It’s Atirar Para o Torto by Margarida Vale de Gato. Just about every page brings me a whole crop of obscure vocabulary. It makes it hard to get absorbed in the flow. I underlined the mysterious strangers on this page because there were so many I couldn’t keep track. Some are obvious (“forçosamente”,”desdiz”), others I’d seen before but couldn’t remember (“frincha”) and others are total mysteries (“vesgo”). Outrossim looks like it’s combining ‘outro’ and ‘assim’ but it’s “likewise” (another one like that) rather than what I thought at first: “otherwise” (like something else entirely)
Even the title of the book was a mystery: “Atirar para o torto”. Torto can mean someone who has a physical deformity of some sort – they’re lame or cross-eyed – as in Que Mulher é Essa by A Garota Não, so I wondered in a vague way if she was taking about some sort of persecution of disadvantaged people. That wouldn’t be a great title for a poetry book though. “Para o torto” means something like “wide of the mark”, so if you threw something at me but your aim was way off, you could say you had thrown “para o torto”. So the book means something like “Shooting and Missing”.
Edit – I’ve been re-listening to old episodes of Say It In Portuguese and the word Torto comes up in this episode, so if you want to know more, have a listen.
Luso 