In Antonio, our Book Club selection for March, acclaimed Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher uses the mystifying, sustaining story of one family’s tragedy to paint a larger portrait of a tumultuous nation’s political and sociological landscape, reverberating through the discrete lives of its citizens. Constructed in a triad of narratives and rich with the fullness of voices in distinct oration, Antonio is both an electrifying mystery and a carefully constructed study of inheritance. In the following interview, Assistant Editor Nicole Bilan discusses with translator Adam Morris about the rigors and pleasures of translating this multifarious, scrupulously woven text.
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Nicole Bilan (NB): I’m going to be really reductive with my first question and say that Antonio is like a book of stories—or various perspectives of the same story—and this makes it quite difficult to kind of pin down its continuity. How did you navigate this ambiguity, that dynamic of mystery?
Adam Morris (AM): Well, one thing that helped was that I actually decided not to read the novel the whole way through before translating it. When New Directions accepted my initial proposal to translate I Didn’t Talk, they wanted to make sure that they had a follow-up. I recommended Anatomy of Paradise (2015), the author’s most recent novel, but the editors decided on Antonio, which I had only sampled for the purposes of writing the proposal. After reading about four or five chapters, I decided that if there was a chance I going translate Antonio, I wouldn’t want to know the explanations behind the novel’s central family secret as I worked; I wanted to find out as I was translating, to see if I could replicate that sense of not-knowing the reader is supposed to experience. So that’s what I did.
NB: That is an absolutely incredible thing to do, because even encountering it as a reader, you’re just constantly thinking: Wait, hold on, hold on, I’m lost. And then it hits you all at once. So how did you find it looking back in retrospect, trying to untangle those pieces of information—how did you refine something that’s so messily constructed in a way?
AM: I think “tangle” and “untangle” are the right verbs to use here; that was what it felt like to be working with the three narrators of Antonio. The way this novel is constructed, the voices aren’t interwoven. They’re tangled. It feels deliberately very messy, as you said; there’s conflicting information disclosed by the three voices as they evolve throughout, each becoming more familiar with their silent interlocutor, Benjamim. And one of the ways that I handled the untangling of these competing strands was to look at the novel in continuity, with each voice isolated, to see how they individually evolved without interference from the others—it’s almost impossible, of course, because their interlocutor transmits portions of each of their stories to the others, and they respond accordingly. So I tried to look at the story as a whole, and then as discrete narrative lines, and then finally reconstructed a synthesis with my revisions. But for the first draft, I just went straight through; I wanted the conversational approach that Bracher adopts to feel as natural as possible. That’s why, when I’d first started reading the novel, I knew I needed to stop. I wanted to preserve and capture the narrative effects.
NB: I really liked what you were saying about kind of getting to know the voices. There’s a point when Benjamim’s grandmother, Isabel, says: “We’re not just literature, my dear,” and then follows it up with this list of very human things that real people do and are made of. As a reader, it was so easy to believe in these fictional characters’ reality—did you get a similar sense?
AM: Yes. One of the reasons they feel so real is because of how flawed they are. And I think this is something the author has emphasized throughout her work. I Didn’t Talk has sort of a morality play behind it. The author has spoken about how there are lots of complicated figures—and no angels—in her stories. In Antonio, the evolution of the different characters—as they’re described by the three narrators—endows them with moral complexity and contributes to that feeling of reality. They seem familiar, like real family members. The author has described her process for creating her characters; she conducts interviews over hundreds of hours, then mines those recordings for locutions, vocabulary, patterns of speech . . . I tried to replicate that by recalling one of my now deceased, but most colorful aunts, who had very notable diction and a way of speaking that was very characteristic of her generation. She would be in her eighties now, approximately Isabel’s age. I didn’t pattern Isabel’s voice off of her, because they were very different women. But I like to think about the styles of speech that marked both women in terms of their lived experience and their boldness of character, because that is what Isabel is all about.
NB: When you shape these voices, do you see yourself in any of them?
AM: I am sure there are echoes of me there, but I try to stay out of the translation as much as possible. I know it’s a very popular point of view right now to have the translator be very present, be on the cover of the book, be speaking with or on behalf of the author all the time, but I feel uncomfortable with that, because my position with regard to translation is that the best translations are a faithful rendering of style, and this requires eradicating my own style and my own voice. When I was a more junior translator, working on my first translated work of fiction by Hilda Hilst, the Brazilian modernist writer, I was simultaneously writing some of my own fiction and working on a dissertation and some nonfiction writing, and I noticed the way her style was bleeding into mine—I could see it replicated in some of my own writing. This is something that happens to me with every translation. I think the translator has to be really on guard against the reverse of that phenomenon, especially because the older and more accomplished a translator or a writer is, the firmer their individual voice becomes. That’s a good thing when it comes to writing, but it’s something to beware when attempting translation. I think the best translators are able to replicate an author’s style; they’re able to hear it and reproduce it in another language. So when people tell me they hear my voice in my translations, I’m disappointed. I feel a little bit like a failure if I’m detectable in the translation.
The most attractive quality of Beatriz Bracher’s writing is her strong command of voice. She’s a very vocally oriented writer with a highly trained ear. That means I have to be very much on guard, as I’ve said, about removing myself and my voice from the characters and from the narrative voice as a whole.
NB: You’ve said that you think of yourself as almost a medium. And that being a translator is like channeling voices.
AM: Yes. I’ve actually done a lot of research about spirit mediumship in the United States in the nineteenth century for my nonfiction projects. There are online archives of period newspapers in which speeches made by deceased statesmen were pronounced by mediums in public, recorded, and printed. One of the talents these mediums possessed was the ability to convincingly channel a voice that was not their own. I was working on these Bracher translations while I was conducting this research, and the concept of mediumship resonated with me as a metaphor for what it was that I was trying to do as a translator: I want to be in a trance with the text and reproduce its voice.
NB: The idea of channeling reminds me that Antonio is constructed with fragments of conversations, with different voices discussing a forgotten, murky past. And there are dead characters haunting the whole novel. Where do you think this work belongs in terms of the surreal—is it on the realism end of magical realism?
AM: Antonio is a somewhat conventional family saga, and family sagas are subject matter that lends itself to magical realism—so I understand why someone might approach the novel with that framework or that category in mind. But it didn’t occur to me when I was reading and translating the novel; it didn’t seem magical at all to me. There are uncanny elements that adhere to any narrative involving madness, especially when the madness is so poorly understood by those who witness it. For the family at the center of this novel, what is terrorizing them is also the hereditary aspect of certain mental disorders or illnesses. In my view, the reason that Benjamim has come to São Paulo making inquiries is because he’s unafflicted; many mental illnesses skip generations, and the anxiety that motivates Benjamim is the thought that this illness could be repeated in his unborn son, Antonio. Eventually, he begins to realize that this family illness—and the behaviors of the two people who were afflicted—were also indissociable from their positions in society, that their extreme conduct and mental breakdowns were inflected by the decadence of the Kremz family, by the turmoil of mid-century Brazil, and the way social upheaval was ripping families apart.
NB: I’m curious about the geographical authenticity of this book—how characterized the locations are. I think that it was actually something the author literally mentioned—setting being a character.
AM: I can say that in Brazil there is a real divide between urban and rural society, a suspicion and unfamiliarity between the two populations. And one of the places evoked in the novel, the sertão, is almost like a mythical place; it’s always defined against civilization, against the city. It’s always other, always over there—never here. It’s a place freighted with a lot of cultural mythology, going back to the violent origins of colonization and the mystery that still adheres to the hinterland in Brazil, which is one of the most unknown places in the world. The sertão is not necessarily barren, but it’s very stark and grand in scale. I’ve never been there, but it’s famously evoked in Graciliano Ramos’s novel, Vidas secas. There’s a film adaptation that offers a very vivid portrayal of what it’s like in the sertão. It’s not exactly a desert, but sort of a badlands: a place of banditry and lawlessness—so no one necessarily wants to admit they live there, even if they do. And it’s a place where Teo, Benjamim’s father, goes to get in touch with what he thinks is a more authentic existence.
In our digitized lives, the terrain for authentic experience is very limited—everything is mediated. Teo goes to a literal terrain that he thinks possesses some kind of authentic character, which he feels his family has lost, or perhaps never had. He seeks it as an artist, and as a result he becomes interested in popular music, he starts drawing, and then he begins to withdraw from what we would identify with civilization. I don’t think that this had any effect on the way I approached the translation, but I was conscious of trying to replicate the unfamiliarity of the space as it appears to Isabel especially, because she would have been the person who felt the most alienated by it. I wanted that to come through very clearly: that the hostility of the terrain was something that threatened her and, she thought, threatened her son’s sanity—when perhaps the opposite was the case.
Meanwhile, in Bracher’s depiction of the city, São Paulo embodies many of the contradictions of late capitalism. The novel is trying to get to that—the way this site of alleged civilization has now become so dangerous it traumatizes the people who live there. Everyone who lives in São Paulo feels the danger of the city. It cannot be dismissed. A modern phenomenon in São Paulo is that a lot of wealthy people go places by helicopter because they regard it as safer, more so than an armored car. I think something Bracher was trying to capture with this novel is the feeling of alienation in a place where capitalism (one might more cautiously say “modernity”) has sped and aggrandized proportions to a degree where they aren’t acceptable or manipulatable by humans. Because literature is one of the ways that we can try to address that.
NB: Do you think that the same thing has happened to the family in Antonio, that the locale has not necessarily sped, but aggrandized this trauma that occurred within the family? What are your thoughts on how Bracher builds that theme into the political, urban, rural landscape?
AM: The family has been destroyed by those centripetal forces of economic acceleration. Isabel has a monologue in which she’s describing her grandchildren’s jobs, and she almost can’t believe how menial their labor is, having come from a well-off family and having received the finest education in the country. Through her denigration of their middle-class positions, you see the haughtiness of that generation really coming through. It’s a little bit repellent because she’s such a snob, but at the same time she almost recalls Adorno: she’s criticizing the crass commercialization of the beautiful life she thinks her family had, and should continue to have. She doesn’t say so, but it’s global capitalism that has rendered impossible this bourgeois, upper-echelon, Brazilian experience. But this novel is not nostalgic for that era, and it is not an apologia for that class.
NB: It’s interesting to see how the micro of daily behaviors plays out with the macro in that way, how there’s this kind of tension of scales that goes on in the novel and continues throughout. How did you preserve that sort of huge contextual backdrop with the tiny details of these two men descending into madness?
AM: I didn’t find it to be contradictory or even contrasting at all. I think it’s through details that backdrops and panoramas are rendered legible. We’re never really given a full picture of the family life at the center of Antonio; we have an idea, and we’re given details from which we can extrapolate: the size of their home, the sort of projects they each had when they lived there, how Isabel’s life changed when she had to leave the house, and so on. It’s through these details that Bracher renders the fall of an entire class, or an entire way of life. There is still an upper class in Brazil—it just doesn’t look like that anymore. This is the sort of cultural memory that the author is trying to reconstruct and memorialize, because that class was so instrumental in all the political drama that characterized the national experience of the 1960s and 70s.
NB: When you say “reconstructing”—do a few bricks get left out? Have you made certain sacrifices throughout the process of this translation?
AM: Absolutely. That’s one of the small daily tragedies of being a translator. I’m not a person who subscribes to the untranslatability thesis, because I think that literature, and the novel, in particular, can’t depend on individual specificities—a novel has a mood, a tone, and a voice. So if details have to be sacrificed, that’s fine, as long as there’s a sufficient replacement for the detail. The translation is like the ship of Theseus, right? You just have to stay above water. Once you get to the destination, you know it’s not the same vessel anymore. All that matters is that it carries the same meaning—that it can still convey it.
Adam Morris has translated novels by Beatriz Bracher, Pola Oloixarac, João Gilberto Noll, and Hilda Hilst. He is the author of American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation (Liveright, 2019).
Nicole Bilan is a Comparative Literature graduate, currently studying for her Master’s degree at King’s College London.
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