Words are contaminatedby every one of us.They drink, distinct in each of us, our blood.They grow pregnant from our lived lives,our specific destinies.Now raised to abstractions,earlier they interned in the pithof our own flesh.That’s why divergence drawsand carves chasm after chasmbetween mouths and ears.What is expressed and prevailsas a seemingly shared code in commondoes not glisten with the aura of its presenceand knows nothing of our inner life. Palavra na berlindaAs palavras se contaminamde cada um de nós.Bebem nosso único sangue.Engravidam das vivênciasde específicos destinos.Quando alçadas em abstraçõesprévias estagiaram no cernede nossa própria carne.Por isso descaminhos se traçame se cavam abismos e abismosentre bocas e ouvidos.O que se expressa e vigoraem aparente senha comumnão cintila a sua aurae de nós o essencial ignora.
Spotlight on the Word
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“Spotlight on the Word” from SPOTLIGHT ON THE WORD: by Astrid Cabral.
Published by World Poetry Books on May 6, 2026.
English Translation Copyright © 2026 by Alexis Levitin.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Astrid Cabral is a leading Brazilian poet and environmentalist who grew up in Manaus, on the Amazon River. She has authored twenty volumes of poetry and received more than a dozen literary awards in Brazil and her work has been widely anthologized. She is also the translator of Thoreau’s Walden into Portuguese. English translations have been published in the collections Cage (Host Publications) and Gazing Through Water (Aliform Publishing), and in numerous magazines, including The Amazonian Literary Review, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, The New York Times, and Two Lines. Spotlight on the Word is her third book to be published in English translation.
Nick Levitin
Alexis Levitin, a translator for half a century, has published works from Brazil, Portugal, and Ecuador. His 50 books include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions, as well as five collections of poetry by the leading Afro-Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão, and twelve collections by Portuguese poet Eugénio de Andrade. He has also worked extensively with Ecuadorian poets, including Ana Minga, Santiago Vizcaino, Carmen Vascones, and Sonia Manzano. He has held Fulbright positions at the universities of Porto and Coimbra in Portugal, The Catholic University in Guayaquil, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.
Spotlight on the Word, Cabral’s third book in English translation, is a far-ranging contemplation of the poet’s endless endeavor to create meaning with the fragile and somehow inadequate material of her craft. For Cabral, what is expressed “knows nothing of who we really are,” and “the word in the head” is a “secret hidden star.” Her exploration of the writer’s relationship to language leads to reverent reflections on silence—what Keats might have been intimating with “negative capability” or painters with their “negative space”—suggesting an acceptance of the paradoxical nature of words which both define and limit, which sometimes blossom, but often do not fly. It is a writer’s testament to both her love and frustration in the eternal struggle to wrest from silence an inkling of meaning through the medium of the word.
“In clear and chiseled language, humble but unapologetic, Astrid Cabral asserts the importance of both the poem and the poet throughout this book. Indeed, both silence and dialogue are dependent on the pair poem-and-poet, which provide the necessary pre-condition for life itself, through the structure of the page. The world is strange and bewildering and Cabral's words refuse to tame it, even as they reveal the subjectivity within objects themselves. Lucidly translated by Alexis Levitin these poems are important reminders of mortality, abundance, and the shared universe.”
—Leonard Schwartz
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