In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’ startling and tender work of speculative fiction, The Lisbon Syndrome, a comet has demolished the city of Lisbon to nothing, leaving people on the other side of the globe—in Caracas—to reconstitute the erupted world with only a strictly regulated stream of news, an overarching cloak of localized violence, and an unshakable faith in the potentials of storytelling. Translated expertly by Paul Filev, The Lisbon syndrome presents a powerful, telling perspective on the Venezuelan struggle against a repressive regime. In the following interview, Book Club manager Carol Khoury speaks to Sánchez Rugeles and Filev on the unique journey of this text, the learned method of its translation, and the courage and necessity of literature.
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Carol Khoury (CK): Eduardo, how was the novel received when it came out in Spanish—in Venezuela and elsewhere?
Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (ESR): It’s strange—the novel wasn’t published in the usual way because the English translation came out before the Spanish edition. The Spanish edition will come out later this year, in October, with the independent publisher Suburbano.
I began writing the novel in 2019 and finished it in 2020, and I showed it to a few publishers here in Madrid. It was during the middle of the pandemic, things were really intense at the time, and they told me, “Well, we like the book, but we can’t publish it until 2025, or at the earliest in summer 2024 maybe. If we take it on, you’ll have to wait in line.”
And I was very impatient to have this book published, because the novel was very emotional for me, given that the events in the novel mirrored what was actually happening in Venezuela at the time. I can usually be more patient with my work, but I felt a little anxious to get this book out. A friend read the manuscript—a movie director—and he told me, “I want to turn this into a movie. What do you say—do you want to work on a script with me?”
And I said to him, “Yeah, we can write a script and turn it into a movie, but let me publish the novel first.” But with the pandemic going on, the whole process of getting the book published was very slow. I felt a little sad about having to wait so long to find a publisher, so I started talking with the director, Rodrigo Michelangeli, and one day I said to him, “You know what? I’ll self-publish the book with Amazon. Forget the traditional publishing route. Let’s make this happen.”
So I self-published it with Amazon first, at which point we could begin working on a screenplay. Self-publishing the book was a very difficult process for me. I went through a lot of hurdles. But then in July 2020, the The Lisbon Syndrome finally came out.
It was interesting, because I’m not very good with social media. I wasn’t very good at promoting the book, and it didn’t sell a lot of copies. But then Ruth Greenstein from Turtle Point Press—she published my first book Blue Label, translated by Paul, in 2018—she found out about it and said to me, “Oh, Eduardo, what is this? This is very interesting. Can we talk about this?”
After the success of Blue Label, Turtle Point Press was keen to publish another one of my novels, and Ruth proposed we do the The Lisbon Syndrome. We all agreed that the importance and topical relevance of the novel, dealing as it does with the restrictive and repressive political environment in Venezuela, made it a compelling choice. And the translation appeared with Turtle Point Press in July this year, while the official Spanish version will appear with Suburbano in October.
CK: Actually, this leads to my second question—Paul, this is a very good translation, but you had a very short time to do it. How did you manage this narrow window?
Paul Filev (PF): I translated the novel soon after Eduardo released the self-published version in 2020, and it took me three or four months to complete. Fortunately or unfortunately, this was right in the middle of the pandemic; Melbourne had one of the harshest lockdowns, so I had all the time in the world, unlike all the other times when I can only work on a translation on my days off from work and on evenings and weekends. Not having to go to work meant I had optimal conditions for once. Not only optimal conditions, but, as stressful as the harsh and restrictive lockdown was at the time, it helped set the tone for me to work on the translation. It fitted well with the claustrophobic repression that’s found in the book’s content.
CK: And your process?
PF: I think the best way for me to explain my approach is the way I explain it to all the customers at my work, which has been in the ceramics industry for most of my life. I’m not a potter, but I’ve worked in every area of the industry: I’ve made clay, I’ve made glazes, I’ve loaded kilns and done firing. But these days I just work in the supplies shop helping customers with their clay-related questions—giving out advice on materials and techniques, problem solving technical issues, puzzling out faults and remedies, that sort of thing.
And customers who don’t know me will always ask me if I’m a potter. They want to see my work and know the kind of things I make, and I say to them, “Oh no, I’m just an honorary potter. What I really am is a literary translator.” They usually give me a puzzled look when they hear this. They’re not quite sure what that means.
So I have to explain to them what it is that I do. And over the years, and since I work in a pottery supply shop, it helps me to explain what I do if I compare translating to sculpting from clay—that I approach translation like a ball of clay that’s waiting to be shaped. Only, I’m shaping words.
Like a ball of clay, the original text that I’m working on has every possibility already inside it, and I just need to start carving it out, start shaping it. Most of my early drafting stage is doing exactly this. My first draft is not dissimilar to the process of extruding lengths of clay to build with. Like a potter, I try to work accurately and precisely to start shaping the words that I’m going to put in my document. Pinching and coiling and joining them until I’ve achieved the desired shape. I can’t help but think of the process of translating in terms of working with clay, because I’m so involved in that industry.
I create a first draft, and I work slowly and methodically until I’ve got the basic shape of the translation. Then I let it sit for a time; when a potter makes a piece, they leave it to sit for a while in order for it to firm up, to get to a leather-hard stage. After that, they can trim the piece, smooth over the edges, add decoration, and make other alterations until it’s ready to go into the kiln to be fired. I like to do the same thing with my translation. I don’t cover it in plastic like potters do, but I put it in a folder and shove it away somewhere in a drawer, because for some reason, I feel like there’s this mysterious thing that happens to translations when you lay them aside for a little while. You could say they get leather hard, and then you have something firm to work on. I’ve extruded all the words, I’ve formed it into a basic shape, but it’s still a bit rough around the edges, so I need to smooth over all the rough bits. I start to burnish it and say, “Oh, I don’t like this word, I’ll take it out.” Or, “No this doesn’t sound quite right. I think I’ll say it like this instead.” I keep drafting and polishing it, going through many, many drafts. It’s not unusual for me to do up to ten or more drafts—until I feel it’s polished enough.
And then, when I feel it’s finally polished—when it has a shiny coat of glaze on it—I’m ready to show it. I’m ready to display my work, to pitch it to a publisher and hope they’ll like what they say, that they’ll take it on.
This is how I explain what I do to my customers at work when they find out I’m not a potter, so they can understand what it is I actually do: sculpting words. But don’t ask me to make a pot! That would be a disaster.
CK: I won’t ask you to make a pot, but I do want to ask you about how differently you work when translating prose versus poetry. In The Lisbon Syndrome, there are a number of poetry lines.
PF: I break out into a cold sweat when I see poetry in the text. It’s one of the most challenging and difficult things for me to do, and this is when the collaborative aspect of translating really kicks in for me, because I seek help from other people who have had more practice in in translating poetry. And not just with poetry, but with song lyrics as well.
I really only had to translate a few lines from the poems by Cesário Verde and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. All the other longer poems in the novel, originally in Portuguese, had been translated by others. As I don’t translate from Portuguese, I used existing English translations of the poems—so the credit goes to Richard Zenith, Amanda Hopkinson, Nick Caistor, Edwin Honig, and Susan M. Brown. But to come back to the way that I did approach the translation of the two poems by Cesário Verde and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, I spent quite a bit of time even on those few lines, and sought the help of a native speaker of Portuguese, who was in fact my old Spanish lecturer from university, Isabel Moutinho. She helped me a lot. And, like all good teachers, she set me a challenge. When I showed her my draft translation of the poem by Eugénio de Andrade, she said, “You’ve inverted the order of the last two verses, which seems a pity because it robs the last line of its force. I wonder whether you could consider keeping the same order—is it not possible in English?” I felt like I was back at university again and being pushed to do better. In the end, I was pleased that she challenged me to try to retain the original word order, which I agree retains the force of the original.
Songs are an important element of Eduardo’s work, but for me, song lyrics, like poetry, are very difficult to translate. Jeffrey Peer, from Turtle Point Press, who also edited the novel, was a big help. He came up with some great suggestions that worked well, and helped me match the lyrics to the pitch and rhythm of the song.
CK: Eduardo, can you tell us a bit about the Spanish poetry and how it’s structured?
ESR: Like Paul, I also didn’t translate the Portuguese poetry in the novel. I used existing translations of the poems in Spanish. For the song lyrics by Madredeus, a band from Lisbon, I kept the original Portuguese form, so Paul had to translate the lyrics from that. Unfortunately, in the end, we weren’t able to sort out the permissions to quote the lyrics of the song by Madredeus—“Haja o que houver” (Come What May)—in the novel’s climax, when Fernando confronts the soldiers, and so Paul just distilled the essence of the song and reworked it as a collection of Fernando’s thoughts.
But all of the literary references in The Lisbon Syndrome are taken from works of Portuguese literature. I read a lot of Portuguese poets—especially Pessoa. I went through a period of intense focus on reading authors from Portugal, and that was maybe a curious personal choice. I spent two or three years reading only Portuguese authors. I don’t know why. I was so passionate that I traveled to Portugal by car from Madrid—to Lisbon and the coast. I was in love with this country, with the sounds, with the sights.
And when I returned to Madrid, I started to read authors from Portugal, from the 19th and 20th centuries to the contemporary, poetry and novels. After that, I wanted to tell this story with their writing in my mind; their influences were with me in a strong way. That forms the basis of The Lisbon Syndrome. Miguel Torga, Agustina Bessa-Luís, Fernando Pessoa, Cardoso Pires—all these authors are quoted in the book.
CK: Why did you choose Lisbon for the novel—does it have to do with the large community of Portuguese immigrants in Venezuela? The connection between the two cities?
ESR: Madrid is a rather lively, in fact noisy city. And it’s a cosmopolitan city. But reading all the authors from Portugal, I had the sensation that a characteristic of this country and these people is that they have a kind of melancholy sadness—in the architecture, in the literature, in their urban areas. Porto is a dark city. All cities in Portugal seem a bit dark.
If you walk down some of the little streets of Porto, Braga, Lisbon, I feel these streets are the same of fifty years ago, sixty years ago. They’re very old. And the music from Portugal is sad too—saudade, melancholic. I always had a sense that I wanted to write a tragedy, because Portugal’s history is a tragedy. I studied the feel of the place and was taken by its melancholy aspect. Madrid doesn’t give me that sense. Madrid gives me other things, but not this sense of darkness.
It was interesting, because when I read some of the works by Portuguese authors, I often came across the word “asteroid” in the poetry of Pessoa, in the stories of Torga, and also in the works of contemporary authors like José Luís Peixoto, who is a very good contemporary writer from Portugal. He published a novel called Galveias, which is the story of an asteroid that passed near Alentejo in the south of Portugal. And I feel like there are some felicitous connections there. That’s why Lisbon.
CK: Eduardo, you manage to work many contemporary global challenges into the novel— migration, poverty, pollution, youth apathy, illiteracy, school dropouts—yet the work is pleasant. What is the secret? Literature is a tool, or should I say, a weapon, which you have masterfully employed, but can we really be saved by literature?
ESR: These days, in public life, we are all political beings with strong views and opinions. We have an agenda about everything. We want a better world and we say so. We express this through social networks, campaigning for things like an end to inequality, racism, discrimination, etc. Most of us would agree these are valid and praiseworthy ideals, but I think that stating those ideals in an explicit way in literary works is often detrimental to them, I mean detrimental to story, character, and plot.
I think that today, a lot of literary works focus more on politics and social issues, but I try to avoid this in my works. I prefer to focus on the characters. For me, characters are the most important thing in a story. A character is not a perfect person—they have fears, they have prejudices, they have some strengths, but they have weaknesses too. They’re contradictory, paradoxical beings full of uncertainties and prejudices. Good characters are not cardboard cutouts with a single message.
When I work with characters, I forget my convictions. I think we know that we have this common ground about the political stuff, but when I work with characters I forget all that. I ask them a lot of questions: what is your relationship and your history with your parents? Where did you go to school? What happened to you? What kind of person are you? In these conversations with characters, I build imaginary convictions. Maybe I’ll find a bad person, a racist, a criminal.
A character with a life of their own serves the goal I have been talking about; it serves the interests of what we call literature.
PF: What I really like about the novel is the way the relationship between the optimistic Moreira and the pessimistic Fernando develops over the course of the novel. The way Moreira gradually nurtures and encourages Fernando, helping him overcome his personal struggles to find hope again. And Moreira does this by sharing his life story and his love of books and reading with him. I remember when Moreira first broaches the idea of sharing his story with Fernando, he says, “Sit back, be patient, let me tell you my story.” He says something like, “There are invisible threads that weave our fates together.” For Moreira, storytelling is vital. It serves not only to connect people and communities to their place and time as well as to each other, but, as Barbara put it in her review, Moreira has “a stubborn belief in the power of literature,” and I agree with her one hundred per cent. A belief in its ability to inspire and even move someone to take action and change their lives, the way Fernando does in the end.
The relationship between Moreira and Fernando also resonated personally with me. It reminded me of my own relationship with my dad, who I realize is a Moreira-like figure. Like Moreira, he’s an immigrant, and an optimist, despite a painful and difficult past filled with hardships. He’s a great storyteller, and importantly a great reader as well. My dad taught himself to read Macedonian and English, becoming an avid reader in both languages, and he passed his love of languages and reading on to me. He’s my Moreira—the person who inspired my own belief in the power of language and literature. He taught me the Cyrillic alphabet when I was a teenager so I could learn to read Macedonian, and that is something that has changed my life, that which ultimately opened the door to translating. The relationship between Moreira and Fernando reminded me of this, of what I’ve been able to change in my life through reading and literature.
Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (Caracas, 1977) is a fiction writer, screenwriter, and teacher. He has published five novels: Blue Label/Etiqueta Azul (2010), winner of the Arturo Uslar Pietri award for Latin American literature and shortlisted for the Critics Award of Venezuela; Transylvania, Unplugged (2011), shortlisted for the Arturo Uslar Pietri award for Latin American literature; Liubliana (2012), honorable mention, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Bicentennial Literary Award, and winner of the Critics Award of Venezuela; Jezebel (2013); and Julián (2014). He presently lives in Madrid.
Paul Filev is a Melbourne-based literary translator and editor. He translates from Macedonian and Spanish. He was awarded a Literary Translation Fellowship by Dalkey Archive Press in 2015. His translations from Macedonian include Vera Bužarovska’s The Last Summer in the Old Bazaar (Saguaro Books, 2015) and Sasho Dimoski’s Alma Mahler (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018).
Carol Khoury is an Editor-at-Large at Asymptote, a translator and editor, and the Managing Editor at the Jerusalem Quarterly.
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