Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

My name is Francesca Cricelli. I’m a Brazilian-Italian poet, scholar and literary translator who has lived in Iceland for about six years. I write — and think — across languages.

Together, we’ll work with poems by three extraordinary groups of women: the Icelandic collective Svikaskáld — The Imposters, whose work plays with voice and mutual contamination; the Italian poet Mariangela Gualtieri, whose poetry moves between the body and the sacred, between breath and silence; and finally Hilda Hilst, a radical Brazilian poet who wrote from the edges of language and desire.

In this lesson, translation is a tool for attention. You don’t need to translate the poems into your own language, but you may do so, if you desire. The intention is to use translation as a tool to notice what a word carries, what it loses, what it refuses to give up. And from that friction — between languages, between meanings, between what was written and what you receive — something new can emerge. Your poem, or a translation.

Hold that word. We’ll come back to it.