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With everything, to my love I’ll be attentive,  Until, and with that zeal, and always, and so much That even in the face of the most enchanted It’s made more enchanting still. I want to live it in every vain moment  And in its honour I shall spread my song And laugh my laughter and shed my tears At its grief or its joy. So later, when knowingly it procures me Maybe death, the anguish of…

Read the latest on da-terra.org: trust a translation of Costa Andrade. Image credit: Uanhenga Xito* by Cristiano Mangovo. *It was alone much later after translating and publishing this that I realised who the figure in the artwork was. Uanhenga Xito, an Angolan writer and member of the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola). You can find the artist, and the original painting, on…

Representation, Expression and Censorship: Same-sex Desire in ‘Orlando’ and ‘The Well of Loneliness’

By 1928 – the year The Well of Loneliness[1] and Orlando[2] were published –there was an increasing social awareness of female same-sex desire in Britain.[3] Whilst The Well engages in religious and contemporaneous sexological discourse in order to legitimise and justify ‘sexual inversion’; Orlando adopts metaphorical language and narrative strategies to deconstruct and expose conventional…

There is a degraded and misogynistic representation of the feminine in E. E. Cummings [2] poetry: an openly disdained and disgusting femininity Cummings invites us to judge. While the degradation in Eliot’s The Waste Land [1] is unified and androgynous, and represented through multiple genders.

E. E. Cummings: 1894 – 1962

Criticism of The Waste Land has come to a general conclusion that it is,…

A Queer Reading of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’

Katherine Mansfield, 1916 ‘But in her bosom there was still that bright glowing place-that shower of little sparks coming from it. It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly dared to look into the cold mirror-but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips, with big,…

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Noemia de Sousa ‘Black Woman’ – A Translation

Please see the original poem below in Portuguese, and read my other Noemia de Sousa translations here. NEGRA