The prison ballad

With its fusion of unexpected images and complex ideas, A Balada do Cárcere (The Ballad of Prison) places Bruno Tolentino at the pinnacle of Brazilian literary modernity. Controversial, with a history of disagreements with MPB composers and USP professors, among others, Bruno Tolentino defined himself as a sharp-tongued man bent by the vice of irony. He displayed no false modesty about his role in the Brazilian literary scene; he was aware of his own talent: "I changed the history of literature, I put Brazil on the international map," he claimed. Considered one of the greatest Brazilian poets of all time, he won the Jabuti Prize three times, becoming one of the only writers to achieve this feat. Born from the experience of eleven years of imprisonment in Dartmoor, in the United Kingdom, *The Ballad of Prison* has an annotated edition, with an introduction by the poet Érico Nogueira, and notes and organization by Juliana P. Perez, Jessé de Almeida Primo, Guilherme Malzoni Rabello, Renato José de Moraes, and Martim Vasques da Cunha. "[...] This book shows that this commonplace has much truth to it. The encounter between the narrator who speaks in the first part, as well as in the epilogue, of *The Ballad of Prison* and the Numeropath (his companion in the British prison of Dartmoor) is, after all, the encounter between expressive, devastating articulate language and a formless, chaotic, aphasic existential mass. It is thus almost a parable about the birth of culture [...]." — Ronald Robson