Join us online for an exciting evening with the translators of the book, Daniel Hahn and Sean O’Brien, as they discuss their translation process and read from Eye of the Island by the late, celebrated Cape Verdean poet Corsino Fortes.
Born on Cape Verde’s São Vicente Island, Corsino Fortes (1933-2015) served as Cape Verde’s ambassador to both Portugal and Angola. A poet, activist, educator, lawyer and diplomat, Fortes wrote in both Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese. His first collection, Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme), was published to great acclaim in 1974, the year the Estado Novo regime collapsed in Portugal, which led to the decolonisation of Cape Verde and other African colonies in 1975. Throughout his career, Corsino Fortes’s poems offered vivid and often hallucinatory glimpses of the land, sea and people of his country – word-scapes rooted in the earth and the body.
The PTC first published Corsino Fortes in 2008, a short chapbook with poems translated by Daniel Hahn with the poet Sean O’Brien. Corsino also visited the UK as part of our early World Poet Tours. We are honoured to present a wider, posthumous selection of this seminal poet’s work as part of the PTC’s World Poet Series.
