Ana Paula Portella¹ begins her preface to Maria Clara Escobar’s poetry collection with incisive musings on the countless ways that our current forms of life—the many crises that we have inherited from previous generations, steeped in legacies of inequality, violence, and environmental destruction—give us a variety of reasons for fears coming from endless sources and directions. Portella recognizes that the fears Escobar names, confronts, toys with, and turns into metaphor have universal elements. However, Escobar’s collection—as a feminist text—speaks especially of and to the fears that permeate the everyday lives of girls and women, as well as the ways women look at these fears, attitudes, and needs. They take us right into the eye of the storm, where we are able—or perhaps obliged—to rethink our acts, our relationships, our survival, and our creativity.

I first read Escobar’s collection Medo, medo, medo (Fear, fear, fear, 2019) in 2021, well into the COVID-19 pandemic and the gripping fear it stirred across the globe. Her work resonated with me beyond the context of the worldwide spread of the virus, a mere chapter in a long saga of human striving and blunder. At the time, I was fortunate enough to be participating in one of Alison Entrekin’s online translation workshops. Tackling the challenge of an English-language version of Escobar’s poem became an opportunity to plunge into the work of a young Brazilian writer and a chance to test my own evolution as a translator of poetry, from Brazilian Portuguese to English. Years and circumstances had initially led me in the opposite direction—translating from English into Portuguese—in partnership with friends and colleagues who were native speakers of the latter. Hence, what became a reversal was also the continuation of my many years of translating English-language feminist writers and poets into Portuguese: a task that had compelled me, a kind of driving need to share my beloved sources—my bibliografias!—with my friends, my students, and my community. In both cases, it meant bringing out women’s voices as voices that resignify, appropriate, defy, and diversify many centuries’ worth of so-considered “canonical” literature. Today these women writers take their place as part of a potent and vibrant movement, an explosão feminista (feminist explosion), a phrase coined by Brazilian cultural critic Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda and the title of her 2018 book on the subject.² The expression refers to an unprecedented blooming of women’s voices in the realms of art, culture, and politics in the Brazil of the new millennium. In the field of poetry specifically, Hollanda (who today publishes under her maiden name, Teixeira) refers to the decade that began in 2010 and its groundswell of women writers who are “poets of feminism, but not necessarily feminist poets.”³

Escobar’s poetry evokes a feeling of being on the brink. Have human greed and cruelty tipped an already failing balance in the definitive direction of our demise? In her interweaving of the personal and the political there is a simple, brutal honesty that ruptures any attempt to sweep hurt, damage, and injustice under the rug. There abound failed love affairs and frustrated attempts at connection, precarious lives, perilous streets and loneliness amid the urban multitudes, and vulnerability in a technology-driven world (as in the fear of airplanes that Escobar invokes in the first set of poems presented here). Yet Escobar also expresses intense feelings of empathy and tenderness for the many others who inhabit her verse; she weaves in stories that reveal her identification with the experiences, if not the destinies, of other women.

Participating in this veritable explosion of women’s voices, Escobar’s poetry moves to its own beat. Yet, as a poet, Escobar nevertheless shares the critical irreverence of many other young poets I’ve read recently, including Tatiana Pequeno, Lubi Prates, and Luiza Romão. In fact, the voices multiply much more quickly than any one of us—as readers, scholars, or critics—can keep up with. As a diverse group imbued with a bursting energy to tell their stories, these women speak from the specific ground they inhabit: both legacy and change, more shifting than solid. Yet however singular their experiences may feel, to write them is to place them within wider webs of understanding.

Working here on the English-language version of these poems, I was reminded of a workshop I took taught by the millennial, gaúcha author Natália Borges Polesso called “A escrita da ruina” (Writing the ruins). Destruction, fear, and the feeling of desperately trying to navigate a largely unsalvageable world come to the forefront as hallmarks of our time, it seems. As I finish this brief commentary, Brazil is confronting the trauma and shock of recent flooding that has affected the overwhelming majority of municipalities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, taking human and animal lives and destroying entire towns, farms, natural landscapes, and city neighborhoods. Tragedy as a wakeup call, if that is still possible. Medo, medo, medo. As a poet, Escobar recreates this twilight atmosphere and perhaps reminds us we must think about what to do about fear and with fear. Finally, let me share some brief thoughts on the ongoing challenges of translating Escobar’s poems. I have tried, above all, to capture her emotional environment and the rhythm and feel of her colloquial tone, her key which is intense and direct. There were the usual tricky spots, inevitable in Portuguese to English translation, such as the differences in the way nouns and adjectives are gendered or not. Such grammatical gendering is a major issue for the current wave of feminist translation, because language has been shaped according to patterns that are steeped in gendered meanings and expectations. Finding other ways of naming things or people may mean inventing words or inflecting speech in ways that cause strangeness or discomfort. In English, pilots, doctors, workers, and other such nouns are neutral, but on occasion, translating them from the Portuguese, when the context calls for marking gender, may become clumsy. For example, I will probably not want to write “female doctor” or “woman pilot.” Yet I am tasked with finding a way of preserving the gendered meaning of “doutora” or “pilota.” Likewise, there are moments of interpretation, as in Escobar’s “Medo das ruas, deles e da morte,” where I chose “men” over “them.” In this case, “deles” might not necessarily mean “only men,” but context tells me it does. Other ambiguities, like when a double entendre in Portuguese might get lost—such as a simple “ligar mesmo já não liga para ninguém,” which could describe calling someone, paying attention to them, or both—led me to different solutions, since I didn’t want to make that choice. In the end, the daily life of poets and translators is just this: paddling our way through a sea of infinite choices or juggling pieces of a composition that can fall into place— or fall flat on the ground.

The poems you find below are the first pieces in an ongoing project, my attempt to capture the spirit and thrust of a young poet whose work resonates with other voices of her generation and further unfurls in her third volume, Zonas de guerra (War zones). Sometimes the words spill out, and I might even get it right; other times, the words come out cuidosamente vertidas, as if poured carefully from the cadence of Brazilian Portuguese into the defiant mold of the English language, through the filter of a person caught in, and captivated by, all that is entre-between.⁴