In 2023, Bruna Dantas Lobato won a PEN Translates grant for her work on Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin, a moving, feeling novel of how relationships—between parent and child, between lovers, between a body and a city—change, develop, and intwine against powerful institutions and worldly violences. Through the story of Pedro—which is in turn told through the life of his murdered father—Tenório vividly inscribes the urbanity of Porto Alegre and the generations that move through it, along with the cruelty, the mystery, and the love. In this interview, Lobato speaks on the novel’s treatment of racism, its refractions of Baldwin, and how its author draws on Brazil’s rich aesthetic canon.
Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): You’ve spoken before about how passionate you are about translating titles from the northeast of Brazil, but The Dark Side of Skin takes place in in southern Brazil—Porto Alegre—and Tenório has spoken about how the racism it describes is one that is expressed more pointedly in regards to the city’s relatively homogenous population. Could you speak a little bit about how geography or regionality works in this novel, and also about what drew you to translate it?
Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): The Northeast of Brazil, where I grew up, is very underrepresented in literature both in Brazil and abroad. There are very few authors from that region available in translation, especially compared to the whiter metropoles. I’d love to see a greater range of stories from different parts of Brazil in English, so we don’t keep reading the same versions of Latin America over and over again.
I was drawn to Tenório’s novel for similar reasons, for how it presents the experience of a Black man in a predominantly white city with insight and tenderness. It’s a beautiful and painful book, and to have Tenório join the slate of Porto Alegre authors widely available in English with a different kind of book was important to me. I hope the publishers who often tell me that they already have their one Brazilian author—or one author from a certain region—will see that one voice can’t possibly represent a whole country.
XYS: A significant portion of the novel is written in the second person, which is a literary point-of-view that I think is especially sensitive to each individual language and the culture it stems from (e.g. in terms of interpersonal hierarchies, categories of persons, speech-acts). How was it working with the second person here?
BDL: A big chunk of the novel is epistolary, and you’re right that this presents all kinds of challenges. I used the narrator’s orality as a guiding principle and found ways to modulate his tone and level of formality through the pacing, register, and sentence length. The characters relate to each other in slightly different ways in each language, but to similar effect, I hope.
XYS: There can be a dialectic, with narratives that speak on racism, in which such works are ascribed the characterisation of being about racist relations, when they could be better qualified as being about human relations—which include the complexity of race. With this title, racism and its brutality is very much woven into the narrative, but it’s within the complex, mystifying familial and intimate relationships at its centre. Could you speak on how these human characters move inside their world, and how it was for you, translating this book’s layered nature?
BDL: Absolutely, racism and colorism affect all of us, whether negatively or positively, and it was refreshing to see this so clearly stated in this book. There’s no interpersonal relationship that isn’t shaped by it, that doesn’t exist in relation to the constraints of our white world, so the characters in the novel navigate through it everywhere they go, from work to a date to a family dinner. They can’t afford to shy away from it—it’s the stuff of everyday life. For my translation of the title, The Dark Side of Skin (something like ‘The Inside of the Skin’ or ‘Under the Skin’ in the original Portuguese), I thought a lot about Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks—how it’s impossible not have a relationship to whiteness, and how whiteness is so often equated to humanness. That double entendre, that skin has two sides and the side you get changes how you’re seen by the world, is central to the book.
XYS: Tenório has mentioned that James Baldwin was a big influence in his writing of The Dark Side of Skin; was this influence noticeable in the Portuguese, and was it a consideration for you as translator?
BDL: I love Baldwin’s writing and I definitely saw echoes of The Fire Next Time in this novel. The protagonist is very educated and references lots of books and movies throughout, especially Crime and Punishment. I took all this into account and consulted Baldwin and Dostoevsky a few times, but I was careful not to drown out Tenório’s voice. It was a bit of a balancing act: all the literary references had to come through in English, but I also had to make sure the book could still speak for itself, without that apparatus.
XYS: This book is also replete with aesthetic—in addition to literary—references, both in terms of the role that literature takes in the characters’ lives, and also with the various figures of art, music, film, and writing that make up the landscape of the text: major Brazilian figures like Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto. . . How do you think these references perform in the Portuguese, and is it different to how they perform in the English?
BDL: Yes, so many! I’m still making my way through all the movies he mentions, and there are many I’d never heard of before. The English-speaking reader might feel equally ignorant around all the Brazilian authors referenced, but in Portuguese, this conveys a sense of Brazil’s rich literary history and the character’s place in it, as a teacher in modern times working with the canon.
In English, this canon is not as readily available, and it’s not so clear which authors are Black or white, or who’s a big name or a more obscure author, but I hope it’ll at least inspire curiosity.
XYS: Parents and children—a connection that literature will never stop looking at. Tenório uses it here, and you also use it in your own forthcoming novel. Did the nature of the father-son relationship in this novel refract into your own writing somehow?
BDL: My favorite books touch on that connection, which is such fertile ground for fiction. It’s incredibly difficult to view our relatives as people beyond the role they have in our lives, and nearly impossible to render on the page all the facets of a person’s multiple belongings in the world. It took me seven years of writing to get close to capturing how we love and resent and miss family all at the same time, and that there are parts of one another that we’ll never get to see fully.
I was pretty much done with my novel when I translated Tenório’s, but I admired how the father is both a parent to his narrator son and a man of his own: flawed, contradictory, enmeshed in the ills of the society he grew up in. I can only hope my mother character is as layered and interesting, and that my daughter character can see her with as much compassion and clarity.
XYS: Teaching also has an overarching presence in this novel, and Tenório is himself a teacher. What do you think the novel communicates about teaching, about education—whether between a teacher and a student, or between a parent and a child? And if fiction teaches, what does this book teach us?
BDL: I think it has more to say about books than about education per se: that books help us see and understand each other, that there’s something about everybody’s otherness that melts away a bit when we genuinely engage with someone’s story. Novels can teach and ask hard questions, though I don’t think that’s always their aim. This one made me sit with a man’s grief, his personal history, his relationship to his Blackness. There’s a lot to unpack here, and it might require reading it multiple times. I’m honored I got to listen in, that Tenório shared his wisdom with us.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is the author of the upcoming novel Blue Light Hours (Grove Atlantic, 2024) and translator of Stênio Gardel’s The Words that Remain (New Vessel Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature, among others.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, editor, and translator. shellyshan.com
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