Cattle of the Lord: Poems

by Rosa Alice Branco, Alexis Levitin (Translator)

Overview

Presented in both English and Portuguese, this lyric poetry collection explores the “troublesome blessing and burden of being human” (Publishers Weekly).

Love. Sex. Death. Meat. Traffic. Pets. In Cattle of the Lord, Rosa Alice Branco offers a stunning poetic vision at once sacred and profane, a rich evocation of daily life troubled by uneasy sacramentality.

In a collection translated by Alexis Levitin and presented in both Portuguese and English, readers find themselves in a world turned upside down: darkly comic, sensual, and rife with contradiction. Here, liturgical words become lovers’ invitations. Cows moo at the heavens. And chickens are lessons on the resurrection.

Over the course of the collection, Branco’s unorthodox—even blasphemous—religious sensibility yields something ultimately hopeful: a belief that the physical, the quotidian, and the animalistic are holy, too. Flesh, in all its meanings—the body of the other, caressed; the animals we abuse, and eat; the sacrificial offering of Christ—demands reverence.

Writing at the boundaries of sense and mystification, combining sensuous lyrics and wit with theological interrogation, Branco breaks down what we think we know about religion, faith, and what it means to be human. “Lord, how much compassion will it take for you,” her speaker cries, “To be godfather at the Sunday barbecue?”

Praise for Cattle of the Lord

“In Rosa Alice Branco, via the compelling translations of Alexis Levitin, we find a poet of immense spiritual, as well as intellectual, curiosity.” —Nicky Beer

“A wild and sneaky book, filled with intelligence, wit, and theological anxiety. . . . Marvelous, moving, and obsessive.” —Kevin Prufer

“Throughout Cattle of the Lord, speakers wield their futile agency to beseech an impassive Lord in the face of their mortality. The result is a raw, daring interrogation that demands both contemplation and confrontation. Limbed with lush language, provocative imagery, and sharp sentiment, Branco’s world is beautiful. But, make no mistake, it is foremost a bier.” —The Los Angeles Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571319456
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Rosa Alice Branco is the author of numerous collections of poems in her native Portuguese, which have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. In English, her work was featured inNew European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008) and has appeared in over thirty magazines, includingAtlanta Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, andThe New England Review. She lives in Porto, Portugal.Alexis Levitins thirty-two books in translation include Clarice LispectorsSoulstorm and Eugenio de Andrades Forbidden Words. Recent publications includeTapestry of the Sun: An Anthology of Ecuadorian Poetry, cotranslated with Fernando Iturburu;Brazil: A Travelers Literary Companion; and Blood of the Sun by Brazils Salgado Maranhao.

Read an Excerpt

The Vespas of Palermo

The virgin smiles at me with her mosaic mouth,
my eyes drown in arabesques on the ground,
the sun’s geometry descends Palermo streets.
Insects accelerate bzz bzz even at the crosswalks
and Christ impassive in the church across the way.
But Christ does not cross the streets:
he is just above the cross, just before it.
Angels are abandoning the darkness of the temple.
The vespas seem like fireflies
and their bzz bzz are the wings of angels
discussing the tourists of the day.
The bzz bzz of the vespas here below, getting together
in the Palermo night. Such ethereal seats
with a glass in one hand, the other on a hip
and on the handlebars of vespas, vespas, vespas
passing kisses, stupefying laughter.
And angels back at their posts in rounded nakedness
while the vespas sleep an asphalt dream.
Supper is being readied and Christ does not deny his place.
Between one bzz and another, I look at you
in the b, baroque or byzantine, and don’t accept
your death, you who cross above the vespas,
vespas, vespas, above Mt. Etna rising to the heavens,
while inside they are brewing hell: your supper,
scraps you’ve left for us in the microwave.

Exchange of Blood

The sacrificial altars are always burning.
We are your cattle, Lord.
Sometimes you order us: hold back the hand above your son.
Has the knife in the air lost its weight?
We thank you this time as if it were for always,
but we leave the blade aimed at human hearts.
Son exchanged for lamb, blood for other blood,
the way one changes shirts.
A man is seated at a tavern door
between the wine and sun. His rotten teeth are
filled with cavities. His breath passes through his gums.
They, too, are bathed in blood and wine.

Water on Stone

We are just the universe
as it is us. At night I groom the stars
from your body and the caresses that clothe me
are accomplices of water.
We chew the earth in the grass that grazes us
and you sprinkle me with sea drops.
Like water on stone, flexible and exact,
you enter my skin, a rising tide.
We only have wings because we have a body.
Our own angels, it is music grazing the earth
that leaves us naked on the heights. As agile
as figures from the Kama Sutra.

Table of Contents

Contents

Tasks of the World
Silk Route of the Blood
Divine Caress
Rape and Run
The Dog That Had Me
Like a Log
Parable of the Talents
Paths That Lead Nowhere
Wounded Sabotage
Animals of the Earth
Prescriptions for the Soul
Laughter in the Grass
Day of the Dead
Exchange of Blood
Savings Bank
Water on Stone
The Vespas of Palermo
One Less
Only the Cats
More Is Less
Black and White
Sub Specie Aeternitatis
Proof of the Soul
Spotless Porcelain
Striptease: Cartagena
Beside the Window
To Each His Own
Decomposition of the Soul
The Soul in the Mouth of Animals
Noah’s Ark
Go Forth and Multiply
Logic Could Be a Madeleine
Via Sacra
No Complaint Book
The Death of Angels

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

01/02/2017
“To have faith in god is to know/ that nothing is suffered in vain,” writes celebrated Portuguese poet Branco in this plaintive, lyric collection—her first to be translated into English. In a world marked by pain and death, Branco’s poems whisper to the earth and cry out to the heavens, seeking faith and joy. The troublesome blessing and burden of being human is the collection’s central theme. “In any language the verb to be/ ends always at the slaughterhouse,” she writes. The intersection of carnality and spirituality leads Branco to seek solace in the sacredness of sex. “And since he made us with a touch/ I touch you, too, with this caress,” she writes, “Blessed be he who loves like that.” She empathetically appeals to a god who shares our human concerns: “If you don’t save yourself/ from your own death, even though you are/ also god, if you die in our name/ and go on dying of us, all we can do/ is celebrate this life.” Presented in a dual-language format, Branco’s thoughtful collection looks to a shared future and offers a solution for the present: “on the coldest nights we rub our bones together/ and lie there watching stars spark from the two of us.” (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Cattle of the Lord

“With what kind of voice shall we interrogate God? In Cattle of the Lord, it is anxious, sardonic, sensuous—but never despairing. In these incisive and vulnerable poems, the problem of the eternal divine is filtered through the modern world, in all its alienation and chaos. We’re shown again and again how faith is inextricable from doubt, how eros is inextricable from death. In Rosa Alice Branco, via the compelling translations of Alexis Levitin, we find a poet of immense spiritual, as well as intellectual, curiosity.” — Nicky Beer

"Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord is a wild and sneaky book, filled with intelligence, wit, and theological anxiety. These poems inhabit a lush, often pastoral world—a world of not-quite-trustworthy dogs, shuffling cows, village feasts, occasional angels. Here, the enormity of God and questions of mortality and spirit are set against the noise and rhythms of daily life, where “every day we have more dead. Or is it they who have us, who tie us to the ground by our hair.” This is a marvelous, moving, and obsessive book—and Alexis Levitin, one of this country’s best translators of poetry, offers an inviting rendering into English."—Kevin Prufer

"Rosa Alice Branco’s poems commune with a miraculous intelligence, translate it for us into an understandable language, and meld it with the darkly erotic, revealing a world in which a 'chorus of wounds is in tune,' and 'even grass/ hurts as it enters the heart.' As 'on the coldest nights we rub our bones together/ and lie there watching stars spark,' we read Cattle of the Lord and our minds spark against it, alight with the possibilities it offers us and to literature. It is a book not only to savor, but to study."—Sara Eliza Johnson

"Rosa Alice Branco’s brilliant poetry offers a profound vision of the human condition, both dark and engaging, with bright veins of tenderness. Presented here in a deft and sensitive translation by Alexis Levitin, Branco’s Cattle of the Lord deploys a remarkable range of images and symbols: 'vespas . . . like fireflies . . . their bzz bzz . . . the wings of angels discussing the tourists of the day;' cats 'gather slowly on the roof . . . to say no to the heavens. / They want to make it clear close-up;' and even the dead who 'tie us to the ground by our hair.' Branco is among the foremost of contemporary poets; this translation of her work has a place in the library of all those who appreciate extraordinary writing."—Miriam KotzinFrom Cattle of the Lord

“Lord, how much compassion will it take for you,
To be godfather at the Sunday barbecue?”

Praise for translator, Alexis Levitin

“Sensual, clear, concise, lyric, luminous, and earthy. . . . Levitin’s brilliant translations seem to echo the nature of the originals.”—Translation Review

“The most fetching lyrics in modern Portuguese poetry. . . . Excellent versions in English.”
—George Monterio, World Literature Today

From the Publisher