Reading
Poetry Night with Paulo Henriques Britto (Brazil)
and: Eugenijus Alisanka (Lithuania), Paulo Henriques Britto (Brasil), Paal-Helge Haugen (Norway), Ursula Krechel (G), Ted Milton (UK), Lutz Seiler (G), James Tate (USA)
Readings in German and the original languages
Paulo Henriques Britto, an ardent fan of rock legends Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan, started translating poems and lyrics back in the 1970s, when he was studying in the USA. He is now one of the most respected translators in Brazil, having translated works by Byron, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Pynchon and others. The publication of his work Macau in 2003 transformed him into one of Brazil’s cult poets. Macau, the former Portuguese colony in China, is also a metaphor for Britto’s art and his personal state of mind.
Paulo Henriques Britto combines a fondness for meta-language, methodology and strict literary forms with concrete poetry, although the contents of his work place him very close to the so-called Geração Mimeógrafo. His generation of writers propagate literary spontaneity and thematise daily life, drawing heavily on colloquial language. Their major influences (not unlike the Beat Generation) are the rock music of the 1960s and 1970s and, above all, Brazilian música popular and its representatives – people like Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. The author, who writes no more than four to six poems a year, published his first volume of poetry Liturgia da matéria (Liturgy of matter) in 1982, followed in 1989 by Mínima lírica (Minimal Lyricism), Trovar claro (Composing in clarity) in 1997 and the volume Macau, for which Britto received the “Prêmio Portugal Telecom de Literatura Brasileira” in 2004. That year he also published his first volume of stories Paraísos artificiais (Artificial Paradises), which he had been working on for over thirty years.
Henriques Britto was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1951. He still lives in Rio, where he teaches literature, literary translations and creative writing at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica.
An event held by the international literature festival berlin as part of the project "Copa da Cultura – Brazil and Germany 2006" in co-operation with the House of World Cultures and the Ministério da Cultura do Brasil.
