Posts filed under 'brazil'

From Japan to Brazil: An Interview with Translator Rita Kohl

Murakami has definitely opened a lot of doors for Japanese literature . . . I’m just anxious to see different people passing through those doors.

In recent years, the popularity of Japanese literature has risen in Brazil, and a much larger share of Japanese titles is now being made available in direct translation into Portuguese. Rita Kohl, who has worked on fiction by authors such as Yoko Ogawa and Hiro Arikawa, is one of the most prolific literary translators working with this pair of languages. 

In this interview with Editor-at-Large for Japan, David Boyd, Kohl speaks about several of her recent translations—from Haruki Murakami’s Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Ouça a canção do vento & Pinball 1973) to Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Querida konbini) and Earthlings (Terráqueos). She also touches on the current state of Japanese literature in Brazil.

David Boyd (DB): Who’s reading Japanese literature in Brazil? What kind of translations are they reading?

Rita Kohl (RK): I’ll try to give you my general impression of the reception of Japanese literature in Brazil, although I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly knowledgeable about the publishing world here. I used to read reviews of translations much more closely, but I haven’t been able to stay on top of it lately, as—thankfully—there’s been so much more of it.

One important thing to keep in mind is that the direct translation of Japanese fiction by mainstream publishers is a relatively recent development. Up to the 1990s, we had some pivot translations from English, such as a few novels by Mishima translated into Portuguese in the 1980s, but direct translations typically came from the academic world or the Japanese-Brazilian community, and didn’t really reach a popular readership.

This started to change toward the end of the 1990s. Leiko Gotoda’s translation of Miyamoto Musashi, published in 1999 by Estação Liberdade, had a significant impact; I say this because it became something of a bestseller (but as this work was the subject of my master’s research, I might be biased). Since then, translations of Japanese literature have been steadily increasing, and are mostly translated directly from Japanese, although it’s still not uncommon to see some indirect translations (thrillers by Natsuo Kirino and Kanae Minato come to mind).

The shift we’ve seen from indirect to direct translation isn’t limited to Japanese literature. It reflects a change in public perception of translation on the whole, which can also be seen, for example, in the translation of Russian literature. At the same time, since editors typically can’t read the original work, we continue to depend on the canon of Japanese literature translated into other languages, and I feel as though we’ve been trying to catch up, translating authors who were translated into other languages quite some time ago: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Sōseki Natsume, and so on. In contemporary literature, the overwhelming majority of translated works are by Haruki Murakami, but we also have some books by Banana Yoshimoto, Hiromi Kawakami, Yoko Ogawa, Ryu Murakami, and Sayaka Murata. I think that a lot of these new additions are the result of an effort to translate and publish more female authors. Personally, I’m very happy with this development, and I tend to prioritize women authors when recommending novels or thinking about what I’d like to translate next.  READ MORE…

We Can All Be Walking Poets: Sauntering Verse and Dada

“Walking artists walk to create something. So actually, you could argue that you are the walking artist.”

Sauntering Verse, a new app for auto-generated poetry, uses Dadaist language to redefine the experience of physical space. In this essay, Lara Norgaard tests the app while reflecting on its implications for our relationship with technology, and the art that it creates. What contexts do we bring to the art we create and consume? What does it mean to be an artist when art is made possible just by taking your phone on a walk?

It is warm and cloudy on the afternoon following the first round of Brazil’s presidential election. The extreme right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro received just over 46% of the popular vote—he would come to win the run-off election just weeks later. It feels like the world I woke up to earlier that morning was not precisely my own, as if a body-snatcher stole my world instead of my skin.

The day is a blur: I walk a few meters from the living room to the kitchen in my apartment. Outside the window, the skyline of nearly identical high-rises in the Brazilian city that I call home glint in clouded sadness, weighed down by more than 186 thousand people who voted for a man whom The New Yorker has called a cross between Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte. Perhaps he will not win in the second round, but perhaps what is already bad will get worse. This eventuality feels so surreal that I focus on boiling water for a calming mug of coffee. I glance down at my phone. It wrote me a poem:

She skipped it

A rear Jesus

They of them

The sagging can retract or sagging sagging

A quirky staging

She pots him

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In Conversation: Adam Morris

History is not entirely objective; it is what posterity makes of conflicting memories.

“Talk… speak… voice”: each word appears dozens of times in I Didn’t Talk, our July Asymptote Book Club selection. Beatriz Bracher’s novel blends together a chorus of voices, orchestrated by retiring professor Gustavo, to explore one of the darkest periods of Brazil’s history.

In conversation with Asymptote’s Jacob Silkstone, translator Adam Morris outlines how the novel came to be translated into English, why it resonates with a contemporary audience, and why the central question of whether or not Gustavo talked is perhaps best left unanswered.

Jacob Silkstone (JS): What led to you translating I Didn’t Talk? It’s the first of Beatriz Bracher’s four full-length novels to appear in English: do you have a sense of how it compares to Bracher’s other work?

Adam Morris (AM): I proposed I Didn’t Talk for Bracher’s English debut because its thematic concerns, although universal, seemed to possess fresh urgency in the context of ongoing political upheaval in Brazil. Censorship and various forms of state repression have re-emerged, and so has openly expressed nostalgia for a law-and-order society like the one the dictatorships professed to uphold. The crisis of democracy in Brazil is so severe that occasional murmurs of a return to military rule must be taken as a serious threat.

Of course, in the time since I first proposed the translation in 2016, authoritarianism has been on the march all across the world. I did not foresee that happening, but it makes the novel that much more timely—some fourteen years after its publication and nearly half a century since 1970, a pivotal year in Gustavo’s story.

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Asymptote Podcast: Language, Meet Arto Lindsay

In this episode of the Asymptote Podcast, Editor-at-Large Lara Norgaard speaks with the experimental Brazilian-American musician, Arto Lindsay.

Music and literature meet at the crossroads of Portuguese and English—what happens? Arto Lindsay. In this episode of the Asymptote Podcast, Editor-at-Large Lara Norgaard speaks with the experimental Brazilian-American musician of DNA and Ambitious Lovers fame. They discuss his unique combination of Brazilian and American influences which range from candomblé to Emily Dickinson. Together, they unpack his expansive and multilayered works while reflecting on the role of language and translation in negotiating identity.

Produced by: Lara Norgaard
Editor and Host: Dominick Boyle
Audio Editor: Dominick Boyle

Music: “Ilha Dos Prazeres” “Unpair” and “Seu Pai” by Arto Lindsay, used with permission.

 

Translation Tuesday: “Blind Spot” from Brief Cartography for Places of No Interest by Marcílio França Castro

"We banished from cartography all lions, mermaids, pygmies, and dragons. The sterilization of maps only confirms the disdain we have for nature."

When I first met Marcílio França Castro at a coffee shop in Brazil during the winter of 2016, he showed up toting a bag full of presents for me. When he dumped the bag onto the table, out came books, like he was some sort of combination of Jorge Luis Borges and Santa Claus. What most impressed me was his eagerness to promote Brazilian literature in general; several of the books were from his peers and not just ones he had authored. And perhaps Borges is a good comparison for Marcílio; indeed, his writing is in line with the likes of Borges, Calvino, and Cortázar. Yet he does not simply imagine other worlds, he perceives with brilliance unsuspected oddities in places of absolutely no interest. In his short stories, which range from traditional length to flash fiction, and with a prose that is at once economic and yet never lacking in precision, Marcílio França Castro transforms his culture’s most unsuspecting spaces into fantastic reading. The author and I have worked together in producing translations for many of his stories, overcoming differences in idioms, metaphor, sentence structure and other obstacles found in the passage from Portuguese to English. Most importantly, this project kept the translator sane during the subsequent North Dakotan winter of 2017. 

—Heath Wing. 

The manuals say such devices are made to take anything. Bumps, turbulence, high winds, lightning. Even crashes and hurricanes. It’s said they come out unscathed from the most intemperate of weather. You know the protocols. For every inconvenience there is a plan, an automatic fix. An aircraft like this one, with all its resources, ought to be, according to the manuals, practically uncrashable. That’s why, if it were up to manuals and manufacturers, our role would be merely to maintain course and keep her steady, taking advantage of the dignity of flight and the charm of our profession. And that’s really what we do here, before this gorgeous instrument panel, full of buttons and colorful lights: with the prudence it conveys, we relax and commend our fate and everyone else’s to the invisible wisdom of the display.

Look ahead. The sky’s magnificent, full of stars; someone might say it’s a painting commissioned to decorate the cockpit. A captain, from the moment of departure, always has his beard well-groomed, his uniform impeccable; he pilots the plane with swan-like indifference. That’s how the passengers see you. We fly calmly. The seats are anatomic and dinner well-balanced. An almost anesthetic experience. The Pacific is nothing more than an enormous tapestry of black silk that clips the horizon. We think and act as if the world outside no longer existed, as though the clouds and the ocean below us were but unfailing radar bleeps or a set of geographical coordinates. In truth, as we fly we simply ignore the substance found in Earth’s elements. Try this coffee, it’s wonderful.

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Translation Tuesday: “What No Longer Exists” by Krishna Monteiro

“Where is everyone?” They’re not here, I reply. They no longer exist, I proclaim.

Today’s Translation Tuesday feature is from Brazil. Adam Morris’s skillful translation brings out the haunting quality of the piece, a stunning meditation on life and the afterlife. 

“In the desert of Itabira
the shadow of my father
took me by the hand.”
—Carlos Drummond de Andrade

The first time I saw you since you died, you were in the living room, in front of my bookcase. The same immaculate beige overcoat as always, the firm press of your shoes crushing the surface of the carpet. You were reordering my books, removing volumes, violating pages, polluting my silence, my secrets. You were pulling from the shelves authors who had taken shelter there long ago, characters and dreams long since forgotten. Without realizing the distance between the two worlds that separated us, without considering that perhaps the cognac and cigarettes or the nightly fumes in which I indulged might be responsible for your return, I went down the stairs into the living room of the big house on Rua da Várzea where you and I and she (do you remember her?) had lived for so long. I ran down the stairs possessed, threw myself in front of you and addressed you with a courage that had never pulsed in me during the entire time you remained among the living.  READ MORE…

Meet the Curator: Joselia Aguiar on Charting the Path To the Peripheries of Literature

The curator of a venerated literary festival in Brazil on innovation, diversity, and the role of the overlooked minority in art and literature.

Flip is a literary fiesta celebrating art and the written word in Brazil. The festival takes over the streets, squares and buildings of the colonial town of Paraty in Rio de Janeiro from July 26 to 30 every year, and calls itself a “feast.” Since its inception in 2003, Flip has garnered accolades in Brazil’s literary circles while also being controversial for favoring mainstream intelligentsia and largely leaving out minorities. The festival’s name stands for Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty (Paraty International Literary Festival). 

The curator for the 2017 edition of Flip is journalist and academic Joselia Aguiar. Over the last twelve years, Aguiar’s work has focused on literature, the editorial market, and public policies for reading. She has served in the capacities of an editor, columnist, academic and workshop leader. Aguiar is also writing a biography of the Brazilian modernist writer Jorge Amado (1912—2001), focusing on the literary and political exchange between Amado and writers of Hispanic America.

Every year, Flip pays homage to a Brazilian literary figure. This year’s honoree, chosen by Aguiar, is Lima Barreto, the Afro-Brazilian writer and journalist, best known for his novella, The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma. Aguiar spoke about curating the festival with journalist and poet Jeanne Callegari in an exclusive interview for Asymptote.

—Maíra Mendes Galvão, Asymptote Editor-at-Large, Brazil.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

No matter where you are, we've got you covered.

Since 2013 we’ve been bringing you the latest news in the literary world, and we’re not about to stop anytime soon! This week our Executive Assistant, Cassie Lawrence, showcases the latest exciting books being published and prizes being awarded in the UK; our new Editor-at-Large from Brazil, Lara Norgaard, focuses on racial and gender diversity in festivals across the country, as well as newly published work that had been previously lost; finally, our Editor-at-Large for Taiwan, Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, fills us in on the latest prizes as well as film festivals happening right now! 

Cassie Lawrence, Executive Assistant at Asymptote, reports from the UK: 

An unpublished manuscript from the late author Maurice Sendak (known for Where the Wild Things Are) has been discovered. The manuscript is complete with illustrations and is said to date from twenty years ago, according to Publishers Weekly. A publisher for the new title has not yet been announced.

June 20-23 saw twenty British writers and over fifty literature professionals from around the world gather in Norwich as part of the International Literature Showcase. An online platform that allows the showcasing and collaboration of international literature organisations, the live event included panel discussions and readings from Elif Shafak, Graeme Macrae Burnet, David Szalay, and more.

Good news for libraries finally! Following the cuts that have taken place across the country in recent years, The Bookseller brings news that 14 libraries across Lancashire are set to reopen later this year and early next year. These will be partly run by community groups, but with the majority still being run by the council.
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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

A trip around the literary world, from USA to Latin America to the Czech Republic.

The weekend is upon us—here’s a detailed look at the week that was by our editors-at-large. In the United States, Madeline Jones reports directly from the trenches of the Book Expo in New York City. A gathering of publishers, booksellers, agents, librarians, and authors, the event is the largest of its kind in North America. We also have Sarah Moses filling us in with tidings from Colombia and Argentina, and updates on the Bogotá39, a group of thirty-nine Latin American writers considered to be the finest of their generation. Finally, Julia Sherwood brings us some hot off the press literary news from the Czech Republic. Settle in and get reading.

Madeline Jones, Editor-at-Large, reports from the United States:

Last week in New York City, Book Expo (formerly Book Expo America) set up shop at the famously-disliked Javits Center on western edge of Midtown Manhattan. Publishers, literary agencies, scouts, booksellers, and readers gathered for discussions about the future of publishing, meetings about foreign rights deals, publicity and media “speed-dating” sessions, and more. Authors and editors spoke about their latest books for audiences of industry insiders, and lines trailed from various publisher booths for galley signings.

Though the floor was noticeably quieter than previous years, and certainly nothing compared to the busy hub of foreign rights negotiations that the London and Frankfurt book fairs are, Asymptote readers will be pleased to hear that multiple panel discussions and presentations were dedicated to foreign publishers, the viability of selling translations in the U.S., and indie books (which more often tend to be translations than major trade publishers’ books). READ MORE…

Brazilian Academic Raquel Parrine Remembers Antonio Candido, 1918-2017

Candido’s death has engendered a crisis of heritage and legacy.

Antonio Candido, born in 1918 in Rio de Janeiro, passed away last week on May 12 in São Paulo. A writer, editor, critic and academic, he remains one of the best known and most influential literary figures in Brazil. Candido joined the Brazilian Socialist Party in the 1940s and was an active member of the resistance under the dictatorship of Getúlio Dornelles Vargas. He reviewed the earliest work of Brazilian greats like João Cabral de Melo Neto and Clarice Lispector and went on to teach for many years at the University of São Paulo. He received the Alfonso Reyes International Prize for lifetime achievement—the first Brazilian to be so recognized—among many other awards and honors. Here, Raquel Parrine writes of his legacy and the empty space that a new generation of political thinkers and writers will need to fill. 

It is hard for me to write about Antonio Candido. The more I think about it, the more overwhelmed I feel by the impact he had on literary scholarship in Brazil, and on the country itself. Professor Candido was a moral compass, a political trailblazer, and a dearly beloved human being. It is hard to talk about him without resorting to grandiloquent terms, which would reduce his very significant impact on his familiars and on Brazilian society.

I don’t think there is any doubt that Professor Candido was Brazil’s most important literary critic. He belongs to a generation of sociologists and economists who took it upon themselves to inaugurate a properly Brazilian scholarship, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to own the political discourse about our culture, and our exceptionality.

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In Conversation with Adam Morris

I regard one of the functions of literature as social interaction, of reaching and challenging other minds. Otherwise, why write at all?

Adam Morris and I emailed over the course of July about his translation of João Gilberto Noll’s novel Quiet Creature on the Corner from Two Lines Press. The novel follows a young, freshly unemployed poet-drifter in Porto Alegre, Brazil who lands himself in jail after committing rape. Then, without explanation, he is taken to a country house owned by German immigrants Kurt and Gerda where the world suddenly turns irrational. As the protagonists’ world turns surreal, the real world churns on around him, as Lula runs for president for the first time, and the Landless Workers’ Movement stages protests on the street.

                                    –Ryan Mihaly

Ryan Mihaly (RM): I want to start with a grammarian’s query as you say. Some of Noll’s sentences are relentlessly long and often change tense. They almost read like transcriptions of a casual conversation. Was there ever a temptation to break up Noll’s comma splices with something like a semicolon or em-dash instead of a comma?

Adam Morris (AM): You are really taking a risk with this question. I have worked as an editor for many years and am opinionated about grammar and punctuation. I’ll try to be brief.

Semicolons are not used in Brazilian Portuguese and are falling into disuse in English, except among the most pedantic writers. So I discarded that option out of hand. The narrator in Quiet Creature is not a pedant and is, as you say, speaking in a conversational tone. The em-dash was another available option, and unlike the semicolon, its prevalence is increasing. I often find it to be the signature of juvenile or lazy writing, which seemed suitable for the adolescent narrator of Quiet Creature. So I tried using it for some of the more blunt comma splices in Quiet Creature. But when I reread what I’d done, I discovered I’d lost the narrator’s voice. In English, the em-dash commands more of a pause than I heard in his wandering drift. His narration is not choppy or staccato, but a sort of numbed fugue of uneven pace. So the em-dash had to go. A few of them remained, and some turned into commas, but I got rid of most.

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Urban Protest in Brazil: the City and the Politics of Luiz Ruffato

What annoys me sometimes in literature is when you try to show me a world which is only a violent, terrible world. I know this already.

‘Our political history is a succession of dictatorships.’

                                                                                            —Luiz Ruffato                                                        

The fiction of Luiz Ruffato tackles the grave injustices found in Brazilian society: the deep chasm between rich and poor, the endemic corruption, the cheapness of life in the sprawling poverty-stricken peripheries of the major cities. He is the kind of outspoken writer that tumultuous Brazil needs right now. The country is in crisis following recession, a massive corruption scandal and the impeachment process of its President Dilma Rousseff.

It is the poor who will suffer most from this debacle. After just a week in power the administration of acting President Michel Temer began scaling back social policies that the left-wing Workers’ Party had put in place over many years. The Guardian reports that ‘moves are under way to soften the definition of slavery, roll back the demarcation of indigenous land, trim house-building programs’[1].’

Ruffato gave presage to all this in his 2013 speech to Frankfurt Book Fair, presenting Brazil not as an up-and-coming economic success story, but a country in which the shackles of slavery had not been shaken off, describing the abject state of the majority of the population as ‘invisible…deprived of the basic rights of citizenship: housing, transportation, leisure, education, and healthcare…a disposable piece of the machinery driving the economy.’

Ruffato is in a position to talk of these matters. The son of an illiterate washerwoman and a popcorn seller, he slept rough for a month in a bus station when he first moved to Sao Paulo, making his subsequent literary success all the more remarkable. His most famous novel, There Were Many Horses, published in English in 2013, has been hailed as a defining novel in the history of Brazilian literature, winning both the Brazilian APCA Award for best novel and the Brazilian National Library’s Machado de Assis Award. In 2016 Ruffato won the International Herman Hesse Prize for Literature in Translation.

Set in São Paulo, a metropolis of over 20 million people, There Were Many Horses roams across the cityscape and its underbelly, investigating the lives of the homeless, the broken, the lonely, the corrupt and the evil. It is an important book for its political and social statements but also a rare example of a novel which engages completely with the concept of the developing world megacity: in characters, imagery, and structure. A series of 69 vignettes which happen over the course of a night in São Paulo, it began as an experiment, an attempt to capture the sprawling city in a way which Ruffato felt traditional novels had not done. Ruffato argues that the book’s experimental form mirrors the splintered infrastructure of São Paulo and the fragmented lives of Paulistas more effectively.

This interview was conducted in two parts. The first meeting happened in Sao Paulo, at the home of Ruffato. The author lives in an old-fashioned apartment block on the quiet crest of one of the city’s steep hills, in the upper middle-class neighbourhood of Perdizes. The narrow marble corridor that leads to his apartment, filled with potted plants and hanging ferns. Inside, the apartment is neat, with few ornaments. Opposite to a shelf of novels and books on art, a sofa sits by a window looking out across the city. The streaming lines of cars, the expanse of blue sky, the poor peripheral sprawl that goes on and on, blurring into the horizon: all of this made a fitting setting to talk about São Paulo itself, the genesis of There Were Many Horses, the challenges of writing about Brazil and developing world cities. 

The second part of the interview happened over the internet, after the recent suspension of the President Dilma Rousseff. This time, the author focused on politics and on uncertain future of Brazil. The bold red typeface in which he answered questions was perhaps an indication of the fear he feels for the dangerous position Brazil finds itself in today.

Kathleen McCaul (KM): Tell me how you came to write There Were Many Horses?

Luiz Ruffato (LR): There Were Many Horses, started first of all, like a stylistic exercise. I was thinking the following; for me, to write about São Paulo, or any other megacity, is almost impossible. The idea of a novel is closed, it’s a closed structure, and with a closed structure, you need to make choices, you need to make edits. I thought that these edits were precarious. I was wondering in what way I could get the city in the way that we (Paulistas) get it. I stayed thinking about these questions. The two basic units/concepts of a novel is time and space and I was thinking how does time and space work in a megacity? It’s not the same in a small city—space and time are different there. And space and time in São Paulo and London are different, for example. These two questions were the first things I was thinking and then I started to think how to put these things into São Paulo, how to create a novel, thinking about time and space, set in São Paulo. READ MORE…

Graphic Novel in Translation: Karim Zaimović’s “The Invisible Man from Sarajevo”

Translating genre, language, text, and image—this is Asymptote blog's first graphic novel in translation

invisibleMan_pg_01

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Channeling The Language (And Spirit) Of Clarice Lispector: An Interview with Katrina Dodson

"I don’t think she wants to be completely understood, and she wouldn’t have understood herself."

“Clarice inspires big feelings. As with the ‘rare thing herself’ from ‘The Smallest Woman in the World,’ those who love her want her for their very own. But no one can claim the key to her entirely, not even in Portuguese. She haunts us each in different ways. I have presented you the Clarice that I hear best.”

By spending the last two years translating nearly four decades of Clarice Lispector’s work in what she calls “a one-woman vaudeville act,” Katrina Dodson has joined a club of translators (trumpeted by Lispector’s biographer and de facto proselytizer, Benjamin Moser), whose interpretations of the Brazilian writer have now generated a skyscraping tidal wave. Though recognized by Brazilians as their greatest modern writer, Lispector was little-known among English-speaking readers until the beginning of this decade. Today, she is the first Brazilian writer to appear on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review (July 2015). For the first time in English, Complete Stories brings together all the short stories that established her legacy in Portuguese.

Lispector gives the impression of a woman looking from the outside in, always taking notes. Like Borges, she expects you to follow her fantastic trains of thought, but she is unconcerned as to whether you enjoy the ride or not. In Complete Stories, eggs become infinite metaphoric permutations (interestingly, Lispector would die of ovarian cancer, on the eve of her 57th birthday), a lonely, red-headed girl and a red-headed basset hound discover they are soulmates, but destined never to be together, and a woman has a face.

Because in Lispector’s world—and Dodson’s translation—it must be asserted that a woman has a face, as if such a characteristic is not naturally of this world. These familiar details, made new —especially during fevered sequences when geography reflects a character’s unraveling—are what end up grinding our faces into the pavement as Lispector gazes on, coolly, but not unkindly, with great curiosity from above.

 ***

MB: When did you first encounter Clarice Lispector, and did you have a form of epiphany moment when you discovered her?

KD: I first started reading her in 2003. I was living in Rio de Janeiro and teaching English at a private English school called Britannia, and I had moved to Brazil that year speaking some Portuguese but, but it was—I spoke French, and then I was listening to these cassette tapes. That’s how long ago it was [laughs]. I would listen to cassette tapes that they would use to teach the Foreign Service how to learn a foreign language. I would listen to these Portuguese tapes before going.  READ MORE…