A Child In Ruins by José Luís Peixoto and translated by Hugo Dos Santos

This is poetry from Portugal.

A Child In Ruins by José Luís Peixoto translated by Hugo Dos Santos is published by Writ Large Press. This is a Book originally written in Portuguese. This was published in 2016.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780981483696E12.

A Child In Ruins, by José Luís Peixoto, is a Portuguese poetry collection from Portugal, translated by Hugo Dos Santos, published by Writ Large Press in 2016. It is a Portuguese collection by José Luís Peixoto where childhood, damage, and tenderness meet in stark light. The title hurts before the poems begin, and that hurt becomes a way of reading memory without consolation. I would read it first for the pressure of the translated line rather than as a puzzle waiting for its correct answer. The best version of a description for a book like this should give the reader a door, not a lecture: a little context, then permission to meet the poem through image, cadence, and affect. For this library, the book matters as more than a representative entry from Portugal. It shows how poetry in translation can carry local weather, private intensity, and literary history into English without becoming merely informational.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.