Spotlight on the Word

Astrid Cabral (trans. Alexis Levitin)

In her late-career examination of language, poetry, and song, renowned Brazilian poet and environmentalist Astrid Cabral focuses on the mystery and elusiveness of the very building blocks of her endeavor. 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.