legend in Brazilian cordel verse. Robin becomes leader of a woodland brotherhood resisting injustice, defeats the Sheriff through disguise and skill, wins Marian’s love, and is ultimately vindicated by King Richard, blending English folklore with Brazilian popular tradition.

Mario Quintana’s “Functional Architecture” | Stephen Basdeo (Translator)

Quintana, as one biographer states, was a native of Porto Alegre, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul—a place where I have spent a lot of time—and was born in 1906. The son of a pharmacist, as he grew up he found that his intellectual interests lay in the reading of European literature, and he learned to speak Spanish, and developed a good reading knowledge of French and some Russian.