Language: Brazilian Portuguese

Skin Has Two Sides: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Translating Jeferson Tenório

. . . racism and colorism affect all of us . . . there’s no interpersonal relationship that isn’t shaped by it.

In 2023, Bruna Dantas Lobato won a PEN Translates grant for her work on Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin, a moving, feeling novel of how relationships—between parent and child, between lovers, between a body and a city—change, develop, and intwine against powerful institutions and worldly violences. Through the story of Pedro—which is in turn told through the life of his murdered father—Tenório vividly inscribes the urbanity of Porto Alegre and the generations that move through it, along with the cruelty, the mystery, and the love. In this interview, Lobato speaks on the novel’s treatment of racism, its refractions of Baldwin, and how its author draws on Brazil’s rich aesthetic canon.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): You’ve spoken before about how passionate you are about translating titles from the northeast of Brazil, but The Dark Side of Skin takes place in in southern Brazil—Porto Alegre—and Tenório has spoken about how the racism it describes is one that is expressed more pointedly in regards to the city’s relatively homogenous population. Could you speak a little bit about how geography or regionality works in this novel, and also about what drew you to translate it?

Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): The Northeast of Brazil, where I grew up, is very underrepresented in literature both in Brazil and abroad. There are very few authors from that region available in translation, especially compared to the whiter metropoles. I’d love to see a greater range of stories from different parts of Brazil in English, so we don’t keep reading the same versions of Latin America over and over again. 

I was drawn to Tenório’s novel for similar reasons, for how it presents the experience of a Black man in a predominantly white city with insight and tenderness. It’s a beautiful and painful book, and to have Tenório join the slate of Porto Alegre authors widely available in English with a different kind of book was important to me. I hope the publishers who often tell me that they already have their one Brazilian author—or one author from a certain region—will see that one voice can’t possibly represent a whole country.

XYS: A significant portion of the novel is written in the second person, which is a literary point-of-view that I think is especially sensitive to each individual language and the culture it stems from (e.g. in terms of interpersonal hierarchies, categories of persons, speech-acts). How was it working with the second person here?

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Merely Looking: On Orides Fontela’s One Impossible Step

Fontela compares language to a stone, dense and infinite in possibility.

One Impossible Step by Orides Fontela, translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels, Nightboat Books, 2023

In 1624, the English poet John Donne wrote that “no man is an island,” a line intended to succinctly describe the relational existence of individuals in the world. In One Impossible Step, a new collection of the work of the Brazilian poet Orides Fontela, the focus is not upon the relationship between individuals in the world, but rather in the connection between man and his island. The collection, translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels, compiles works from across Fontela’s entire corpus and is buttressed by a section titled “Poetics,” which explores her literary style through a thoughtful translator’s note, interviews with the poet, and several critical essays—all of which serve to form a clear understanding of the poet’s fascination with the natural, physical Others that compromise our world, ranging from a bird, to a rose, to a star. In the very first poem of this work, “Speech,” the reader is told that “all will be aggressively real,” but that the consequence of this realness will be our wounding.

From this fascination with the natural emerges Fontela’s idea of the poem as “an idea expressed in a very concrete image . . . something closed, a strong defined image.” The question then arises: why does this image wound us? Perhaps because it exists only through language, the collection suggests. Any mode of expression divides the poet from the world, and if language is the tool that allows for communication, it is also the obstacle between the elements of the world and the poet. The sequencing of the poems in this collection is worth noting here. Daniels, in his translator’s note, describes the translation as following the original texts by beginning with sound and ending with silence, almost as if each section is an exploration into the futility of language as it meets the elements of the natural world. Indeed, in the fittingly titled “Poem,” Fontela writes about the subject thusly:

To know silence by heart
—and profane it, dissolve it
in words

She takes this a step further in the poem “Rose,” describing writing as akin to murder:

             I murdered the word
And hold my living hands in blood.

For Fontela, the act of writing is an act of profanity against life itself, reducing it to the image alone. That profane act of reinforcing the impossible distance between the world and the writer is further complicated, then, by the act of reading, and particularly the act of reading in translation. The poet is necessarily separated—always an “impossible step” away from the bird, the star, the rose—and language concretizes this “distance of looking”; the reader is never able to see what the poet sees, while the reader of the translation will never even see it in the same language. The natural world is understood through perspectives all at a degree of separation from each other, and the bridge of translation, here, is a reconfirmation of the distance between one side and the other. But what is left behind is a longing that can never be fulfilled. “[T]he real,, Fontela writes, “will ache in us forever.”

That is, to the poet, man is an island and yet distinct from the island itself. The paradox lies in being part of the world—being able to observe the flight of a bird, the twinkling of a star—and knowing that one is wholly separate from it:

The star completes
the unity it does
not inhabit.

The state of isolation is also one that leads to unrecognition:

the stars do not interconnect
and the greatest distance
is merely looking.

This “distance” that “is merely looking” is a gaze that only serves to highlight the lack of recognition, even when the other is a sister star or brother strangers. To Fontela, the star may be forgivenshe has no mirror and therefore necessarily lacks empathy and knowledge of her shared form. However, when Fontela turns her attention to humanity, her poetry becomes far more barbed:

It is the stranger (the brother) who knocks
But there will never be
a reply:

welcome’s country
is far to go.

The stranger has a face one can recognizeperhaps even a tongue one can understand as well, if only one chooses to stay in “welcome’s country.” But the fact that the Other may share your face and your tongue does not reduce the isolation of one’s existence. Nor can it reduce the inherent narcissism of perspective. Unlike the star, we may look in the mirror—having the capacity to recognize the commonality between ourselves and others—but in the mirror, only “I” exists only “I” stares back.

A god
I eye
eye
to
eye . . .

. . . We see by mirror
And riddle
. . . but would there be another
way to see? . . .

the mirror devours
the face.

At one point in this collection, Fontela compares language to a stone, dense and infinite in possibility. That infinity, however, can only exist within silence, or within the wholeness of the stone. To borrow heavily from the philosophy of John Searle, the tool of chiselling is perspective. Individual consciousness is necessary to move from the dense silence of the totality of language into speech. The stone, when it is simply the raw material for a sculptor, has the possibility to become anything. It is the artist’s perspective which creates the sculpture and the poem, but it is the very act of chiselling, or rather the tool of perspective, that the isolation of the impossible step is reaffirmed:

To construct abstract towers
yet the struggle is real.

The poet can never understand the flight of the bird nor its settling, despite an endless observation of the Other. In constructing the poem, the image is created, an image that profanes the real; the actual language of flight is one that we, as readers of this English-language collection, must encounter through translation, through the perspective of the translator. Language, here, is an isolating act of love.

The translator’s situation itself is indicative of this “deep, profound love,” as Fontela puts it. Daniels must face the difficulty of translating poetry that is, at its core, concerned with both languages beyond those of the human and with the grammar of silence. How do you approach these images knowing they are marked with isolation, that such a mark must be made visible to another audience? How do you translate a work that is so focused on the silence of the world?

In One Impossible Step, the approach is to explore, chronologically, a few select subjects in Fontela’s oeuvre before moving to a study of her poetics. The resulting benefit is that the reader is provided an opportunity to consider Fontela’s evolution as a poet, as she plays with form and plumbs for deeper insight into the world. In this collection alone, the bird is mentioned eighteen times; yet, for all those eighteen poems, the reader understands that the poet is unable to move closer to the subject itself. Every poem takes her away from the hermetic language of flight, and the bird will never know of her desire for it.

For though the “impossible step” is the central preoccupation of this collection, none of the poems themselves use this term; it is an implicit understanding, constructed through the conspicuous absence of the poetic figure of an “I.” The ache of perspective cannot be avoided, but the struggle to get beyond oneself, to reduce the step to the world, is ever present. The focus may be on the image and the ethical struggle involved in its crafting, but it is ultimately a struggle made all the more powerful for its backgrounding of the poet. Daniels captures this effect when he writes, in his translator’s note, that:

. . . she wished to express ideas, to write about the world, the universe, and perception itself, while taking herself out of the picture, however impossible that may be.

One Impossible Step is a lonely work. Yet, paradoxically, its loneliness is that of any living being; we are able to understand it and empathize with it, while never getting away from the fact of our own seclusion. “Lucidity / maddens.” We will never be able to sing with the bird, nor with the poetthe privilege is to be told the story of the birdsong through the voice of the poet and her translator.

Meenakshi Ajit is currently a MA student at the University of Chicago. She is interested in comparative literature and theatre studies, particularly the drama of the ancient world.

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Translation Tuesday: “Clarice” by Marília Arnaud

During the day, the Girl would look at the chicken for a long time, sitting on the doorstep, her chin resting on one hand, smitten.

This Translation Tuesday, we present a child’s eye view of the habits of a beloved pet hen. Marília Arnaud’s girl is filled with the intense curiosity that true love engenders; watching her Clarice for hours on end, she is alert to every detail, her wonder unending. Compassion abounds in this story, which has been translated by Ilze Duarte with all concomitant warmth and care.

“Why don’t we eat chicken feet?”

“Don’t you know who pecked at the straw where Jesus was born?”

No animal should be cursed, innocent as it was of its own existence, the Girl mused in her own, peculiar musing way, while Esmeralda treated the chicken’s wounded foot.

Clarice, as the Girl decided to call the chicken, arrived on a Saturday. Esmeralda had bought her at the street market, and Mother didn’t seem to mind, maybe because chickens were animals of little noise and presentation. She would always move about in the green, sun-bathed rectangle behind the laundry area in the back of the house, pecking at worms in the dirt here and there in her silly way, shaking off the rest of the world with her indifference.

Clarice was a chicken of much elegance in her reddish-brownish color. Her comb, a bit paler and drooping to one side, gave her a playful look. She would hop on her spring-coil feet when the Girl came near her. Teek, teek, teek… Clarice would scratch the warm dirt and swallow corn kernels as the Girl threw them on the ground for her. Then, she would wet her beak under the dripping faucet and close her eyes in a trembling of the greatest pleasure.

The Girl soon found a place for Clarice. The unoccupied kennel at the edge of the backyard, set up with a pole and everything because Esmeralda said chickens only liked to sleep perched up. The Girl herself would sweep and wash the little henhouse every other day so that Clarice could spend her nights in comfort.

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Writing Against Tradition: A Conversation with Stênio Gardel and Bruna Dantas Lobato

I’d like to think that when people read my book and looked at that environment, they could perhaps question their own privileges and prejudices.

In his debut novel, The Words That Remain, Stênio Gardel’s draws out the sublime transformations that language enables. Written in the vivid mind of Raimundo, an illiterate, gay man from rural Brazil, the novel depicts the after-effects of violence, the burden of shame, the pain of unrequited love—and movingly, how learning how to read and write in his old age has transformed all these experiences. We were proud to present this one-of-a-kind novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Gardel and his translator, Bruna Dantas Lobato, talks to us about underrepresentation of Brazil’s northeastern region, queer literature, and combating prejudices with writing. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Rachel Stanyon (RS): Firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on this wonderful debut novel. Could you tell us a bit about your paths here?

Stênio Gardel (SG): I started really dedicating myself to writing at the end of 2016. Before then, I’d only had a strong desire, and was storing everything I’d tried to write in computer files or drawers. I had carried this desire for a very long time—since I was twelve or thirteen years old—but never had the courage or the initiative to start, nor the dedication required to become an author. Then, at the end of 2016, I started taking classes with the writer Socorro Acioli, and everything changed from there. I learned a lot from her, and that was where The Words That Remain started.

Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): Like Stênio, I was also born and raised in the northeast of Brazil, but when I was about seventeen, I got a scholarship to go to a boarding school in New Hampshire for a while—I had the colonized dreams of speaking French and Latin—and then ended up going to college in New England. I stuck around, went to grad school in New York, and somehow became an immigrant in America.

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a child, but it was when I found myself as a foreigner for the first time that I realized I was also already a translator; I didn’t really get to choose it. There were so many books I loved that I wanted to share with the people around me in my new life, and I was also continuously writing, so translation—translating Brazilian literature—felt like a way to be my full self again. I was an English major and then a comparative literature major, but it was still very Western, and it felt like I had renounced this huge part of myself. To feel like my full self again, I started translating a bunch in my free time, and took translation classes.

That’s what eventually brought me to Stênio’s work. I was committed to translating books from the northeast of Brazil, which is so underrepresented both in Brazil and abroad, because obviously writing from the big metropolises like São Paulo and Rio always gets a lot more attention. I really wanted to bring the kind of life I knew into the life I live now and into the English language. It’s an honor to translate a book like this one. READ MORE…

Poetry Beyond Words: An Interview with Patrícia Lino

. . .the traditional academic essay will never be able to say so clearly what the “infraleitura” does not say.

In this whirlwind and evocative interview, Asymptote contributor Alan Mendoza Sosa sits down with poet and professor Patrícia Lino to discuss just one of her many innovative approaches to poetry critique and response, the “infraleitura.” Based in expanded poetry, in which the word is not the ultimate form of expression, the “infraleitura” bypasses text to reach a visual, sonic, and tactile dialogue between poetic works as well as between poets. The “infraleitura” is ultimately a work of community; here, we are brought into the dialogue with a call to—in Lino’s words—“use it and transform it endlessly.”

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AMS): Could you tell our readers who are unfamiliar with expanded poetry what it is? 

Patrícia Lino (PL): On the one hand, the association of the terms “poetry” and “expanded” is paradoxical. Poetry, since its beginnings, has always been expanded and has been linked to the idea of ​​making something both corporally and intermedially. On the other hand, the association between “poetry” and “expanded” contradicts the logocentric and occidental tendency of modern poetry and reminds us, at the same time, of the importance and validity of the plural, unoriginal, and infinite qualities and possibilities of the poem, which, in addition to being verbal, can be visual, audiovisual, three-dimensional, performative, interactive, olfactory, gustative, or cinematographically conceived—as is the case for the poem in comics. In other words, the expanded poem is a composition contrary to the hierarchy of expressions, in which the word traditionally (and colonially) occupies the top, and image, sound, or gesture are relegated to, respectively, second, third, and fourth places.

AMS: You coined the term “infraleitura”; what does it mean and how does it relate to expanded poetry?

PL: The analytical tools of traditional literary criticism, which developed in the context of the aforementioned logocentric inclination, do not, by focusing primarily on the word, account for the various dimensions and materials of the expanded poem. The “infraleitura” arises, against interpretation, to respond to the absence of a bodily and decolonial way of reading poetry. It could be defined as an-impossible-to-define form of intermedial and creative essay, in which, as well as the poet’s body that expands to make the poem, the essayist’s body expands itself to understand. This other method of comprehension considers not only the word, but also any other useful means to grasp the poem in analysis. It is about reading with the whole body.

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Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel

The necessity of casting off shame and regret, of rejecting violence instead of our identities, are crucial messages in this book.

In Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain, everything hinges on the unfolding of a page. Through the Brazilian author’s vivid prose, a world unfurls between the covers: of unrequited love, of shame and survival, of rurality and history—all of it circulating a letter that its protagonist has never opened. Asymptote is proud to present this incredible debut work as our first Book Club selection of the year, a book that merges its triumphant celebration of language with the pivotal interrogation of marginalization, all along the long journey towards self-acceptance.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, New Vessel Press, 2023

Much like the relationship that dominates it, The Words that Remain is just long enough to leave an indelible impression—but finishes in a flash. Stênio Gardel’s debut novel packs a literal and figurative punch, its brief pages flecked with contrasts: pleasure and pain, pride and shame, love and violence, peace and regret, strength and submission, what is spoken and what is kept silent. The storytelling moves fast, spanning half a century in its 150-odd pages, but Gardel’s sparse prose never creates a sense of freneticism. Through swirling reflections, the novel moves like a steady whirlwind, conveying inner turmoil and external inaction, punctuated by powerful, sometimes devastating change.

The Words that Remain tells the story of Raimundo Gaudêncio de Freitas, who paints his life as framed by two transformative events: learning to read and write at age seventy-one and falling in love at seventeen. Almost everything between the book’s covers oscillates between these two experiences, the chasm between them held taut by a letter—“half blessed, half cursed, wholly mysterious”—that he has never before been able to read. Penned by his past lover, the letter hangs over his life like a talisman, a burden, and a beacon of hope all in one.

Raimundo is gay. He and his lover, Cicero, are able to embrace their sexuality and one another for two years, but always with the fear of rejection from their families and community persisting in the background. This is rural Brazil in the 60s and 70s, and life is hard. Prevented from going to school by his father at an early age because “writing was for people who don’t need to put food on the table”, Raimundo must instead do backbreaking work to help support his family through floods, poverty, and infant death. While he longs for an education and the freedom to live with Cicero, the harsh realities of working-class life and widespread bigotry are so pervasive as to be almost completely internalised: being together gives them “a good taste, but [one] that left something sour in the back of their minds”, and even when they fantasize about living together, it is only imaginable in a big city—where no one will know they are more than just roommates. Sadly, their fears prove to be well grounded; when their families find out about their relationship, they are forbidden from seeing one another, and Raimundo is beaten mercilessly by his father for days, until he is driven away by his mother. In the long aftermath of this rejection, Raimundo thinks of himself as fated to wandering in a shadowy husk, his sexuality locked away, his life and love suspended in Cicero’s impenetrable letter, completely opaque like Cicero’s own destiny. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A True Story” by Natalia Timerman

A man who writes. A man who writes in a notebook, seated next to me on a plane.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a work of metafiction from Brazilian writer Natalia Timerman’s collection, which was a finalist for the Jabuti Prize. In “A True Story,” a chance encounter with a man on the plane—her seat partner—leads to an intense connection mediated by the act of writing. Translated from the Portuguese by Meg Weeks, this story conveys the electric atmosphere of first meetings.

From the aisle of the plane I spotted row twenty-seven. I sat down in the middle seat. The seat by the window was already occupied by a young guy in a baseball cap, his attention focused on his phone. I was praying that no one would occupy the seat on my other side so I wouldn’t feel the need to make myself smaller, when a man, tall and blondish, his skin scarred by acne, approached.

He greeted me almost imperceptibly with his eyes and sat down on my left-hand side. Ok, patience. I took my book out of my bag, which I then placed below the seat in front of me, and opened it to the marked page, 174.

The man had large hands.

I tried to read but I couldn’t stop observing those hands moving to take a notebook and a pen out of a black backpack, also placed on the floor. 

I looked surreptitiously at the man’s face. From my brief glance, he struck me as interesting. His lips were red and thick, his eyelashes long and pale. Handsome, almost.

I returned to my book, but the movements of the pen executed by those large hands gripped my attention. A man who writes. A man who writes in a notebook, seated next to me on a plane.

I adjusted myself in my seat to achieve an angle that would allow me to both read my book and peer at his notebook as well. I was about to begin deciphering the handwritten words when the plane began to move.

I closed my book and my eyes and adjusted myself again in my seat, this time to face forward. I get sick to my stomach when planes take off. I took care, however, to leave the cover of the Bolaño I was reading face-up.

Once the plane had achieved its cruising altitude, I opened my book again. The man was still writing . . . delicate hands, I was able to make out while I pretended to stretch. He fidgeted a bit in his seat and in the same movement, rested his notebook on the armrest between our seats. Ah, now it was easy to read what he was writing—which he didn’t stop doing, even momentarily—all I had to do was tilt my body diagonally towards him. READ MORE…

Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

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Translation Tuesday: “Prodigy” by Nei Lopes

Rumor had it the festival in the bay was being watched from the highest parts of the city too.

This Translation Tuesday, dive into a short story from Jabuti Prize-winning author Nei Lopes that takes the reader a century back to Guanabara Bay in Brazil where a circus troupe disembarks. Drawn from a short story collection (Nas águas desta baía há muito tempo: Contos da Guanabara) that zooms in on complex and forgotten chapters in Brazilian history. Hear from translator Robert Smith how Lopes, in Smith’s own words, “undertook meticulous historical research to offer a sweeping view of the place and era, celebrating Afro-Brazilian culture and exploring the history of systemic racism.”

“In portraying a dynamic period of upheaval, the narrator Prodigy occasionally overwhelms readers with the feeling that too much is happening too fast. At the same pace that his story becomes entangled with that of the geographical region, two revolts, and the historical figure João Cândido Felisberto, his ebullient mood overlaps episodes of horrific violence. This translation took some liberties in altering punctuation to maintain this disorienting effect. When translating idiomatic expressions indicative of a past era, I looked to rough English equivalents that would sound similarly dated to contemporary readers. A challenge specific to this short story is the multivocal narrative, which leaves the question open as to whether we are facing a carnival storyteller who is cordially inviting us to suspend disbelief, a folktale with elements of magical realism, or an unreliable narrator whose traumatic experiences as a victim of abuse and a soldier have led him to rewrite his life story.”

—Robert Smith

This island has a lot of stories. They all do, I should say; the whole bay: land and sea. The day the first circus arrived, for example, was like the world was starting all over again.

When the barge docked and started unloading all that stuff, we had no idea what it might be. But a strange joy took hold of everybody, made us want to sing and dance to do something to please that gift that had fallen from the sky without saying what they had come for. Little by little, the colorful poles, the boards, the wheels, the iron braces, the motley flags appeared… Then the cages with the animals.

It was the Seventh of September¹, and, while we were watching everything in awe, the fireworks were going off. The ships, Tamandaré, Trajano, Liberdade², were sailing by in the bay, shooting their fireworks toward the city, way over on the other side. Right then and there, we knew that something truly beautiful had begun in all of our lives.

Disembarking in the quay, the caravan of oxcarts and wagons continued down the bumpy old road. The company was directed by the famous artist Benedito de Lima. And it arrived on our island, straight from Niterói, to save us from our isolation and change our daily routine. It popped up out of nowhere, the only attraction in our village, stirring up the hopes and daydreams of rich and poor, young and old, black and white; everybody.

No one had known the circus was going to come. But when it arrived, even without announcements or pamphlets or newspapers, word got round. READ MORE…

The Blurriness of Intimacy: On Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries

Abreu has the ability to narrate big emotions while undercutting them with a self-consciousness that means these moments never feel trite.

Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, Archipelago Books, 2022

Moldy strawberries: just past the point of ripeness, bursting with life until they exude decay. Sweet yet bitter, delicious yet spoilt, nourishing yet rotten. It is this dichotomy that sustains Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries, tenderly translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato: a collection of short prose pieces and stories that brims with life even as its flesh bruises.

Abreu (1948-1996) came of age in a turbulent time in Brazilian political history. In 1968, the Department for Political and Social Order put him on the watch list they used to target their ideological opponents, and Abreu subsequently spent time in exile across Europe—in Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, England, and France. While his writing was heavily censored by the Brazilian authorities, he nonetheless became one of the country’s most beloved queer writers, winning the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction three times for his luminous work.

Moldy Strawberries is considered by many to be his magnum opus. Published in 1982, its vivid depictions of queer communities amidst the perils of the military dictatorship, rising homophobia, and the looming AIDS crisis serve to affirm life even when the threat of death feels ever-present. In eighteen prose pieces, which range from dialogues and vignettes to fully developed stories, Abreu’s writing bears witness to humanity in all its fragile glory. His prose affirms the possibility of love, desire, and connection—or at least indulges that dream. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

In which we discuss the International Booker Prize longlist and bring you literary news from Poland and Uzbekistan!

This week, our editors from around the world discuss the 2022 International Booker longlist (released just yesterday), the Polish literary world’s reaction to the war in Ukraine, and literary nationalism in Uzbekistan. Read on to find out more!

Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, on the 2022 International Booker Prize Longlist

The longlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize landed yesterday and we’re chuffed to see so many of our past contributors (20!), former team members (five!), and Book club titles (two!) on it! We’re especially thrilled for Anton Hur, who debuted in a big way by making the cover of our Fall 2016 edition with his translation of Jung Young Su’s “Aficionados” (we are proud to have played a small role in ”changing his life,” as he himself attests). Hur has not one but two titles on the 13-book list—a feat which, as far as we know, has never been accomplished before in the (admittedly short) history of the International Booker Prize. You can find his very smart metafictional essay on translating Bora Chung from our Winter 2021 issue here (accompanied by a translation into the Korean by Chung herself!); Hur also facilitates Rose Bialer’s interview with Sang Young Park here (both Chung and Park appear respectively with Cursed Bunny and Love in a Big City).

In stark contrast to last year’s longlist, which saw only one work from Asia included, this year was a bumper year for Asian representation, with five titles—among these, nominees Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translator Tiffany Tsao also first appeared together in Asymptote (read their debut in English here). We extend our warmest congratulations to editor-at-large David Boyd, whose co-translation, with Samuel Bett, of Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven—Kawakami’s inclusion this year makes up for the glaring omission of Breasts and Eggs last year—is also nominated. Before we let you check out the list on your own, we note, with no small measure of delight, that Phenotypes, our Book Club pick for January 2022, and After the Sun, our Book Club pick for August 2021, were also selected for the longlist, proving that joining our Book Club is one of the best ways to encounter tomorrow’s prizewinners today. Find our interviews with the two respective author-and-translator duos here (Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn) and here (Jonas Eika and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg). Best of luck to all nominees—and may the worthiest pair (or trio) win!

Erica X Eisen, Blog Editor, reporting on Uzbekistan

The month of February saw celebrations in honor of the 581st birthday of the poet Alisher Navoi, a key figure in the history of Central Asian literature who was born in 1441 in what was then the Timurid Empire. While festivities occurred in several countries of the former Soviet Union, they were most pronounced in Uzbekistan, where Navoi’s work is seen as foundational for the country’s national literature. In various parts of the country, admirers of the poet held readings of his ghazals and reflected on his life and legacy.

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Blackness and the Experience of Blackness: Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn on Phenotypes

I think if you read a sentence in Portuguese, you would recognize it as a Paulo Scott sentence from two hundred meters away.

In the electrifying novel Phenotypes, Paulo Scott takes on the complex subject of Brazil’s racism and colorism, dispelling rosy myths of the country as one of harmonious multiculturalism. In a story of two brothers—Lourenço and Federico, the former dark-skinned and the latter light—the intricacies of privilege, identity, activism, and guilt are brilliantly explored in Scott’s unmistakable blend of length and lyric, bringing to the page some of the most urgent and daunting questions of our time. We are honored to host this title as our Book Club selection for January, and also to have spoken live to Scott and translator Daniel Hahn about the novel’s nuances, regionality, and language.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Rachel Farmer (RF): One of the main themes of Phenotypes is what constitutes an activist approach to the many problems portrayed in the novel. Paulo, could you talk about what inspired you to write about activism in this way?

Paulo Scott (PS): Well Rachel, I come from Southern Brazil, which is a very racist region. My family is black, upper-middle class—you know, the kind of family that is in a position to speak out against this racism. So I took the truth of my family to create fiction. My brother is black—real black—and I have this lighter skin. But I see myself as a black man. My mother might deny it now, but as I remember, she always said that we were a black family.

I think that this book is both one of anger and of self-reflection. The protagonist found a place in the heart of anger to build a very specific story for himself, then at some point, he got lost in this fight against racism. He believed himself to be really strong, he saw his father as a very strong man, and he thought that his father’s power was in this anger, his rage against the world—but it wasn’t. Instead, the fact is that his father could understand the complexity of racism, like [Martin Luther] King [Jr.].

There is a connection between the members of this family: father, grandfather, son, and granddaughter—Roberta, the niece of the protagonist. They are almost the same entity, as three different movements of the same vision. The story ends with Roberta sleeping in the back seat of the car because she’s the future. I could have written a book about Roberta, for efficiency’s sake, but this is not a book of answers; this is a book of questions. The racism in Brazil is very, very strong, and it’s still a taboo topic here. The suffering is so pervasive that some readers struggle to see themselves in this mirror. 

RF: Were certain characters—such as that of the mother—inspired directly by the memories of your own family?

PS: My brother was the coach of my state’s basketball team, and he is a really dark-skinned man. He’s not afraid to be with white people—powerful people. He’s black, but he’s in that club of the upper-class, and he doesn’t accept any disrespect. That’s really strong. READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail!

When it comes to browsing the shelves and diving head-first into the wonderfully vast world of translated literature, sometimes you just need a little help from your friends. In this caselet us be your friends. Our editors are sharing their favourite reads to make sure that yours is time well spent.

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Readers already familiar with Nina Berberova’s fiction in collections such as Billancourt TalesThe Tattered Cloak and The Ladies from St. Petersburg will find her first novel—translated by Marian Schwartz—a surprising divergence in style from the lightness of touch and sparse but pungent details in her stories about small casts of characters grappling with challenges in their everyday lives. Written in 1928-29, The Last and the First (Pushkin Press, 2021) is a drama on a broader canvas about Russian émigrés in France struggling to decide whether to return to the Soviet Union or to throw all their energies into establishing a meaningful life in France, specifically whether to join Ilya, the messianic central character, toiling on the land in Provence. It is driven by a complex plot in which the true identities and motives of some characters are initially hidden, and stylistically has more in common with novels of the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky being the writer who springs most to mind for the intense and knotted emotional relationships between the main characters, their striving for some kind of salvation, as well as in the vivid and grimy descriptions of the backstreets of Paris.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor (Issue Production)

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A tale of two lives, that of a poetess living in the USA and of a Yazidi who saves the women of Sinjar, unfolds through a series of phone calls and a single face-to-face visit. In her pensive The Beekeeper of Sinjar (New Directions, 2018), masterfully translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss, the Iraqi-born Dunya Mikhail recalls her conversations with Abdullah, an ordinary man turned local hero, who has chosen to devote his days and nights to rescuing the innocent girls kidnapped by the militant group Daesh. Simultaneously a meditation on absurdity and a truthful account of real-life experiences, the book offers its readers a path to understanding the shifting values of a region long tormented by its past. The unimaginable loss and heartbreak that pour from every page are curiously accompanied by an almost inhuman ability to forgive, while the deceptively simple descriptions of misery bring home the scale of the disaster. Despite the traumatic events, however, the locals have managed to retain their purity and, what is more, to find time for the poetry of existence. As we all should.

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria READ MORE…

How the Light Hides Us: On Cuíer: Queer Brazil

Cuíer gives us pause and proclaims its own foreignness—only on its terms are we invited into its gambit.

Cuíer: Queer Brazil, translated from the Portuguese, Two Lines Press, 2021

Can we translate “queer”?

Cuíer: Queer Brazil—a brand-new anthology of queer/cuíer Brazilian poetry, fiction, and non-fiction translated from Portuguese into English—wants us to grapple with this conundrum. Uniting voices across generations, genders, and mediums, the latest offering from Two Lines Press’ chic Calico series is, like all its predecessors, expansively and thoughtfully curated.

A vibrant portrait by Igor Furtado graces the cover; in it, we glimpse a masc-identified person lying in prone position—one could say amphibiously—on what appears to be the earth of a river bank. His lime-green skin-tight top accentuates the exposure of his body’s lower half, boldly visible in the background through spangles of rippling water. The tattoo on his arm, the earring basking in shadow, the painted nails of his splayed fingers. His direct gaze at the camera mingles enticement and challenge in equal measure.

Like the photograph, Cuíer gives us pause and proclaims its own foreignness—only on its terms are we invited into its gambit. As the only Calico title so far with a non-English word as its name, “Cuíer” demands to be sounded, savoured on the tongue—it audibly carries the phonetic ghost of “queer,” but must be shaped differently in the mouth. The word ostensibly stems from Tatiana Nascimento’s avant-garde “cuíer paradiso,” a poem in Cuíer wherein parentheses, wordplay, and dialect wreath around a yearning for the simple pleasures of quotidian love. What unfolds is an enumeration of possible “less than”s: “less bureaucratic than / marriage equality regulated by the state,” “less surveilled than e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y / asking if it is (non-)exclusive,” “less of all that makes us listless.”

In the absence of utopia, one can only imagine it in terms of what it is not (yet). Nascimento’s Afro-futurist linguistic experiments—near the book’s centerpiece—perhaps gesture to the impulse behind Cuíer’s formation: to know another “with no need for armor, / anticipating no answer, / no need to learn how to punch nor / map the space before entering.” A place of silence beyond translation. READ MORE…