In his debut novel, The Words That Remain, Stênio Gardel’s draws out the sublime transformations that language enables. Written in the vivid mind of Raimundo, an illiterate, gay man from rural Brazil, the novel depicts the after-effects of violence, the burden of shame, the pain of unrequited love—and movingly, how learning how to read and write in his old age has transformed all these experiences. We were proud to present this one-of-a-kind novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Gardel and his translator, Bruna Dantas Lobato, talks to us about underrepresentation of Brazil’s northeastern region, queer literature, and combating prejudices with writing.
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Rachel Stanyon (RS): Firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on this wonderful debut novel. Could you tell us a bit about your paths here?
Stênio Gardel (SG): I started really dedicating myself to writing at the end of 2016. Before then, I’d only had a strong desire, and was storing everything I’d tried to write in computer files or drawers. I had carried this desire for a very long time—since I was twelve or thirteen years old—but never had the courage or the initiative to start, nor the dedication required to become an author. Then, at the end of 2016, I started taking classes with the writer Socorro Acioli, and everything changed from there. I learned a lot from her, and that was where The Words That Remain started.
Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): Like Stênio, I was also born and raised in the northeast of Brazil, but when I was about seventeen, I got a scholarship to go to a boarding school in New Hampshire for a while—I had the colonized dreams of speaking French and Latin—and then ended up going to college in New England. I stuck around, went to grad school in New York, and somehow became an immigrant in America.
I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a child, but it was when I found myself as a foreigner for the first time that I realized I was also already a translator; I didn’t really get to choose it. There were so many books I loved that I wanted to share with the people around me in my new life, and I was also continuously writing, so translation—translating Brazilian literature—felt like a way to be my full self again. I was an English major and then a comparative literature major, but it was still very Western, and it felt like I had renounced this huge part of myself. To feel like my full self again, I started translating a bunch in my free time, and took translation classes.
That’s what eventually brought me to Stênio’s work. I was committed to translating books from the northeast of Brazil, which is so underrepresented both in Brazil and abroad, because obviously writing from the big metropolises like São Paulo and Rio always gets a lot more attention. I really wanted to bring the kind of life I knew into the life I live now and into the English language. It’s an honor to translate a book like this one.
RS: It’s so interesting that both of your journeys to this book seem to relate to not being able to fully express something about who you are or what you want. This seems to have parallels to Raimundo’s own story, and I think all of us—even if it’s not to the extent that Raimundo has to hide—can somehow relate to this experience. Stênio, did you draw on your experience of taking these writing workshops for Raimundo’s story of learning to read and write as an adult?
SG: I think the parallel is there, but I don’t think I did it on purpose. Raimundo has a lot in common with me: like him, I grew up in a non-urban area until I was seventeen, and I’m gay—but we are also different. I was able to go to school from a very young age, while he could not, and I never suffered the violence that he did. So there is a kind of closeness, but also distance between me and Raimundo. But, of course, my story somehow relates to his, and I believe that literature and writing feed off that: all my experiences, from learning about creative writing to experiences from my work, or from my personal life. Everything comes together in the moment that I’m in front of a blank page.
BDL: I think a lot about how to bring my own personal experiences into translation. What is me and what is Stênio? Where do I end and where does he begin?
I’ve just finished writing my very first novel, and rereading a few passages of The Words that Remain just before this interview, It was such a surprise to recognize something that I was also thinking about, and that appears in my own writing. For example, there is a shoe box with the letter under Raimundo’s bed; as I was writing my novel, I really wanted the character to have a hidden side. So, I thought, “I know what I’m going to do here”—thinking it was fully original—“I’m going to make her have a shoe box under her bed!” And then I came back to this book, and of course this is what my subconscious was tapping into. So not only do I bring my life into this translation—some of my own perceptions, my own reading, my own experiences, my own language—it also comes into my writing. There’s a constant dialogue, which I really appreciate.
RS: How did you approach your collaboration on this project? Both being native Brazilian Portuguese speakers and being from similar parts of Brazil, did you work closely together?
SG: I was so surprised that both Bruna and Michael, from New Vessel, really welcomed me to work on the translation. It was such an interesting process; I’m learning that, although I created the story and wrote the book, the translation and the future film adaptation are new products. They are kind of the same story, but they build on different points and create different pictures. Of course, the translation is closer to the original book, but there were parts where Bruna had to intervene, and she intervened so beautifully.
BDL: It was my first time working with a living author, but I really welcomed it and was grateful to Stênio. There was a lot we didn’t know about each other, but we played it by ear and found out as we went along what was relevant. I don’t like to ask the writer a lot of questions; I would rather have a really consistent vision that I bring to the table and ask questions to the people around me. But when he read the whole thing, his vision also came into the mix. It was a phenomenal experience that I’d never had before, and I really hope I get to have it more often. It wasn’t as straightforward as some of the other projects where I worked with one editor, and it had that kind of insular experience to it. I felt like there were a lot of hands: two editors, Stênio, and me. There were external forces. It was a new and unique experience for both of us.
RS: The world that Raimundo inhabits is very different from many typical representations of Brazil in popular culture. Could you tell us a little about the social and political context of the book and its publication in your country?
SG: I’m not going to say that it’s the first book to have this kind of character; especially in the last few years, we’ve had a good amount of publications that bring characters from underrepresented groups into literature. But I knew that it would be a challenge to have the main character as a gay, illiterate man. Firstly, because I had to find a way to write his voice—what is a voice of a man like that like? One of my choices was to refrain from following all the rules of grammar in the original version, because I could not have this character speaking and thinking as though he had been to school since he was young.
It was also very important to bring this character to a great publishing house at a time when in Brazil, we were under a very extremist government—a far-right government—and the book is the total opposite of that. I believe literature can help people think about and question their own reality, and I’d like to think that when people read my book and looked at that environment, they could perhaps question their own privileges and prejudices, and their own relationships with each other. I am very happy that a lot of people have reached out to me to talk about their experiences of reading the book; very often, they tell me really private stories about themselves that were really connected with Raimundo’s story, and for me that is so beautiful. It makes me believe in literature even more, and in how important it is for us to bring even more characters like him into books and have people encounter them.
BDL: I love his character so much, and there was so much there that I saw in my own upbringing. There are certain things that I recognize as part of the experience—the speech patterns, for example; but there was also so much that I didn’t know, because I didn’t have a life that is representative of everybody there, and neither does Raimundo. It’s unique to those circumstances and upbringing and class; it’s a conversion of factors. But in more general terms, because Brazil is such a large country—much like the United States where I live now—it is very divided. Historically, the northeast of Brazil was the most brutally colonized part of the country. If you read Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, or other classic books on the subject, you will see that, through the sugarcane plantations, the land was harvested so many times that it is now completely dead. It’s a desert, even though it’s by the ocean. You can’t even grow weeds in it. Even when there is water, the soil is so impoverished it can’t absorb it anymore. This caused mass migrations from the northeast of Brazil to more affluent parts of the country.
We also have a distinct dialect and a unique accent, and there is prejudice against the northeast because of its history. It’s also the most uneducated part of the country, with the highest illiteracy rate in South America, and poverty is such a big issue there. It is also the most left-leaning region of Brazil: the most “liberal” (although this word is an Americanism on my part) presidents and politicians we’ve had have been elected largely by northeastern voters. So it feels markedly different from the rest of the country: In the south of Brazil, there are very large German and Italian populations who maybe vote for Bolsonaro, who maybe are fond of the dictatorship, who are pretty wealthy and white, and may end up becoming Victoria’s Secret supermodels; in the northeast of Brazil, it’s more working class, mostly people of color, who are just trying to make do.
Things have of course changed a lot over time, but that’s the history of the northeast. We’re at the forefront of a lot of labor rights struggles, which I’m very proud of. People often ask, “Isn’t the northeast very uneducated?” especially when I meet other Brazilians; and in New York, where I lived for many years, I would meet Brazilians from the south or from the southeast who would say, “Why do you talk so funny?” or, “You’re from the northeastern of Brazil? I’m shocked, you speak English!” or, “You went to school?!” So I like to show the other side, which is the incredibly rich culture. We have our own beautiful music that the other regions copy all the time—they whitewash it, to be honest—and our own dialect. Much like white communities here do with black slang, other regions of Brazil can’t come up with their own, so they appropriate northeastern slang; it’s that kind of constant, very uneven exchange. I know the southeastern accent incredibly well because that’s the accent on the evening news, but they don’t know the way we talk. There is the dominant Brazilian culture, what is considered the definitive version of Brazil, and the more marginalized, which is an incredibly huge population and very vast, but not as appreciated or recognized. So it is important to me to show a variety of ways of looking at it, and telling a queer story was one of them.
RS: The Words that Remain is filled with so many beautiful images, written in such simple and natural, yet elegant language; it seems to simultaneously capture something about the very practical struggles that accompany illiteracy, and the power of language as not only a communicative tool but an artistic one. You talked, Stênio, about how hard it was to try to translate that experience into your novel in Portuguese. Bruna, how did you capture that simplicity in English, and were there any other challenges?
BDL: I love simple but lyrical, complex language. Actually, I’m not going to call it simple; I’m going to call it deceptively simple. It does a lot of work with just a flick of the hand, and I admire writing like that. It’s the kind of writing I want to do, so it wasn’t challenging because it already matches my aesthetic interests. It’s the way that I’m inclined to write, and it’s also why I was interested in the book. I like to think that I don’t choose books just because they’re sitting there; it’s because I see something that I think I can do well. I don’t think every person can or should translate every book—that’s probably misguided. There should be a reason why you want to do a book specifically, and speaking Portuguese is not enough of a reason. I fought some other translators for this one, and I’m glad, because I think I brought something to the table that felt intimate. I felt that I understood the way Raimundo talked. I felt that I could do the dialogue justice, and that’s not how I feel about every book at all. There are books that I won’t touch; I don’t think they’re in my voice, or a voice that I have any knowledge about. I think being discerning in that way would help not only authors and publishers, but also translators. Instead of making a northeastern character sound like they’re from somewhere in the American south, like Georgia, I could do something interesting, that actually has intentionality because I understand the language—there would be more room for that kind of thing.
There were other challenges, though, that definitely came up: crafty concerns, like how to deal with the fragmentation or with the shifting verb tenses. Unlike standard English, Portuguese is also very comfortable with comma splices, and I’m a huge advocate of long sentences; if the sentence is long, I think: does it lag in the middle? Does it sag a bit, or does it have forward momentum? Is that what’s going to help carry the sentence through? And in Raimundo’s case, there was this forward momentum. There was this speed to it, this swiftness, so it didn’t feel that long. It felt just like the cadence of storytelling, which is full of meandering. I tried to capture it that way. Another writer I translate, Caiao Fernando Abreu, who is a very important queer writer of short stories in Brazil, has these four-page-long sentences, and I love them. In his case, it’s for a different reason: he wants it to be breathless, sensual, so I prioritize it that way.
Another example of a challenge is the language around transgender and queer experiences being specific to each country. It’s like with the caveat I gave for the word “liberal”: if I’m just transposing a Western sensibility onto the terminology, I won’t really be doing it justice. Stênio was incredibly helpful—as was the editor from New Vessel Press, Michael Wise—in helping me figure out how to convey this experience of queerness into English without pigeonholing it, or using a word that in English has a different connotation.
RS: Reading The Words that Remain, though, I still was trying to think—as I always do, especially when reviewing—what does this remind me of? In a way, it struck me as like an anti-Call Me By Your Name: Raimundo’s experience seems to be almost the exact opposite of Elio’s, who is supported and encouraged in his summer of self-discovery by his parents in an upper middle class, educated, and cosmopolitan milieu. Stênio, are there any traditions that you felt you were working with or fighting against when you were writing this novel; and Bruna, were there texts that you drew on as part of your research?
SG: I had just watched Call Me By Your Name before making a deal with the publisher, and I thought exactly the same as you. It is so different from my story, but it’s kind of a similar character. It really made me wonder whether I could be up against what Bruna brought up about writing from the northeast, with northeastern, marginalized characters—not only Raimundo but also Suzzanný, for example. In this sense, I was writing against the more traditional and better represented characters that we have been seeing here in Brazilian literature for a very long time. Also, in the Portuguese version, my writing is not traditional at all. Most of the books we have here strictly follow Portuguese grammar, but it did not make sense to me to use that kind of language to tell Raimundo’s story.
When it comes to a more traditional background in literature, we have wonderful northeastern writers like Graciliano Ramos, whom I love; José de Alencar, one of our first novelists, is a writer from my state; Rachel de Quieroz; Maria Valéria Rezende, who is a contemporary; and Marcelino Freire. What all these writers have in common is that they write about characters in poverty, and about groups of people that face difficulties that do not appear in other books.
BDL: I love hearing this list, because those are the authors I grew up with and love. Rachel de Quieroz’s book on the drought period is fantastic and a very formative book for me. Many of the writers mentioned have written books essential to everyone in Brazil: we study them in school, and they’re a big part of who we are, but northeastern books definitely have particular tropes like the drought, so I loved that Stênio included a flood, which mirrors my experience of the contemporary northeast.
There’s a lot that I saw in The Words That Remain that counters some of the more stereotypical northeastern writing. I also loved that Raimundo goes somewhere where he meets Suzzanný, but it’s not written that it’s São Paulo or Rio; as far as I know, he’s still in the northeast. He doesn’t leave the region, whereas these kinds of characters would usually go to the white, cosmopolitan south of Brazil. So there are a few things that I see Stênio doing differently from other authors from the northeast.
RS: Finally, the million-dollar question: Does Raimundo ever read the letter?
SG: Yes. We have to talk about the letter! In every book club, we discuss the letter. Some hate that I didn’t show it; some just love it. It was kind of supposed to be divisive like that.
There was a letter in the very first draft of the novel, but when the text got critical readings from professionals and editors, I was told that not showing the letter could be more impactful and potent to both the story and Raimundo’s arc. At first it was very hard for me to accept it: I could not imagine having Raimundo not opening and reading the letter at the end. It was my personal dream. But as I talked to those people and thought about it—I always tried to put the text first, and that was what I did. I put the book first, and decided not to show the letter. And I’m so happy. I think we definitely found a much more interesting ending.
Stênio Gardel was born in 1980 in the rural northeast of Brazil. The Words That Remain is his first novel.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a Brazilian writer and literary translator based in St. Louis. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and other publications, and her literary translations include Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries, Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain, and Giovana Madalosso’s Tokyo Suite.
Rachel Stanyon is a translator from German into English and a senior copyeditor with Asymptote. She holds a master’s in translation and in 2016 won a place in the New Books in German Emerging Translators Programme. Her first full-length non-fiction translation has recently been published with Scribe.
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