Place: Brazil

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…

From Japan to Brazil: An Interview with Translator Rita Kohl

April 19, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by David Boyd

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…

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.

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 8, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, and Sam Carter

Our section editors present their favorite works from our Winter 2021 issue!

Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.

“Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.

—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor

Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.

—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor READ MORE…

We’re Reached Our Milestone Tenth Anniversary! 🎉

January 28, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

And we’re celebrating with a new issue (and some very big names in world literature)!

Dear reader,

I’m thrilled to present “Brave New World Literature,” our special milestone edition marking ten full years of curating the very best in contemporary letters. Highlights include an exclusive last interview with James Salter conducted before he died in 2015, new translations of Alfred Döblin and Alain Mabanckou, as well as a trio of essays by intellectual heavyweight Eliot Weinberger, former Granta editor John Freeman, and frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang—all suggesting a “culturally multidirectional” way forward for the next decade.

In addition to featuring a “writer’s writer” (the aforementioned James Salter), we’re proud to debut in English a “true poet’s poet” (the Mexican Max Rojas) in a roster that also includes poet superstars Najwan Darwish and Carlos de Assumpção. Elsewhere, fellow Brazilian writer Adelice Souza and Hungarian author Anna Mécs give us a pair of stunning fictions in which women perform (or postpone) their deaths, while our first nonfiction lineup under new Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki sees a fascinating pseudo-scientific colonial document answered with a modern memoir of Egyptian politics. In light of the recent protests by Navalny supporters all across Russia, Artur Solomonov’s drama—also about enacting death, while portraying the machinery of state propaganda—could not be more timely: The play was in fact considered so politically inflammatory that it has only ever been staged underground. All of this is illustrated by talented guest artist the Australia-based Naomi Segal. READ MORE…

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…

Autoria Negra: An Interview with Cidinha da Silva

September 7, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva and Daniel Persia

We sought and insistently seek ways to affirm our existence, to demarcate places for the living human beings that we are.

I first met Cidinha da Silva about a year ago, at the International Literary Festival of Paraty (Flip), in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the time, I had just begun translating Sobre-viventes! (Pallas Editora, 2016), a collection of crônicas that approach Brazil, past and present, through everyday lived experience. In 2010, Cidinha coined the neologism Exuzilhar, a verb that combines the Portuguese encruzilhar (“to cross”) or encruzilhada (“crossroads”) with Exu (an Orisha in the Yoruba religion, the divine messenger or gatekeeper). Exuzilhamento is indeed a driving force of Cidinha’s work, which, as she reveals here, “revolves around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity.” The interview that follows, conducted alongside my fellow translator Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva, showcases the complexity of Cidinha’s creative process and her critical place in contemporary Brazilian literature.

                                                                                 —Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil

Daniel Persia (DP): It’s great to connect with you again, Cidinha, especially after having featured some of your work in our Summer 2020 issue. Can you give us a general panorama of your career as a writer?

Cidinha da Silva (CS): I started publishing literature in 2006, in São Paulo, with a self-financed, independent book of crônicas, Cada tridente em seu lugar. It’s a book that still sells widely, fourteen years later. The fourth edition was just released, with Mazza Edições (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). I had always wanted to publish literature. I wrote crônicas for an online magazine and readers kept asking when we’d have a book. That’s what really got me thinking about publishing my first literary work; I had already published a book of essays in 2003, Ações afirmativas em educação—experiências brasileiras [Affirmative Action in Education: Brazilian Experiences] (Summus).

Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva (AO): Tell us about your creative process. Do you have a daily writing routine?

CS: My writing process has practical, creative, and other dimensions that are somewhat intangible. In practical terms, I’m a relatively organized and disciplined writer; I sit and write at predetermined times. I don’t have any problems with the “blank page,” but sometimes I’m faced with a lack of time to write. My writing routine depends on the volume of work at hand, on how much I need to accomplish to ensure survival: lesson planning; preparing and delivering lectures, workshops, and courses; reading; studying; traveling; keeping up with my online store and promoting my books. The time left for writing is very minimal, it boils down to just a few hours a week. I write very little on impulse; I usually write with a particular book in mind, one that I’m still developing or organizing. I also write a lot of commissioned work, for publications of the national press, primarily, but also theatre and essays.

As for the creative dimension, I prefer to write early in the morning, which is the best time of day for me. I write on my desktop computer, sitting in a comfortable chair in a large office, with a glass door on the balcony and the sun coming to visit me. I collect dictionaries and keep them in reach for consultation. My productivity is greatest in the morning, for about four to six hours (when I’m in a more intense process of production), but from the fourth hour onward, what I really do is reread, revise, consult reference materials. I read everything out loud, several times; that’s how I set rhythm and establish harmony. When I’m mulling over an idea for a new book, I tend to take a lot of notes in my notebooks—scattered things, like names for characters, beginnings of crônicas or short stories. I usually only write down ideas, but when I write down full sentences, they almost always unfold into one or two paragraphs at that very moment, when they’re first being recorded. And so there you have the beginning of a new text.

The unimaginable happens in dreams (of which I remember little or nothing), in conversations, in exchanges with real people, in observing the world, in interacting with stones, plants, flowers, water, earth and fire, and smoke, too. In intuition, which I’ve built over the years, in exercises and life tests, to pay full attention and remain confident. Spirituality communicates with me through intuition.

DP: What are some of the main themes in your work?

CS: Through two of my more recent books—Um Exu em Nova York (2018), a collection of short stories, and Exuzilhar (2019), the first volume in a series of selected crônicas—I’ve come to understand that my aesthetic interests revolve around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity. Other topics include racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequalities, though the central theme really is that tension and dialogue mentioned above. I’m also interested in themes of death, love, soccer, and politics. I write a lot about politics. 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…

Translation Tuesday: “Marigô” by Cidinha da Silva

May 19, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva and Daniel Persia

“Can I call you marigô, too?”

A lexical misunderstanding leads to a hilariously awkward exchange in Cidinha da Silva’s “Marigô,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. “Marigô” is an exemplar of the crônica form, a uniquely Brazilian genre of journalistic writing that combines slice-of-life anecdotes with (often ironic) social commentary. Cidinha da Silva, one of Brazil’s most dynamic and prolific contemporary writers and cronistas, utilizes the third-person present tense to capture the conversational nature of the form, mimicking the complex rhythm and set-up of a joke. Here the punchline not only provides laughs, but also a wry statement on Afro-Brazilian identities and the cultural importance of language.

Samantha worships her friend Dandara—for her beauty, her culture, her intelligence, her knowledge of the world, and, above all, her integrity of purpose. Samantha views Dandara as an activist even when talking with her mother on the phone. Every time Dandara calls—which isn’t just once a day—she greets her mother with an “Oi oi oi, Marigô, calling just to say hello!”

Samantha’s face lights up every time. Somehow she got it in her head that Marigô meant “mother” in Yoruba. At home, she wrote down the word in her small dictionary-diary, where she’s been recording the African words that circulate daily in Brazil. She has a ton already—it’s just a matter of finding the right time to start using them in her stories. Dandara thinks her co-worker is an Afro-nut, the kind of person who wants to transform anything and everything into an episode of African rebirth.

On Dandara’s birthday, her mother decides to surprise her and shows up at her work to take them to Rhinosaurus’s, her daughter’s favorite fast food joint. While waiting for her daughter in the parking lot, she amusingly reads Barack Obama’s biography. Samantha ends up leaving work before Dandara; when she sees two black hands behind a steering wheel holding a copy of the biography of the president of the United States, she goes Afro-nuts. Only a fascinating person would read such a book, she thinks. She has to introduce herself, has to get to know that woman so she can soak up all of her knowledge. READ MORE…