What’s in a Name by Ana Luísa Amaral and translated by Margaret Jull Costa

This is poetry from Portugal.

What’s in a Name by Ana Luísa Amaral translated by Margaret Jull Costa is published by New Directions. This is a Book originally written in Portuguese. This was published in 2019.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780811228329E12.

What’s in a Name, by Ana Luísa Amaral, is a Portuguese poetry collection from Portugal, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, published by New Directions in 2019. It is a Portuguese collection by Ana Luísa Amaral drawn toward naming, identity, and the intimacy of address. The poems understand that names are never small; they carry gender, inheritance, love, grammar, and power. 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.