October 18th: Patricio Ferrari in Conversation with Maya Popa
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Patricio Ferrari and Maya Popa will discuss The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos by Fernando Pessoa.
This event will take place live at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd avenue, on Wednesday, October 18th at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.
The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Patricio Ferrari and Margaret Jull Costa (New Directions, 2023)
Álvaro de Campos is one of the most influential heteronyms created by Portugal’s great modernist writer Fernando Pessoa. According to Pessoa, Campos was born in Tavira (Algarve) in 1890 and studied mechanical engineering in Glasgow, although he never managed to complete his degree. In his own day, Campos was celebrated—and slandered—for his vociferous poetry imbued with a Whitman-inspired free verse, his praise of the rise of technology, and his polemical views that appeared in manifestos, interviews, and essays. Here in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari’s translations are the complete poems of Campos. This edition is based on the Portuguese Tinta-da-china edition and includes an illuminating introduction about Campos by the Portuguese editors Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello, facsimiles of original manuscripts, and a generous selection of Campos’s prose texts.
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the Portuguese poet, literary critic, and essayist, is one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century. He wrote not only under his own name but under many others (including Vicente Guedes, Bernardo Soares, Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, and Ricardo Reis).
Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor born in Argentina to Italian immigrants. Ferrari has transcribed unpublished Pessoa writings, edited several of his books, and earned a PhD from Universidade de Lisboa with a dissertation on the role of metrics in Pessoa’s trilingual poetry and the shaping of his heteronyms. As a translator and literary editor, Patricio has published twenty works, including The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, The Complete Works of Alberto Cairo by Pessoa, both with New Directions, and Habla terreña by Frank Stanford (Pre-textos, 2023). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books, among others. Patricio teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Rutgers University, enjoys an ongoing collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance, and hosts the “World Poetry in Translation” reading series in NYC, celebrating foreign poets and translators. He just completed “Mud,” the first volume of his “Elsehere” multilingual poetry trilogy.
Dr. Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023) and the chapbook Dear Life (Smith|Doorstop 2022), which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards (UK). Wound is the Origin of Wonder has been featured in The Washington Post, The Harvard Review, Booklist, and elsewhere. Her newsletter, Poetry Today, was named a 2023 Substack Featured Publication.
American Faith was published by Sarabande Books in 2019 as runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong. It was awarded the North American Book Prize in 2020. She is author of two previous chapbooks, You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave and The Bees Have Been Cancelled (PBS Summer Choice). She is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Oxford Poetry Society, the Hippocrates Society in London, and the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, among others.