Poetry
The Slave Ship
O navio negreiro
Castro Alves · 1870
Opening lines
'Stamos em pleno mar... Doudo no espaço
Brinca o luar — dourada borboleta;
E as vagas após ele correm... cansam
Como turba de infantes inquieta.
We are on the open sea… Madly in space
The moonlight plays, a golden butterfly;
And the waves run after it… tire
Like a restless crowd of children.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from pt.wikisource.org
Synopsis
The poem opens on the high seas, on a moonlit night when sky and ocean merge, and the poet admires a ship speeding before the wind. He approaches it and discovers on deck, under the whip, chained Africans, men, women and children, forced to dance. What follows tells where they come from: lands and families from which they were torn to be treated like beasts and sold to masters. The tone shifts from wonder to horror.
Context
The poem, dated São Paulo, 18 April 1868, was recited in public on the following 7 September under the title “Tragedy at Sea”. According to the edition by Afrânio Peixoto, it first appeared in the Jornal da Tarde on 23 June 1870; the 1880 edition, in Rio, upset the order of its stanzas. It was to enter the collection Os escravos, published in 1883. Written nearly twenty years after the 1850 law that banned the slave trade, it has six parts and thirty-four stanzas in varied metres; Manuel Bandeira saw in it one of the high points of its author.
Who it is for
A poem in six parts, in Portuguese, written to be spoken aloud; its metres change with the scenes it paints.
Prizes and reception
The best-known abolitionist poem by the man who came to be called the poet of the slaves.
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