Eye of the Island
£9
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.
Author of works like Pão e Fonema [Bread and Phoneme] (1974) or Árvore e Tambor [Tree and Drum] (1986), his work expresses a new awareness of Cape Verdian reality and a new reading of cultural tradition from the archipelago.
— Antonio Miranda
English speakers can finally experience how Fortes addresses the exile’s status common to so many around the world.
— Publishers Weekly
It is the seductiveness of [the] “dynamism of expression” through which the reader will best remember this significant translation.
— Douglas Messerli, Hyperallergic
Concerned with giving voice to Cape Verdean life, Fortes writes in Cape Verdean Creole – and not just standard Portuguese – a powerful statement reinforcing the islands’ distinctive African nature. However, his poems are often written from the perspective of an exile – and themes of exile and redemptive return recur in his work. This collection introduces English readers to Fortes, and the poet’s beautiful and unique use of language.
— Portuguese-American Journal
