In this edition of our Diaspora podcast, we chat with Alex Simiema. Alex is from Goias, in Brazil, he lived in Natal, Brasília, and also in California, London, France, residing today in Lisbon, circulating around Austria. A nomad? An explorer? Or is this would be a certain inquietude of an artist’s soul?
Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) was a Brazilian poet, playwright, and fiction writer. She was strongly influenced by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and this influence appears in themes and techniques that are recurrent in their work such as the flow of consciousness and fractured reality.
Love’s a fire that burns out of a sight;
It’s a wound, yet a painless torment;
It’s a discontent sense of contentment;
It’s a pang, yet unbearably slight.
I won’t be the singer of some woman, some tale,/ I won’t evoke the sights at dusk, the scene outside the window,/ I won’t distribute drugs or suicide letters,/
Above all, to my love I’ll be attentive
First and always, with care and so much
That even when facing the greatest enchantment
By love be more enchanted my thoughts
Rafael Mendes is a poet. He came to live in Dublin in 2016. The following year he participated in the collection “32kg: An Anthology Brazil-Ireland” by Editora Urutau and published with the same publisher his first collection “an essay on beauty and chaos”, launched in Brazil and Europe. His poems have been published in magazines, radio, and soirees in Ireland.
In this conversation, we talk about art, chaos, beauty, love, and longing – a word full of meaning. We talked about memories – one of the raw materials of a poem – about languages and Rafael’s experience in translations for the Diaspora magazine.
“Sometimes I have symptoms of reality. I make training field of my dreams and ask myself, “Why do I wake up with sand in my eyes?” Maybe it is a race against time. “ She was asked on the street if she is an actress. Maybe she had some appearances on the stage, or maybe […]
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