Contemporary Brazilian poet Edimilson de Almeida Pereira writes of his poetry collection O som vertebrado (A backbone sound): “The printing of the first edition of this book occurred in 2022, more than 400 years after the first excavations in the land we now call Minas Gerais. The sound of this work of explor-action¹ can still be heard among the ground, animals, buildings, and people. This work is one of those reverberations. Another consequence of these sounds is the work of the poet, composer, musician, and multi-instrumentalist Milton Nascimento, to whom this book is dedicated, on the year of his 80th birthday.”² In establishing a resonance between the physical attributes of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais (general mines) and his poetics, Almeida Pereira emphasizes writing as a material act of both unearthing and investigating a complex and multilayered territory. His note, as well as the references to the materiality of writing and reading (to ink, paper, and printing), foregrounds a poetics of weaving together the seemingly opposing categories of the natural and cultural, the animal and human, the visible and invisible, and the audible and inaudible, as well as the colonial and racial past and present that have cemented these divisions over centuries. O som vertebrado remains attuned to languages both human and nonhuman, inspired by a land whose cultural traditions Almeida Pereira has studied for many years as a prolific anthropologist, poet, and novelist. In the poems that follow, syntax and language are broken and made strange in order to write another kind of history and geography of Minas Gerais.

In addition to his work as a poet, Almeida Pereira is a wellknown anthropologist and literary scholar of Afro-mineiro traditions and Black Brazilian writing and cultural production. Many of these poems are “extracted” from the landscapes and histories of Minas Gerais and the Indigenous and Afro-diasporic traditions fundamental to this land. I use the word “extraction” quite literally, as this term is necessary for reading Almeida Pereira’s poetic and scholarly work. Minas Gerais was the site of the Brazilian Gold Rush in the 1690s, which brought over 500,000 enslaved Africans to the region. Portuguese colonizers employed slave labor to build infrastructure and mines, which continued as Minas became the epicenter of gem and crystal mining through the 18th and 19th centuries. By the time slavery was abolished in 1888, many of these mines had also been exhausted. As a result, once-populated cities with their ornate architecture and colonial monuments quickly fell into ruin, becoming ghost towns. Meanwhile, mining and environmental disasters continue to afflict the region into the present: One recent example of this is the Rio Doce disaster, of which the Indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak has written extensively.³ As Almeida Pereira tells us, this is the same afflicted land that defines the melancholy music of the famous mineiro singer Milton Nascimento.

My philosophy as a translator has been to maintain certain moments of ambiguity and estrangement to the best of my ability and to prioritize the formal and poetic aspects of Edimilson’s words as much as his “literal” meaning, which is often impossible to definitively “extract.” It is my belief that to make the English version more legible would be to flatten the sense of strangeness and dis-articulation of language that this work stages, or to replace a multidimensional and palimpsest-like Portuguese with an all too fluent English that harbors its own histories of colonial and imperial domination. This notion of ambiguity is relevant to Almeida Pereira’s work across multiple registers: As a literary critic and anthropologist, he has written Black Brazilian and Afro-mineiro identity as multiple, defined by its internal conflicts and contradictions, impossible to pin down.⁴ These works, as well as their formal and theoretical implications, are essential for ongoing discussions surrounding Blackness in Brazil, and the relationship to Black Diasporic cultural production more broadly.

I thank the many readers who were essential to the completion of the translations below, who helped me attempt to maintain the strangeness and hermeticism of these poems without rendering them as excessively literal or unnecessarily opaque. Two of the poems below, “Dream River” and “Gautherot,” carry the specificity of Minas Gerais into English through their proper nouns and references. “Dream River,” for example, references a steamboat that once traversed the São Francisco River and was originally built in Mississippi and brought to Brazil, while Marcel Gautherot was a French photographer whose work documented many rural traditions of Minas Gerais. In both of these poems, and the two others I include, use of passive and reflexive verbs and ambiguous subjects give the work an especially dreamlike quality, so much that one image or moment fades into another and makes one scene, person, or element hard to distinguish from its surroundings.⁵ My translations intend to preserve this ambiguity—an ambiguity inherent to the “coming and going of signs,” as Almeida Pereira writes of in “Dream River.” In this sense, if O som vertebrado imagines ways to hear the speeches and sounds of the people, animals, ghosts, and land of Minas Gerais, then rendering his poetic reverberations in English is also an attempt to hear those sounds across multiple geographies and temporalities. This hearing is necessarily uncertain or difficult: It is a release from the prison of syntax and toward the other, yet unimaginable, grammars, geographies, and places that Almeida Pereira’s poetics attune us to.