Staff Pick: February
by Emerson Lee, Editorial Intern
Inspired by a June ‘76 Billboard clipping: a monthly series of petit reviews. This chilly February: a review of Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, trans. Hilary Kaplan. Send us requests for texts, film, sounds, art, anything, and we just might be at your bidding for February. See below for the full review.
with love & ovaltine: a review of Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas trans. Hilary Kaplan
You creep into the bookstore without intention and almost feel the books shouting to you. Or you're up late from heartache, trying to drown your sorrows in ice cream and old poetry. Or maybe—something else, a less real kind of animal—you are just dreaming of mermaids, hair and fins that shine like pearls, and hoping for better luck. This is how Rilke Shake transports the reader, in English, Portuguese, or both, infusing a whirl of almost-familiar tableaux with absurdist, sharp-tongued fantasy.
This debut poetry collection is a sly and lively language game, a reclamation of the concept of a canon, and a treat to read—but foremost, it is a love letter, an ode, to love: self-love, connection, and passion itself, in delicious verse.
The lines and poems themselves tend short but never simple; I first encountered the collection five years ago, coincidentally the same way the translator relates in her foreword—aimlessly wandering a bookstore, the title jumped out at me, and from the first page I was irrevocably charmed—and I've been chewing over these poems ever since. Crammed with nimble and affectionate (but never anything so boring as sacrosanct) images of the Concrete, the Modernist, and the Romantic (with a special line in lesbian poets), Rilke Shake is heartfelt and witty, the kind of read you'll want to gulp down in one sitting.
The translation by Hilary Kaplan is striking and adept; in the face of challenging pieces like "as bruxas de bruxelas / the witches of brussels," a limerick which hinges on a Portuguese place name, and "[o que é um baibai? / what's a see you?]", which dips into four (!) languages in a single stanza, Kaplan manages to discover toothsome and delightful twists of language without sacrificing Freitas's fresh, vivid voice.
Links:
Four Poems From Rilke Shake (English Only) - PEN America
Angélica Freitas Reads The Title Poem Rilke Shake - Poets & Writers
