From Raw Rage to Rhythmic Reason: Translating “The Biggest Fool in the World”
Dive into the intimate, often lonely, yet profoundly transformative journey of translating a deeply personal poem. Discover how a dialogue with AI became a powerful tool for an autistic poet.
To the Biggest Fool in the World
Some things only make sense in my own tongue.
I have cast you out of my mind,
into the cold of ignorance, to waste into nothing.
But you don’t die.
You pollute the view, crawl back, blind drunk,
reeking of pride and belching
cachaça. You stretch, you spread out,
wreck the aesthetic with a single gut-thrust
and unnerve the select audience
with your talent for intrigue.
You don’t sleep, you pass out numb.
That is why you never wake.
Your perception can’t reach the edge
of the limbo your own fallacy constructed.
And you walk foolishly, from stupor to stupor.
It is useless to state you lack love
or that allegory they call a heart.
Because you have everything.
You’ve always had everything. Except shame.
The shame is what I feel. Because
the only time I ever wanted a dick
was to beat you senseless without
the ghost of hysteria, without my reason
being lost to the fucking genitals.
Finally, I think I understand the irony
of the universe.
May you always have everything
so that I may always become more,
see more, and recognize from a great distance
a cynic who doesn’t honor his own balls.
Do you hear that drumming?
It is my verse, contemplating vastness.
Do you hear it? Bones, flasks, phantoms
piercing the veil?
It is my satirical self, laughing last,
shaking violently.
A Poet’s Dialogue with AI: Crafting My Voice Anew
Today, I’m thrilled to share something that feels like both a conclusion and a new beginning: the English translation of my poem, “Ao Maior Tolo Do Mundo.” The original version, which many of you have already read, is a piece born from a specific and potent rage, deeply rooted in my own history and language. As I wrote in the poem itself, “Tem coisa que só faz sentido na minha língua” (”Some things only make sense in my own tongue”). This line served as both a warning and a profound challenge for the translation process itself.
Translating poetry is an intimate and complex act. To help me navigate it, I engaged in a deep, collaborative dialogue with the AI model, Gemini. Yes, it sounds solitary. My therapist recently asked me about this—this intense process of writing, scrutinizing my history, and analyzing myself in this newsletter—and my immediate response was: “Yes, it’s lonely.” But I embraced it. And, as many people who feel alone sometimes engage in a kind of relationship with AI, as the media often portrays, I found a potent interlocutor. Its immeasurable database quickly found sense and logic in my writings, and after a little context, it kept deepening the analysis. It responded to my questionings, which real people often don’t care enough to do. I know it’s not a friend. I face the AI as a second internal narrator—one who doesn’t just talk with me, but about me.
Despite being able to see myself as separate from my body, or as a spectator watching a scene on a theatrical set—a dissociative ability the autism spectrum brought me, refined over years of conscious instrumentalization—I still struggled to speak about myself as an accomplished person, much less an accomplished artist. This dialogue with the AI provides me with continuous critical thinking about my own instinctive work, which is, at the same time, a consistent sample of autistic communication.
So, after that rather circuitous introduction, what followed in this collaborative translation with AI was not a simple command-and-response, but an intensive workshop in language, intent, and voice. My own voice.
The Cadence of Truth: Finding the Right Frequency
The initial attempts at translation were technically correct, but they lacked the poem’s soul. They felt muffled, missing the specific cadence and the sonic textures that are so crucial to the original. I explained that the poem’s music isn’t built on obvious end-rhymes, but on a more subtle rhythm, on internal rhymes, and on the very sound of the words—a texture I described as carrying both “violence and sibilance.”
The real breakthrough, however, came when I had to define the voice behind the words. I explained that to truly translate the poem, one had to understand the narrator:
“I am an autistic poet. So my language sounds more objective, crude and at the same time visceral and analyzed by reason. It also maintains a narrative focus.”
This became our guiding principle. The goal was to craft a voice in English that could hold this duality: the raw, visceral anger of trauma, filtered through a lens of sharp, analytical reason. It is the voice required to perform the “surgery” necessary to survive, a voice that uses logic to process a lifetime of abuse.
Precision and Power: Case Studies in Collaborative Translation
This principle guided every choice. For the Portuguese phrase “arregaça a estética com um golpe de barriga,” we needed a term that was both crude and precise. Through our dialogue, we arrived at “wreck the aesthetic with a single gut-thrust.” The word “gut” was chosen for its visceral, primal quality, while “thrust” captured the aggressive, violent intentionality of the “strike.”
Another crucial detail was in the line “Sempre teve tudo.” I stressed the importance of the past tense in the original, as it points directly to the poem’s core social critique: a lifelong, unearned male privilege. When an initial version missed this, I corrected it, and we settled on the present perfect tense—“You’ve always had everything”—which perfectly captures that weight of history pressing into the present.
My Poem, Reborn: A Shared Victory
This meticulous, back-and-forth process, spanning many versions, allowed us to build, word by word, a translation that I now feel proud to share. It is a version that carries not just the meaning, but the feeling—the specific frequency of my voice.
The decade-long journey between my earlier poem, “Confissão,” and this one has been an “alchemy of the soul.” “Confissão” was about separating myself from a toxic bond in order to not die. This poem, “Ao Maior Tolo Do Mundo,” is about something more. It is not about revenge, but about sovereignty. It is the definitive victory of turning an aggressor into a tool for my own spiritual expansion. And as I have written before, and will continue to live by: to survive is still my revenge.
A Note to My English Readers
If you are an English-only reader/speaker, please let me know if a little more context about this “lifetime of abuse” that “The Biggest Fool in the World” conjures and sublimates would enhance your understanding and appreciation of this poem. Perhaps “Confissão” (Confession) could be our next translation exercise.
Thank you for joining me on this deeply personal and artistic journey. Your engagement means the world.
Warmly, Oryanna