Language: Brazilian Portuguese

An Occupied Literature: On Julián Fuks’s Occupation

September 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Fuks has “put something more than pain, something more than misfortune” in his novel, making “something worth writing.”

Occupation by Julián Fuks, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, Charco Press, 2021

I’m writing a book about fatherhood without being able to become a father—and probing motherhood as if I didn’t know that I will never learn it. I’m writing a book about death without ever having felt it switch off a body, in a speculation of feelings that one day will seem laughable, when I do encounter the pain. I’m writing a book about the pain of the world, the poverty, exile, despair, rage, tragedy, ludicrousness, a book about this interminable ruin surrounding us, which so often goes unnoticed, but as I write it I am protected by solid walls.

Occupation, Julián Fuks’ latest novel to appear in English translation by Daniel Hahn, is a quiet masterpiece. Touching on family and relationships, birth and death, colonialism, the refugee crisis, political activism, the Holocaust, our (in)ability to identify with one another, and how to find hope in a world of ruin, this novel is sweepingly ambitious in its themes, yet the measured, self-critical voice of the narrator and the calm, understated prose prevents it from veering into sensationalism or sentimentality.

The novel’s chapters alternate between the different preoccupations of our narrator, Sebastián: his father, who is occupying a hospital bed; his wife’s decision to have a child, which will occupy her body and shift the dynamics of their relationship; a group of migrants occupying a dilapidated building, many of whom exiles from lands that have been occupied, now seeking refuge in Brazil, a country with its own history of occupation; and his own attempts to understand what all of this means for his occupation as a writer.

Small jumps in time, along with chapters that begin mid-conversation, can at times create a sense of dislocation, but Fuks weaves the strands together so gently and dexterously that when they coalesce, it does not feel like the technique has been a pretext for creating suspense; rather, it is as though the narrative has been constructed this way so that the narrator might himself work through and better understand the components—as if each narrative thread must be understood on its own to bring the whole into relief. Nevertheless, the technical mastery of this construction should not be downplayed, and throughout the book, the reader will notice explicit motifs along with subtle echoes and patterns in the language. All this adds to a sense that the novel’s threads are both connected and discreet, amplifying the plurality of the voices and experiences which ultimately merge with the voice of the narrator, who “allow[s] them to occupy [him], to occupy [his] writing: an occupied literature.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “It Was Then That I Lost That Child” by Carla Bessa

July 20, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

And so then, I had: my children, I had: seven children, I mean: six

The fate of a working class mother who loses her child is the focus of this week’s Translation Tuesday, which features an unforgettable experiment with the short story form. Devised through a verbatim technique, Carla Bessa—actress, director, and winner of Brazil’s most prestigious literary award, the Jabuti Prize—mines the genre for its dramatic possibilities. Bessa’s moving story switches deftly between a confessional monologue with eclectic punctuation that lends the mother’s voice a searing, staccato quality and, on the other hand, a set of intricate stage movements revolving around a domestic scene. The effect is a casual meeting of tragedy and mundanity. Indeed, for translator Elton Uliana, this story conveys “a reality of marginality and crime which is becoming increasingly prevalent in Brazil, particularly with the rise of far-right politics, its contempt for and disenfranchising of the lower classes.” This social commentary is achieved with great formal and emotional intensity in “It Was Then That I Lost That Child.” 

(She takes the chicken out of the freezer and puts it in the microwave. She rinses the thermos with boiling water, she puts the filter holder over the mouth of the flask, she places the paper filter in the holder and fills it with coffee powder, five level soup spoons.)

And so then, I had: my children, I had: seven children, I mean: six. Because: the one who got killed, I never really got to raise him. I couldn’t. I only: I only had him for the first month, then his father: stole my child from me, yes, it was his father: he kidnapped my boy.

(She pours the hot water carefully over the coffee until the filter is full. She stops, and waits for the water to seep through. The microwave beeps. With the kettle in one hand she goes to the microwave, presses the button that opens the door to remove the chicken. She realises that she has only one hand free and pauses.)

He beat me up. I’ve got the scars here on my face, see, ruined: it was him. That’s why I’ve got a face like this, all: destroyed, have a look. 

(She pours more water on the coffee, she stops and waits.)

He stole my son, and: I reported him. And so: it was his mother that had to look after my son. He and his mother raised my son, but: they never let me visit him. Then: I took them to court again: and I won: I won the right to see my own son. A right that was already mine. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2021

July 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Barbara Halla, Ruwa Alhayek, Suhasini Patni, and Thuy Dinh

New texts from Italy, Brazil, Korea, Morocco, and Spain!

In this month’s selection of excellent literature in translation, there’s something for everyone. From a dreamy and architecturally expressive graphic novel that speaks to fates and futures, to a collection of strange and visceral short stories delineating the network between bodies and their definitions. And if science fiction or unsettling tales aren’t your thing, there’s also the powerful narrative on a prodigal son who returns to navigate the pathos-filled landscape of past tragedies, loneliness, and isolation; the masterfully told history of Catalonia as it plays out through the life of a woman embroiled in the tumult of her time; or a cunning satire of contemporary Morocco that traverses territory of both physical and virtual landscapes. Read on for reviews on each of these remarkable works; hope you enjoy the trip!

celestia

Celestia by Manuele Fior, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards, Fantagraphics, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

“. . . from above, this island is in the shape of two hands intertwined.”

                                                           —Dr. Vivaldi, from Manuele Fior’s Celestia

Such is how Dr. Vivaldi alludes to Venice—curved strips of land yearning to touch and engulf each other in blue space. Ambitiously realized by Manuele Fior and eloquently translated by Jamie Richards, Celestia—Venice’s oneiric double—is a visual poem and modernist dance in graphic novel form, encompassing diaphanous terrains and gothic undertow, exuberantly tumescent with allusions to literature, art, and architecture.

Born in 1975 in Cesena, Italy, Fior currently lives in Paris, France. Drawing from his studies at Venice’s University of Architecture (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, or IUAV), he has, over time, developed a dynamic visual language with narrative elements drawn from both Western and Eastern aesthetic traditions. Several of his acclaimed graphic novels have been translated into English and published by U.S.-based Fantagraphics, and Celestia marks his fifth collaboration with Richards—a scholar and translator of Italian literature.

Deeply influenced by John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “Profezia” (“Prophecy”)—Fior depicts Celestia as a fusion of dualities that exist both in the history of Venice as well as in the fictional universe of his work: Gothic and Renaissance, spiritual and secular, traditional and modern, rational and organic, freedom and oppression, community and exile. While in Fior’s earlier work—such as The Interview—telepathy is depicted as an extraterrestial gift, in Celestia this ability has existed from time immemorial among certain people, possibly as an evolutionary process. When the story opens, the island of Celestia is home to a group of telepathic refugees, who long ago fled from a horrific invasion that had devastated the mainland. One of them, Pierrot—cloaked in his commedia dell’arte persona—now wishes to renounce his telepathic power, which he perceives as a tragic link to his childhood. After delivering vigilante justice to a member of the demonic syndicate that controls the island’s murky depths, Pierrot escapes Celestia with Dora—a seer also burdened by her gift, as well as the oppressive intimacy enforced by her mind-melding circle of elites, led by Dr. Vivaldi.

Beset by this innate ability that has become a form of enslavement, Pierrot and Dora set off—hoping their journey would both resolve the past and guide them toward a new future. The couple’s subsequent arrival on the mainland brings them into contact with an omniscient child, or Child—who embodies both the future of mankind and its messiah. READ MORE…

To Channel a Voice: Adam Morris on Translating Beatriz Bracher’s Antonio

April 22, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Nicole Bilan

[T]he concept of mediumship resonated with me as a metaphor for what it was that I was trying to do as a translator.

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.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

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. READ MORE…

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Antonio by Beatriz Bracher

April 14, 2021  |  in Book Club  |  by Nicole Bilan

Bracher vaguely nods toward the uncanny, peeping out from behind confrontational realism.

Our Book Club selection for the month of March comes from one of Brazil’s most powerful contemporary voices. With Antonio, Beatriz Bracher brings philosophy and narrative in a deeply ruminative and immersive expedition through familial lineage, uncovering the various fragments of a tumultuous paternal relationship in order to understand the myriad forces that carries an individual from their origin to their present.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Antonio by Beatriz Bracher, translated from the Portuguese by Adam Morris, New Directions, 2021

“The spectators were part of the show, but they only realised it once they had gone by.”

To read Antonio is to become part of its story. In the conversational style that has become one of Beatriz Bracher’s calling cards, the narrative begins in a direct address to the reader, immediately situating us as characters for whom the story is told, as though one was crowded around a fireplace, listening to a relative tell stories from an armchair. Adopting the same hushed tones and subtle drama of the fireside orator in her writing, Bracher crafts a layered story which brims with mystery and tension. Effortlessly weaving her way through points of obscurity and shocking revelation, she plays with the reader-turned-listener as she leads us through the undulating landscape of a murky family history.

READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Padma Viswanathan

March 25, 2021  |  in Podcast  |  by Steve Lehman

Find out how Padma Viswanathan stumbled into translation and why she loves Brazilian literature

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Today on the show, the award-winning author and translator Padma Viswanathan joins podcast editor Steve Lehman to talk about her love for Brazilian literature, the connection between writing and translating, and how translation helps her form an even closer relationship to Portuguese. Afterwards, stick around to hear an excerpt from the short story “The Woman Who Didn’t Know How to Die,” written by Adelice Souza and translated by Padma Viswanathan, in both Portuguese and English. You can read the full story, and many other great works in translation, at asymptotejournal.com.

Sadness Has No End, Happiness Does: An Interview with Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

September 21, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Serena Solin

I’m okay with “hybridity” and “identity” in the sense that they are procedural, but not to the extent that they are arrivals and conclusions.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist working across mediums, from poetry and translation to net art, film, theory, and performance. Her work explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and phenomenology, with a particular focus on the vacillating potential of the internet as a public and personal space, equal parts diary and mechanism of empire. I first encountered her work in Algavarias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), a translation of Syrian-Brazilian poet Waly Salomão. Gharavi renders Salomão’s “poems of ideal architecture” in all their immense complexity, as humorous as they are solemn, as splintered as they are universal. 

Serena Solin (SS): Something that intrigued me throughout Algaravias: Echo Chamber was the fragmentation of image. I’m thinking particularly of this quote from the poem “CARIOCA STREET 1993”: “clippings, replicas, reshowings, free samples, clots without blood, prostheses of the fantasmagoric Soap Street.” Virtual realities and “handycams” are also represented. As a contemporary artist, is fragmentation or reflection across multiple screens something you think about? Do you believe there is now, or ever was, an unbroken space for art?

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (MMG): I think that Waly Salomão was certainly ahead of his time in writing that poem in the early nineties. Naming a poem “.doc” before we had AOL and Hotmail accounts is especially interesting for an artist in South America who was attuned to the burgeoning virtuality of how we see each other and ourselves.

One of the things I’ve been doing under quarantine is watching period dramas. If I were just living my ordinary, non-quarantine life, I wouldn’t be watching Vanity Fair and The Age of Innocence, but it’s fascinating to think about the idea that there was ever a time when the whole could be contained. We have a fantasy of ourselves as contemporaries, being post-everything, and to some extent there may be truth to that; our tools have shaped us to be different than Martin Scorcese’s characters. But watching period dramas and experiencing a different visual repertoire from my own, I’m struck by how much virtuality and narrativizing of lives and selves there was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maybe we as contemporaries are so hungry for control that we have an impulse to find containers for everything. I think control is part of the artistic impulse, as well as a directive under quarantine—to not lose your mind, to think about the very few things within your control. I don’t know that I can draw a ready line to virtuality, but often our tools give us that sense of control. At the same time they are not just tools; they shape us.

SS: With regard to period dramas, I thought quarantine might be a good time to read Anna Karenina for the first time, and I was enthralled by the way the plot is reflected through characters who weren’t actually present for an event but heard about it from someone else—in other words, gossip as narrative style. Perhaps the conclusion is that there’s nothing new under the sun—not virtuality, not narrative fragmentation.

MMG: Anna Karenina was actually on TV the other day, dubbed into Portuguese, a real experience. Postmodernism is maybe the most boring topic ever, but the first thing to be given that word in literary theory was that moment in Mrs. Dalloway when multiple spectators are watching an airplane. That refractory self and the breakdown of representative, directive viewership is where postmodernism starts to exist historically. But I think we can go further back, and wider culturally.

At the same time, I think we are living something different. I live in the time of Uber. It’s significant that we know the technology we rely on is working when it’s most erased, which is profoundly interesting and understudied—we would have to give more attention to that to fully understand ourselves. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2020

August 17, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Samuel Kahler, and Scarlett Castillo

New work from Guadalupe Nettel, Małgorzata Szejnert, and Daniel Galera!

This month’s selections of newly translated world literature seem to revolve around the unknown, be it to uphold or dispel it: a Mexican short story collection explores its protagonists’ dark psyches while providing no easy answers, a piece of Polish reportage rediscovers lost voices on nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrant experience in America, and a Brazilian novel hilariously tackles a group of friends’ exploits in almost unchartered digital territory during the nineties.

bezoar

Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine, Seven Stories Press, 2020

Review by Samuel Kahler, Communications Director

Unusual as they may be, the strange and wistful short fictions in Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories are not only clever in their portrayal of human desire and obsession; they are often wise as well. Nettel, an acclaimed Mexican author, was named as one of the Bogotá 39 and is a recipient of the largest Spanish-language short story collection prize, the Premio de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero. Bezoar is her second collection of stories, published in the original Spanish in 2008 and now translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine.

Over the course of the book, Nettel and her characters have something fresh to reveal about their unique obsessions and secrets (the stories are told from the first-person perspective). But at just over one hundred pages, Bezoar is an all-too-brief journey through the grey areas and dark recesses of hidden passions, lusts, and compulsions.

Depending on one’s subjective definition, the narrators of Bezoar might be considered everyday people who, at face value, live quiet, unremarkable lives: a photographer in Paris, a man strolling through Tokyo’s botanical gardens, a teenager on a summer vacation, and—yes—a voyeur here, a stalker there, and one supermodel under psychiatric supervision. While memorable and idiosyncratic, these are not outsized characters with grand schemes; instead, they look inward and act in near-singular pursuit of resolving psychological issues. Fittingly, their stories are intimate chamber pieces that delight in the details of unfulfilled needs and wants, emotional attachments and detachments, and traces of personal insight that at times reflect a broader general truth about human dissatisfaction. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 24, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Daniel Persia, and José García Escobar

This week's latest news from Brazil, Hong Kong, and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you news of what’s happening around the world. In Brazil, a newly published collection draws together international voices discussing their experience during quarantine; in Hong Kong, tightened lockdown measures have meant book fairs and events moving online; and in Central America, the Autores en cuarentena event series is taking place online, whilst Carlos Wyld Espina’s essential political essay El Autócrata has been reissued. 

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has no doubt weighed heavily on writers, altering not only their physical workspaces and subject matter, but also their orientation to the art itself. In Brazil, the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) has invited 126 individuals and collectives to reflect on their experiences during quarantine, featuring multimedia work from writers, visual artists, and musicians, among others. Meanwhile, reflections have gone global with Para além da quarentena: reflexões sobre crise e pandemia, which showcases critical discussions from Brazil, Italy, France, Portugal, the United States, and Uruguay. The collection, released in June, is available in free pdf and e-book formats through mórula editorial.

Another new release, Pandemônio: nove narrativas entre São Paulo—Berlim [Pandemonium: Nine Narratives Bridging São Paulo—Berlin], takes a more in-depth look from two of the world’s major literary hubs: São Paulo and Berlin. Organized by Cristina Judar and Fred Di Giacomo, Pandemônio touches on the pandemic, the ongoing economic crisis, and the advance of authoritarianism, highlighting similarities and differences between São Paulo and Berlin. Featured authors include Aline Bei, Cristina Judar, Jorge Ialanji Filholini and Raimundo Neto (representing São Paulo) and Carola Saavedra, Fred Di Giacomo, Alexandre Ribeiro, Karin Hueck, and Carsten Regel (representing Berlin). Pandemônio illustrates the strength of collective testimony, highlighting how stories have the power to bridge experiences from distant corners of the globe. The book is available for free online at www.pandemonioantologia.com, and through Amazon. A full English translation will be released in August. READ MORE…

Os bichos me fantasticam: On Clarice Lispector and Lygia Clark

July 8, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Austyn Wohlers

Both Lispector and Clark use human contact with animals as a way to get closer to a paradoxical self-alienation that leads to self-actualization.

One of the greatest pleasures of a text can result from its echoes throughout other mediums, when we startle upon the themes and traits of our most cherished authors beyond the page. In this essay, Austyn Wohlers traces the dialogue that forms between lauded Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and visual artist Lygia Clark, most notable for their mutual application of animality and wildness.

Clarice Lispector’s fascination with animal life is one of her defining qualities as a writer: readers may be familiar with G.H.’s fateful encounter with a cockroach in The Passion According to G.H., or Lucrécia’s bodily identification with horses in The Besieged City. Her ideas about how animals affect the humans who encounter them were complex, as one can see in this excerpt from her posthumously-published novel A Breath of Life, referencing Lispector’s real-life dog Ulysses:

Contact with animal life is indispensable to my psychic health. My dog reinvigorates me completely . . . All he does is ‘be.’ ‘Being’ is his activity . . . When he falls asleep in my lap I watch over him and his very rhythmical breathing. And—he motionless in my lap—we form a single organic being, a living mute statue.

This description of animal-human contact as a “living mute statue” reminds me of Lispector’s contemporary (and fellow Brazilian) Lygia Clark’s Bicho sculptures. Mostly created in the early 1960s, the Bichos were a series of unique sculptures largely designed to be handled, manipulated, and warmed by the viewer as one would hold a small animal. In The Abandonment of Art, Cornelia Butler writes that she “imagined the encounter with [the Bichos] as something like an exchange between two organisms”—forming, in other words, the same “living mute statue” that Lispector describes. Both Lispector and Clark use human contact with animals as a way to get closer to a paradoxical self-alienation that leads to self-actualization: Clark’s empty-full (vazio-pleno), described by Suely Rolnik as the moment “when the silent incubation of a new reality of feeling is underway,” and Lispector’s wild heart—the thing itself—the it.

The word bicho does not have a direct cognate in English, and is usually translated as “beast,” “critter,” “animal,” or “pet.” The word in Portuguese has a diminutive quality, so the cutesiness imparted by words like “critter” and “pet” convey the tone well, and communicate the lighthearted spirit with which Clark expects viewers to play with the Bichos while palliating—or perhaps humanizing—their more serious, transformative, “living mute statue” nature. Interestingly, the word bicho appears often in Lispector’s writing, and though Lygia Clark’s usage is often translated as “critter,” Lispector’s is translated as the more serious word “animal.” Elizabeth Friis provides a few examples from Lispector’s novel Água viva in her essay “In my Core I have the Strange Impression that I don’t Belong to the Human Species: Clarice Lispector’s Água viva as Life Writing?”:

Ás vezes eletrizo-me over bicho.
Sometimes I get electrified when I see animals.

Os bichos me fantasticam.
Animals fantastricate me.

Não ter nascido bicho é uma minha secreta nostalgia.
Not having been born an animal is a secret nostalgia of mine.

READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 26, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daniel Persia and Eva Wissting

Literary news from Brazil and Sweden!

As countries around the world are grappling around the walls of our new reality, their literatures respond in turn to the urgency of contemporary matters and the necessity of recognizing history. In this week’s dispatches, our editors report on publishers in Sweden taking on climate change and the world welcomes new translations of a canonical Brazilian author, among other noteworthy news. Read on to keep up!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Publisher Natur & Kultur announced in their most recent sustainability report that they aim to become Sweden’s first climate neutral book publisher. The goal is to become climate neutral within 2020, which means that firstly, they will do what they can to minimize climate changing emissions, and secondly, they will compensate for any emissions from their activities or production. Their printing house, located in Estonia, will switch to ecofriendly electricity and they are investigating how to minimize transportation within the publisher’s business. Authors published by Natur & Kultur include historian and former Swedish Academy Permanent Secretary Peter Englund (The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War) and writer, columnist and August Prize winner Lena Andersson (Wilful Disregard and Acts of Infidelity).

Another reminder of the importance of action on climate change arrived recently with the fall edition of the triennial book catalogue from the Swedish book industry organization Svensk Bokhandel. This fall, Sweden’s most prominent environmental activist, and possibly most well-known person overall right now, Greta Thunberg, is having another book published by Polaris Publishing. Last year, photographer Roger Turesson and journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto travelled with Thunberg through Europe and the United States and the book is their depiction of the young environmentalist. Previously published works by Thunberg includes Our House is on Fire, written together with her parents and sister, and No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, which is a collection of her speeches.

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

As Brazil continues to grapple with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, its literary community perseveres. With the recent cancelation of the 26th International Book Fair of São Paulo, originally slated for October 30 to November 8, 2020, publishers, writers, and reviewers have carried the conversation to online platforms such as YouTube, Facebook Live, and Instagram. Despite current flight restrictions and limitations on travel, Brazilian literature continues to cross new frontiers, garnering new readers across the globe. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2020

June 15, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Eva Wissting, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

New publications from Brazil, Japan, and Poland!

This month, our selections of newly published literature from around the globe seem to cohere under the umbrella of trauma and memory, and the way they inevitably turn into narratives in the process of retrospection. From a Polish work of non-fiction that traces the sufferings of Poles during WWII, to the journals that document a Jewish immigrant in Brazil, to the strange and unspoken secrets of a small village in Japan—these works are of both documentation and imagination.

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A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm, World Editions, 2020

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

It is a grim fact, one that acquires increasing urgency in recent years, that those who were alive to experience the horrors of the Second World War are getting older: before long, we will no longer be able to talk to people who have direct experience of those times. Thus, we are increasingly grappling with the problem of second-generation memory: with the matter of how the descendants of survivors preserve and pass on the stories of the past for future generations, and with questions as to whether, or how, those descendants inherit the trauma of their ancestors. Anna Janko’s A Little Annihilation is a powerful meditation on these issues.

In this reckoning with the past, Janko describes the destruction of the Polish village of Sochy by the German military on Tuesday, June 1, 1943: the inhabitants massacred and buildings burned to the ground over the course of a mere few hours. Nine-year-old Teresa Ferenc, Janko’s mother, was among the survivors. In recounts of conversations, her mother describes her memories of that day—most especially, witnessing the death of both of her parents. Janko also chronicles interviews with other survivors from the village, interweaving their stories and noting the discrepancies between them, while describing efforts to tabulate the exact number of lives lost. The impossibility of establishing precise details is a crucial reminder of the intertwined nature of history and memory, a refutation of the common notion of their opposition, as well as a reflection on the challenges of documenting a massacre.

For some English-language readers, Janko’s text may be the first work they have encountered that discusses the sufferings of non-Jewish Poles during the Second World War. For Americans especially, to learn about Nazi atrocities is generally to learn about their efforts to exterminate European Jews, without a detailed understanding of how their eugenicist ideology shaped their policies and strategies in a broader variety of ways. Confusion over the fact that Poland was occupied territory has led to mistaken statements about “Polish death camps” (most notably, perhaps, when President Barack Obama used the term during a ceremony awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski in 2012; he later apologized for the error)—as Janko angrily reminds readers. “In my opinion it would be best if Germany gathered up all the camps they left behind in Poland. So that no one would be mistaken any longer.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 1, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Daniel Persia, and José García Escobar

Despite setbacks and delays, literature around the world is still going strong.

This week, our writers bring you the latest literary news from Brazil, Central America, and Hong Kong. In Brazil, literary communities are still going strong via online events and livestreams; in Central America, journalists and writers have been reaching audiences through online videos; and in Hong Kong, universities have been putting lecture series online for the public. Read on to find out more!

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

In the midst of rising political tensions, presidential disregard for the ongoing pandemic, and increased social distancing measures at the local and state levels, writers and readers have come together to help shape a new virtual literary landscape in Brazil. Over the past few weeks, with travel restricted and residents urged to stay in their homes, I’ve tuned in via Facebook Live, Instagram Live, Youtube, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and more to engage with authors from across the country. With some livestreams reaching two thousand-plus users in a single session, one thing remains clear: the Brazilian literary community continues strong, with readers now more than ever searching for opportunities to engage in dialogue and debate. To stay connected, you can follow writers and publishers on social media; subscribe to email newsletters; and check out how your local bookstore might be engaged with virtual encounters! READ MORE…

A Titan of Brazilian Literature: John Milton on José Bento Monteiro Lobato

March 18, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Shelly Bhoil

Lobato’s adaptations of Peter Pan and Don Quixote have become more so the works of Lobato than those of Barrie and Cervantes.

José Bento Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) is one of Brazil’s most influential writers, a prolific translator, and the founder of Brazil’s first major publishing house. His lifelike characters have become an integral part of the Brazilian society, so much so that restaurants, coffee shops, wheat flour, or readymade cake packs in Brazil are named after Dona Benta, an elderly farm owner in Lobato’s fictional works. Despite the largeness of his influence and the progressive ideas he sought to bring in Brazil through his literary endeavors, however, Lobato has been posthumously accused of racism in his literary portrayal of black people. His work, Caçadas de Pedrinho, has especially come under scrutiny for calling Aunt Nastácia as a “coal-coloured monkey,” and he continually makes reference to her “thick lips.”

Professor John Milton’s recently launched book Um país se faz com traduções e tradutores: a importância da tradução e da adaptação na obra de Monteiro Lobato [A Country Made with Translations and Translators: The Importance of Translation and Adaptation in the Works of Monteiro Lobato] (2019) examines how Dona Benta’s character is instrumentalized by Lobato in his stories to express his criticism of the Catholic Church, the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Latin America, and the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, among other socio-political practices of the times. In the following interview, Professor John Milton speaks about Lobato, a household name of Brazil, stemming from his long-term research on the author’s life and works.

Shelly Bhoil (SB): Monteiro Lobato’s famously said, “um país se faz com homens e livros” (a country is made with men and books). Tell us about Brazil’s first important publishing house, which was found by Lobato, and how it mobilized readership in Brazil? 

John Milton (JM): Lobato’s first publishing company was Monteiro Lobato & Cia., which he started in 1918, but it went bust from over-investment and economic problems in 1925. Then, together with partner Octalles Ferreira, he founded Companhia Editora Nacional. Both companies reached a huge public. Urupês (1918), stories about rural life in the backlands of the state of São Paulo, was enormously popular, and within two years went into six editions. Lobato quickly became the best-known contemporary author in Brazil. Dissatisfied with available works in Portuguese to read to his four children, he began writing works for children. In A Menina do Narizinho Arrebitado [The Girl with the Turned-up Nose] (1921), Lobato introduced his cast of children and dolls at the Sítio do Picapau Amarelo [Yellow Woodpecker Farm]. The first edition of Narizinho sold over fifty thousand copies, thirty thousand of which were distributed to schools in the state of São Paulo. By 1920, more than half of all the literary works published in Brazil were done so by Monteiro Lobato & Cia. And as late as 1941, a quarter of all books published in Brazil were produced by Companhia Editora Nacional. 

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