Adelia Prado - Voice of Brazil

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Poet Adélia Prado has shunned the spotlight since her discovery in 1976 – then a 40-year-old mother of five. Her literary career was launched by Brazil's foremost modern poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, with the announcement that St Francis was dictating verses to a housewife in the backwaters of the interior state of Minas Gerais.

She writes about the transcendent in ordinary life, of how the human experience is both mystical and carnal. Now aged 80, her sensual, devout, sometimes provocative poetry is read and admired around the world. In the company of her long-time translator and fellow poet Ellen Doré Watson, Adélia Prado invites us into her home to talk about her life and work.

Picture: Adelia Prado, Credit: Eve Streeter

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Adelia Prado Voice of Brazil on the BBC World Service.
0:08.0	A rare encounter with Brazil's foremost woman poet, with me Ellen Dore Watson her translator these past 35 years.
0:17.0	This is a syrene from the of the Zona's when my papa-Balleva
0:24.0	is music for me.
0:26.0	This siren that comes from the place where my father worked on the railroad
0:31.0	is music to me.
0:33.0	I was born right next to the railroad tracks.
0:37.0	I was born right next to the railroad tracks.
0:40.0	And this is I've been
0:42.0	I've seen jung to the first spot,
0:43.7	da da my mom and my father.
0:46.3	And I heard this sound from the beginning,
0:48.2	like the first words from my parents.
0:50.7	What did the sound mean?
0:52.0	This seerini,
0:54.0	it was to me always
0:55.0	a regard to the
0:56.0	the siren called people to work.
0:59.0	Growing up in Chevenoptery in the state of Minister Ice
1:02.0	in the
1:03.7	the chief monopolies in the state of Minister Ice in the 1930s and 40s there were more
1:05.4	than 1,000 railroad workers living here. Wherever you are in a city you can hear
	...

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