Marcelo Lotufo is a literary translator and founder of Edições Jabuticaba, an independent Brazilian press with a unique focus on poetry in translation. In today’s post, he sits down with Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Brazil, Lara Norgaard, to discuss the burgeoning indie publishing scene in São Paulo and the role of translation in Brazilian literature.
Lara Norgaard (LN): What was your vision when your started Jabuticaba? How did you see it fitting into the Brazilian publishing scene?
Marcelo Lotufo (ML): I had the sense that an indie scene was starting in Brazil. Lote 42, for instance, was a press that had started a few years before Jabuticaba. Editora Patuá had started around the same time. And Marília Garcia, who is a poet, she and her husband, Leonardo Gandolfi, who is also a poet, also started a press, LunaParque. The scene had been around for four, maybe five years before Jabuticaba started. Before, there were some smaller presses that didn’t last for very long. People would start self-publishing and then a bigger press would invite them to their offices and then they would close the press. You saw that happen with Daniel Galera and other groups.
Poetry has always been sidelined, though. Brazil doesn’t have a big poetry market in the big presses, so smaller presses tend to crop up and do a lot of poetry. 7Letras and Azougue, which are both from Rio, have been around for almost twenty years and they’ve done a lot of poetry. But for a long time there wasn’t exactly a scene.
So, this scene was starting to come out. I was in the US and I wanted to translate some of the poetry I was working on, but I couldn’t get anyone to publish it. And they were big names, like Anne Carson and Bernadette Mayer. So I figured I would try to do it myself, and that’s how Jabuticaba started. There wasn’t a big vision, but there was the idea that no one else was doing this. You have to pay copyright fees if you are translating contemporary big names, so people either chose to do something from the public domain or something more underground, on the handicraft side of things, which meant they wouldn’t have to pay for copyrights, but also that it would not sell at bookstores. We thought that there was space for us there.
We tried it out with Anne Carson to see if we could actually pay the copyrights and sell not at a loss. And that went really well for several reasons. One is that Vilma Arêas, who is a well-known name in Brazil, already wanted to translate Anne Carson. She wanted to do the translation, and I said sure, yes, let’s do it, so we had a big name translating. And I didn’t know it at the time, but a lot of people were already working on Anne Carson in Brazil, which meant that suddenly there was a lot of interest around her. That brought us more attention than we would have gotten if we had started with a different author. For example, the next book we did was John Yau, who is a poet from New York and also well-known in poetry circles, but he probably wouldn’t have gotten the same attention because there wasn’t this hype around him in Brazil. Our first book helped us finance the following projects, and there was a lot of luck in that.
It also turns out that poetry is much cheaper than prose, which means we can afford the copyrights and do small printings if we do most of everything ourselves, like the book design, etc. We have help, but it’s mainly advice that people give us, or artists who are friends and help us design the covers. Lately a friend and designer, Bruna Kim, has been overseeing our design and art. The idea is to keep the costs as low as possible so we can actually invest in the copyrights and get the books we want published.
LN: Tell me more about the books that you want published. What is Jabuticaba’s editorial line, especially when it comes to translation?
ML: At the beginning, when it was basically just me and a friend of mine, Adi Gold, it was just the English-language poetry Adi and I were reading. We were both at Brown and worked on this together as a fun project. But now the press is a little bit more structured. There are four of us in the press. Rodrigo, Douglass, and Mariana, and I. And Adi is our editor at large, so to speak, always sending suggestions. And each one of us has our own area of expertise. I’m connected to the English-speaking world, Mariana works a lot with Spanish. Rodrigo works with Russian and Brazilian poetry, and Douglass translates from German. He lives in Berlin, and he’s very connected to Portugal. We are becoming more diverse as time passes. Each one of us has our own ideas and our own lines that we look for.
The basic idea is to keep doing some “copy left” stuff, work that is already in the public domain but that hasn’t been translated. We did a Kurt Schwitters selection, for example. He had no translation collections in Portuguese, of course, just a few poems translated here and there. That was the first actual book of his poetry in Brazil. And then on the other side of things we translate big contemporary names that are well recognized in their original language but that aren’t getting translated into Portuguese. So we’ve done Anne Carson, we’ve done Bernadette Mayer, and now this month we did Jan Wagner, the German who got the Georg-Büchner Prize, which is the big prize for German literature. He’s rather known in Germany, but no way he was going to get translated into Portuguese by any one of the bigger presses. They just don’t have that tradition. This year, we are also doing a collection of poetry by Eileen Myles, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Susana Thenon’s Ova Completa, among some other stuff.
LN: How do you see the role of translated texts in Brazilian literature and publishing more generally?
ML: Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and the Brazilian concrete poets more generally do a lot of translation. It was part of their literary project to create a new canon with their influences. So they did that, but it was very connected to their own projects as poets. Their translations are sort of contained. It’s not about filling the gaps. Of course, we don’t want to fill every gap that there is in the Brazilian translation market, because we just do between six and eight books a year.
I was in Italy recently, and if you go to a bookstore there, you find so many people in translation. Every bookstore has a small poetry section and they have a lot of translations. Of course they have their preferences, and they usually have a lot of Russian stuff. But a lot of the people we’re thinking about translating here have already been done there. It’s the same thing in the US. A lot of the people we’re working on, like some Italian poets, for instance, have at least one book published in another language. But there’s nothing in Portuguese. You need to get the Nobel Prize to be translated in Brazil.
People have been doing a lot online, on blogs. You have a few blogs that do a lot of translations. Escamandro is probably the most famous one right now. They’ve been around for a while. You do have people doing this work, but I still like the idea of having the books in a bookstore and not just online. Maybe it’s because I don’t read that many blogs, so I always felt excluded from that scene.
LN: That’s interesting, because Jabuticaba has begun to play with the physical form of its books. Currently you have a zine series called Bacuri, and the first volume showcases contemporary Latin American women poets. How does the materiality of the book-object relate to the kind of content that you publish?
ML: There was this press in Brazil that closed recently called Cosac Naify, which did amazing graphic projects, but the books were very expensive. Now, you have the inheritors of that kind of project, and they do amazing books at a very, very high price. But Brazil is a poor country, so our main goal is for our books to be accessible. They should not be expensive. That’s why we have very simple projects that allow us to sell books for R$30 at bookstores. We do play around with other forms, and we want to explore a little bit more, but if it makes the books cost R$50, R$60, it’s a no.
That’s why the Bacuri is fun. It’s a very short magazine, and originally we wanted to give it out at book fairs for free. It turned out that it wasn’t that cheap, so we had to sell it for R$5, which is still almost symbolic. We’re doing more Bacuri and we’re trying to play around with zine formats that are cheap. It’s also a way for us to explore things that later on we can turn into books. Right now we are working on an Italian Bacuri with some Italian poets. All of them write about the immigration crisis in Europe or other contemporary issues. The idea is to go beyond the comparisons between Brazil and Italy because of their respective major corruption investigations, “Operation Car Wash” and “Clean Hands.” We can also make other comparisons now with the fascist elected governments in both countries. So we are doing a Bacuri with this in mind, which is something that is cheap and simple so that we can try it out. And maybe we can expand it into an actual book collection of Italian poetry. The Bacuri is very short. It only has seven pages. The Bacuri is one space where we can try things out, and maybe we will find other formats that are playful and still cheap. Though, as you can see, the emphasis for us is always on content and not so much on form . . .
LN: What is the role of cheap forms like zines in contemporary Brazilian literature?
ML: I think it’s the same as in the US. Most contemporary poets start putting out zines before they put out a book. I think we should have even more zines out before people put out actual books. It’s this place to try out and understand what a book is. How you make a whole out of the pieces, how you put something together.
I think the zine scene is growing along with the indie presses. You have a scene of indie book fairs and poetry gatherings where independently published books are sold, and that’s the same space for people selling zines. There’s no point in putting out a zine if you don’t have anyone to give it to or anywhere to sell. So since we have these book fairs, now you have more places where people can sell their zines. And institutions like Casa das Rosas, which is a poetry center in São Paulo, have started the tradition of having their students put out zines after the writing courses they offer. Some are really good because the students work on those poems throughout the course. With all of that, the idea of zines has started getting more traction.
Our books are not zines, though. We started thinking in terms of chapbooks. Some of the first books we put out were inspired by the New Directions pamphlet series. It’s a book but it’s also not really a book. It’s in between.
LN: What is your readership like? Who reads your books?
ML: That’s a fun question. Some people buy online and we don’t really know who they are. All we know is where we are sending the books, so we get to see where there are poetry readership scenes. Brasília buys a lot of our books, probably because we don’t work with any bookstores there, so people have to buy online. But we’ve seen a lot from other places like Belo Horizonte, which does have a lot of bookstores, and from Porto Alegre as well.
I also read a lot of Brazilian poetry and then see the poets who I read buy our books. That’s very exciting. Part of doing these translations means bringing a poet that I like into the Brazilian scene. It’s fulfilling to watch the Brazilian poets I like buy the books that we’ve translated. We also sell at book fairs. A lot of the same people come every book fair to see the new book that’s being put out, so you have a sense that people like what we’re doing. They keep coming back and reading.
LN: Jabuticaba publishes some Brazilian work as well, in addition to all of these texts in translation. Who are some Brazilian poets who haven’t been translated into English who you would like to suggest to a wider audience?
ML: I like Fabiano Calixto and Tarso de Melo. Both of them are very connected to São Paulo. I’m from São Paulo, so I like reading their poetry. Their work talks about the city in a flâneur sort of way, and I enjoy that. I think it would be fun for someone not from São Paulo to get a sense of the city.
LN: How about Brazilian poets who have been translated?
ML: Marília Garcia and Ana Martins Marques. I enjoy their poetry very much. There are also some older names, and I don’t know if they’ve been translated before. I think Brazil got deeper into the festival circuit recently, so people are traveling more, which helps them get translated. I’m not sure if the generation before them has been translated. Carlito Azevedo*, for instance, is a great poet, and I can’t remember having seen his work in English. The same with Marcos Siscar.
LN: Do you have any advice for people interested in starting small presses or getting involved in indie publishing circles?
ML: You shouldn’t wait to have a press to be part of the scene, so to speak. You have to be going to festivals, reading people, going to poetry readings before you open your press. It’s much more fun if you have friends who you are collaborating with. There isn’t a lot of money going around in the indie sphere, so it’s mostly about having fun and doing something you believe in and enjoy.
My other piece of advice is to be small. I read a lot of articles about the market in Brazil before I opened the press, and there was this one pattern that I found. Everyone who was failing failed in their first year because they had done a giant printing of something that they were certain would be a hit and then it wasn’t. So then all of their assets were in that one book that couldn’t sell. If you print five thousand books and you only sell two hundred, you can’t even distribute the remaining ones to libraries. That’s where all of your money is. Everyone was failing by starting big. Maybe it’s because they were starting presses with an eye on being profitable and making money rather than with the goal of being part of a literary scene. So being small has been our key to success.
The New Yorker has a piece about New Directions and how they’re organized. The founder organized the press so that it can’t grow. There’s a limit on the number of books they can publish a year. That’s because the emphasis should always be on quality and good literature. That’s what I want for Jabuticaba. We do not want to grow. We just want to keep doing good books. There’s so much to be translated. Some of what we publish is what no one would do because it’s not immediately profitable, because there isn’t a big audience for it. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be circulating. If you are small, you can afford to do a book for three hundred people, which is okay.
That’s the idea: be small and keep doing good stuff.
*Editor’s note: Carlito Azevedo’s work has been translated into English, including in the Fall 2017 issue of Asymptote.
Marcelo Lotufo has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Brown University and currently acts as a postdoctoral researcher at the State University of Campinas. His Portuguese translations of poetry by John Yau, Adrienne Rich, and Rosmarie Waldrop have been published by Edições Jabuticaba. Lotufo’s fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in a range of academic and literary publications including Revista Pessoa, Suplemento Pernambuco, and Jornal Rascunho.
Lara Norgaard is a journalist, literary critic, and an editor-at-large in Brazil for Asymptote. Her reporting has been published by Agência Pública and The Princeton Echo, and her literary criticism can be found in Peixe-elétrico. She is the founding editor of the magazine Artememoria, a free-access arts publication with English-language content about the memory of Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship, funded by Princeton University’s post-graduate Labouisse Fellowship. In 2018, she taught English letters at the State University of Londrina as a 2017–2018 Fulbright Grant recipient in Brazil. She currently lives in São Paulo.
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