WHEN A PAIN INHABITS SILENCE: POETRY AS A TRANSLATION OF THE UNSPEAKABLE

Abstract

This article discusses the power of poetic language as a mechanism for translating the subjective experiences of pain and silence of black women. To this end, it takes as its object of investigation the poems Antigênesis, Canção, Do silêncio from the work Dia bonito pra chover (2024) by the writer Lívia Natália. Based on the concepts of intersemiotic translation proposed by Júlio Plaza (2003) and the decolonial critique carried out by Oyèrónke Oyêwùmí (2021) on the translation of cultures and the imposition of a Western visual and gender logic, we analyze how the lyrical voice present in the poems operates a transposition of the unspeakable, inhabited by pain, waiting, and heartbreak, to the verbal plane, creating a textual body that is simultaneously wound and cure. It is argued that Lívia Natália's poetry, by incorporating elements of orality and an Afro-diasporic cosmoperception, destabilizes the boundaries between sound and silence, word and flesh, effecting a sensitive translation that resists the generification of experience and at the same time restores the complexity of feeling.

Keywords: Poetry; Intersemiotic Translation; Silence; Pain; Black Woman.