Carla Bessa wears many hats: theater actress, director, poet, short story writer, novelist, and translator. Born in Rio de Janeiro and now based in Berlin, she has translated Germanophone writers—Max Frisch (Switzerland), Ingeborg Bachmann (Austria), Thomas Macho (Austria), Christa Wolf (Germany), and more—into Brazilian Portuguese for São Paulo-based publishers WMF Martins Fontes and Editora Estação Liberdade, as well as Editora Trinta Zero Nove in Mozambique. As a translator, she works on fiction and nonfiction as well as young adult and children’s literature. As a writer, she writes what may be termed as “cross-genre” or “hybrid works,” questioning the boundaries demarcating limitless possibilities; this would eventually earn her Brazil’s most important literary award, the Prêmio Jabuti, given to her short story collection Urubus (The Vultures, Confraria do vento, 2019).
In this interview, I spoke with Carla on her award-winning works that cross the conventional genres of poetry, play, and prose; linguistic politics in the Lusophone world; and the intricacies of translating German-language writers into the Brazilian Portuguese.
Author photo by Hubert Börsig.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Urubus and Todas uma, two of your short story collections, were translated by Lea Hübner into the German for Transit Verlag. Your 2017 book, Aí eu fiquei sem esse filho, on other hand, was rendered into the Greek by Nikos Pratsinis for Skarifima Editions. In the Anglosphere, you have been translated by Fábio Mariano and Elton Uliana. To anyone working on your works from their Brazilian Portuguese originals, what demands do you think these translators would face—in particular those translating you into German and English?
Carla Bessa (CB): The other day, I read an interview with my colleague Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel—the German translator of Nobel laureate Jon Fosse—in which he said: “Every literary text is an aesthetic project in its own terms. The translation is good if it realizes this aesthetic project in a style that is appropriate and consistent without breaks.”
I agree with that, despite the particularities of syntactic and verbal structures between Brazilian Portuguese and German. (As for English: I haven’t mastered this language in depth, but I dare say that the differences are minor.) I believe that the greatest difficulty in translating my texts is not of a textual or grammatical nature, but a cultural one. In my writing, I work very closely with spoken language, sometimes even using a kind of verbatim technique. So the translator of my work needs to have an in-depth knowledge not only of the environment where the stories take place—specifically the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro—but also, and above all, of the musicality of the Brazilian Portuguese spoken in these layers of society that I portray. I was very pleased that the translators who have translated me into English so far—Elton Uliana and Fabio Mariano—are Brazilian. Normally, we tend to think that a literary translator should have the target language as their mother tongue, but I don’t think that applies to all types of texts. In my case, the main challenge lies precisely in transferring this specific social environment with its many overlapping layers of cultural influences into the language and reality of German- and English-speaking countries, because this environment and its characters are the basis of my aesthetic project: to return here to the idea presented by Schmidt-Henkel.
Elton Uliana, a Brazilian who has lived in England for a long time, is, in my opinion, an ideal person for this kind of challenge, and our collaborations have been really fruitful. He has already translated several of my short stories as well as chapters from my novel Minha Murilo. Now all we need is a publisher in the English-speaking market.
AMMD: The multiplicity of the Germanophone writers you translate into the Brazilian Portuguese is undeniable: Swiss playwright-novelist Max Frisch, Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, German novelist-essayist Christa Wolf, Austrian philosopher Thomas Macho, among others. I’m curious about your translation process: are there parallels and variances, process-wise, in translating across the differing genres, aesthetics, and movements these writers write from?
CB: Although their styles are very different, what unites these authors is that they share a common time and space: the second half of the twentieth century in Europe. So, I’d say they’re driven by similar anxieties and obsessions, specifically post-war European thinking, social unrest, and the consequences of fascism and the division of Germany. These are themes that are present in their works, even if their books don’t deal with them openly. They are there in a subliminal way. For example, when Christa Wolf writes her version of Medea, in which she rehabilitates this figure from antiquity (as her Medea is not the murderer of her own children), she is echoing the voices of the entire feminist movement of her time, which seeks to redefine the position of Western women. Something similar, albeit in a different style, happens with Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann.
As for the translation process and its parallels, what reverberates in these works for me is the difficulty with their stream-of-consciousness narratives—what I usually call “cascade of thoughts.” This is reflected in their syntax, in the excessively long sentences. I think there was a tendency in twentieth century German literature to abuse compound sentences because they mirror this associative, aesthetic, and philosophical complexity. This is something that these authors have in common. Younger authors are working with a different language, which sometimes goes against the grain. They are no less complex—on the contrary—but their complexity lies on reduction.
For example, last year I translated a trilogy of plays by Wolfram Höll, a contemporary playwright who has won many awards here in Germany. His plays emphasize restraint and minimalism, and the sentences are extremely short and the language very dense, verging on poetry. In this translation, I was faced with a different kind of challenge: I had to concentrate on rhythm and musicality and try to find an equivalent in Brazilian Portuguese. It was a very rewarding job because it allowed me—or rather forced me—to recreate. The book has been published by the recently launched publishing house Besouros Abstêmios. It was a process that gave a lot to me as an author, as it comes closer to my own language.
AMMD: How do you choose the authors and texts you translate? Are there certain criteria you follow or are your choices grounded more on intuition and urgency?
CB: I find this question very interesting because, in my opinion, it says a lot about the working conditions of translators in the literary market. From what I’ve seen, many translators—especially at the start of their careers—translate at their own risk, without a contract; only when the translation is ready do they go after a publisher for possible publication. This seems to me to be a trend in the publishing market of many countries, and I think it’s worrying, as the immense work of translating a book occurs, from the outset, unpaid. I understand that translators want to establish themselves in the market first, but if they work without remuneration, this leads to a vicious circle of exploitation in a profession that is already very poorly paid. Even for me, someone with a lot of experience, I’ve pitched the translation of an interesting work to a publisher, and they in turn asked me if I had already translated the whole work. Of course not! If I approach the publisher, it’s because I want to be hired for it. When I started out, we would just do a sample translation of twenty to thirty pages and go after a publisher. We’d only get on with the translation after signing a contract. In Germany, this is still the habitus—and I think it’s the right way.
Now my answer to your question could perhaps be a little disappointing: as I refuse to work without pay, for the reasons I’ve just mentioned, I don’t actually choose my authors. To date, I’ve translated eleven books by seven different authors (I’m currently working on my twelfth translation project). In fact, the only one that I selected was Wolfram Höll. All the others were commissioned works for which I was approached by publishers. In terms of translations, I’m very eclectic and I accept almost everything I’m asked to do; I think you learn a lot from different styles and themes. The only thing I wouldn’t take on is literature from before the twentieth century, because I don’t feel competent enough in terms of the language, and I don’t think I’ve mastered early Portuguese to the point of making a good translation.
AMMD: I would like to know your take as a translator from the Global South working with two dominant languages (German and Portuguese): given translation’s colonial legacy and history since time immemorial, how can we work towards an anti-imperialist and decolonial publishing industry?
CB: The colonial legacy, especially in Brazil, is language. Portuguese is, by its very nature, the language of the colonizer, but we shouldn’t forget that when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in 1500, more than a thousand indigenous languages were being spoken there. Then there was the arrival of more than four million enslaved men, women, and children from Africa, as well as European immigrants from other countries, refugees, or seekers of gold and diamonds. All these different people brought their own languages and cultures. In this way, a very distinctive language developed in Brazil, but it remained far from the official language used in institutions and documents, the so-called “standard Portuguese.”
When I was born, the Modernist movement had already appropriated and publicized books using Brazilian Portuguese as a literary language, but I remember that in my school days, there was still a strong distinction between Brazilian Portuguese and so called “correct Portuguese,” which would be the standard written and spoken Portuguese. This imposition of the standard language in literature continues to this day, despite all the awareness-raising movements that have been going on for over a hundred years. This discrepancy between the “correct” written language and the “wrong” spoken language has been and continues to be a way of inhibiting Brazilians, especially those without access to education. It takes away their voice.
So I think that an important job for contemporary writers and translators is to help ensure that this Brazilian variety of spoken Portuguese is naturally adopted in writing. I’ll never forget a talk I had with a young writer, who said that his impetus to start writing was reading a book in which the favela dialect is used. He said, “At that moment I realized, ‘Ah, so you’re allowed to write like that!’”
It seems like an unimportant detail, but representation—the driving force behind emancipation, as we know—goes a long way towards identifying one’s own language in public discourse.
AMMD: What issues, within and beyond the text, does a German-to-Brazilian Portuguese translator face? What about your experience in finding an audience for German writers in translation in Brazil, or even in the Lusophone world?
CB: In addition to the problems relating to the aesthetic project—which I mentioned above—there are, of course, differences in syntactic structures and verb tenses, as well as the use of humour, which needs to be transferred to the target language so as not to cause strangeness. This often causes problems because if you translate faithfully, the effect will often be a different one. Humour, for example, can hardly be translated at the literal level. Here, you have to understand the author’s intention in using irony or making a joke at a certain point in the narrative. The author probably intends to characterize a character or a situation, so the irony must have the same function in the translation, without necessarily being said with the same words.
For example, I’m currently translating Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Novel—not the opera, but the novel. In this book, there are all the problems mentioned above: the syntactic structure (still in the style of the very long hypotactic period, used at the beginning of the last century), the verb tenses, and the Brechtian humour, which is somewhat dry and subtle, while at the same time extremely cerebral and constructed, which sounds invariably unnatural or “forced” in Brazilian Portuguese. So I’m walking on a tightrope to let Brecht’s style shine through in the translation, without making the text too strange or truncated for Brazilian readership. And that’s a problem I often have to deal with, because German literature of the last century is usually characterized by this style which is “too cerebral.” And that’s also where the difficulty lies in disseminating these works to the Brazilian audience because, in general, our audience wants more “fluid” literature. It’s not that Brazilians want something light—on the contrary, the reading public in Brazil is very interested in political and social themes. But in terms of form, I have the impression they want something less “constructed.”
AMMD: I spoke with Mozambican publisher and translator Sandra Tamele on Mozambique’s literary scene and the prestige held by Continental Portuguese over the Portuguese from Lusophone post-colonies, such as Mozambican Portuguese. As a Brazilian and a translator into the Brazilian Portuguese, would you say there is a center-periphery tension between Continental Portuguese versus Brazilian Portuguese and other Portuguese varieties? And in what ways is that reflected in Lusophone writing and publishing at the global level?
CB: There is definitely not only a tension between Continental Portuguese and its varieties in the former colonies, but also a form of oppression. As I mentioned above, even today there is an imposition of a “standard language” in both academia and publishing, orienting towards European Portuguese and intimidating the people who don’t master it. And when I talk about people who haven’t mastered such “standard language,” I’m not talking about an illiterate or semi-literate class, but a large part of the Brazilian middle-class as well. I’m a great supporter of many linguistic varieties being used in written literature, because there’s no way to create authentic characters if they speak in a way that has nothing to do with the reality in which they live. And it also becomes impossible for the reader to identify with the character.
It’s funny that you mentioned Sandra Tamele, because I also worked with her a few years ago. I translated a book by the Austrian author Carolina Schutti for her publishing house, Editora Trinta Zero Nove. It was a very exciting process, because while I was only able to translate it into Brazilian Portuguese and not into the Mozambican variety, we agreed that Sandra would edit my translation, adapting it to the Mozambican Portuguese. I think her retranslation was essential for readers in Mozambique to establish a relationship with the book; it’s not just a question of vocabulary or grammar, but of register—in other words, the different “ways of saying” the same thing. The different focuses, accents, and postures.
It’s clear that these differences make it even more difficult to create a global Lusophone audience, because the audience for Portuguese literature (which is still small compared to the English-speaking public) is generally only interested in texts which reflect their own European and Portuguese culture. Or, as the great and controversial Brazilian linguist Marcos Bagno put it, “Lusophony might be an illusophony”!
AMMD: Early this year, Urubus has been reinterpreted, this time on stage in a performative and musical production in Berlin. Would you say, as a theater director and actress yourself, that stage adaptations of books are a form of translations? In what ways? And how do they differ from translating one language into another?
CB: There is a literary theory called Reader-Response Criticism, advocated by the Constance School of Reception Aesthetics. This theory analyzes the relationship between the text and the reader. Two central concepts of this theory are the “implied or ideal reader” and the “real reader.” The implied or ideal reader is that imaginary being with whom the writer mentally dialogues while writing the book, present and active as a potential recipient of the work. This reader is not a real person, but a projection of the the real reader—who we hope will tie up the ends of the story with their own interpretation. The real reader, on the other hand, is a person who will actually buy and read the book and interpret it based on their life experience, which may differ greatly from that of the reader imagined by the author at the moment of writing. Or perhaps that real reader won’t even exist because one can never be sure if the book will be finalized, published, and read.
The Spanish playwright and theater director José Sanchis Sinisterra refers to these concepts when he says that: “the great work of the director is to transform the real spectator into the implied spectator.” In other words, when staging, the director has to take into account that the ideal reader imagined by the playwright may live in a completely different reality at the time and place that the play is performed. The director needs to play the role of a mediator between these realities and cultures, and they will do this with their language, and that language is theater.
I see many parallels here with the work of the translator. We have to not only mediate between cultures, but also to make the text breathe (like an actor on stage) in the language, time, and culture of the target audience. And we do this with our own vocabulary—the lexicon, emotions, and associations that we bring from our individual backgrounds—because we don’t translate words or phrases, but those conglomerations of signs that allude to facts and sensations beyond the body of the text. So the translator’s job also basically consists of transforming the real, extra-textual reader into the ideal reader, imagined by the writer during the creation of the text, or the other way around.
AMMD: When we speak of the scholarship surrounding Brazilian literature, who are the Global Majority, Latin American, and Brazilian scholars, writers, artists, and thinkers whose works shaped your philosophy, creative-critical writings, and ethos? In what ways have they been influential to you?
CB: I believe that we can be influenced both positively and negatively. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the standard language, European Portuguese, was imposed on Brazilian literature for many years. This continues to intimidate a lot of Brazilians, fearful of writing “wrong”—and I include myself in this group of intimidated people. So, for me, although I have an enormous admiration for certain authors who are considered classics in Brazilian and Portuguese literature, I also have an ambivalent relationship with them, because I feel like they were a negative influence; they inhibited me, preventing me from putting my own stories on paper for so long. I even think that I, as a lover of literature and texts, went into theater because of this fear of writing and articulating myself in my own words; as an actress, I was able to appropriate other people’s discourse as my own.
As you know, I started writing late, I didn’t dare until I was forty-five, after I had started my career as a translator—perhaps still driven by that fear. I could mention Fernando Pessoa, Machado de Assis, and Cecília Meireles among the authors whom I admire so much, but at the same time, that admiration held me back. Luckily, one day I discovered authors who also worked with spoken Brazilian Portuguese in their writings, and I think one of the best-known and most important names in this literary field is João Guimarães Rosa, who is, in my opinion, a giant. But there are also more recent ones, my contemporaries, whose “colloquial” language (or as some call it, “street language”) had a liberating effect on me, boosting my writing. Among them, the work of Luiz Ruffato was essential, especially his book Eles eram muitos cavalos, which gave me my first injection of inspiration. I should also mention Graciliano Ramos, Carol Rodrigues, Raimundo Carreiro, Ana Cristina César, Manoel de Barros, and Stella do Patrocínio (a poet who cannot write, and thus she performs), to name but a few. This sort of liberation was cathartic, and the influence of those literary figures is just inspiring.
AMMD: Are there Brazilian writers (working in Portuguese and other Brazilian languages), modern or from antiquity, whom you wish to be read more globally or even translated further?
CB: Here, you’ve touched on a sensitive and little-known point: the other languages within Brazil. We have a vast tradition of indigenous literature that is virtually unknown to the public because it is an oral literature, passed down from generation to generation. In most cases, it has not yet been put down on paper, let alone published. According to the Instituto Socioambiental, there are 255 indigenous groups and 150 languages in the country. Despite this large number, indigenous culture was rarely recognized and valued until the 1990s. Before then, only a few individual works managed to gain some exposure, such as the poem “Identidade indígena” by Eliane Potiguara in 1975. From the 2000s onwards—with the passing of Law 11.645, which makes the teaching of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures compulsory throughout the school curriculum—things began to change, but very slowly. I myself have to confess that I don’t know many authors beyond those who have achieved greater exposure such as Davi Kopenawa, Daniel Munduruku, Eliane Potiguara, and Ailton Krenak.
I would also like to see a wider circulation of literature in the Pajubá language, a vocabulary and performative repertoire of a certain section of the LGBTQIA+ community—especially the travesti, a localized sexual and gender identity. This language consists of a series of words that have their origins in Nagô and Yoruba (from enslaved Africans brought to Brazil). It came to the fore, if I’m not mistaken, in the context of the military dictatorship, as an attempt to create a communal identity among LGBTQIA+ folks. One of the greatest exponents of this literary strand is trans activist Amara Moura, who writes in Pajubá and championed it in her PhD in literary theory and criticism. But there are, of course, many other names.
These literatures considered peripheral have been gaining more space in recent decades, but at the same time they are being attacked by the conservatives, as well as by certain authorities. Internationally award-winning books such as Jeferson Tenório’s O Avesso da pele are being banned from school curricula due to pressure from parents; a Marvel graphic novel has been withdrawn from the Bienal do Libro in Rio de Janeiro because the cover shows two men kissing; and so on. So what we have here is censorship of books that deal with issues such as racism, sexual orientation, and gender, disguised as an initiative in favor of “protecting minors.” This is a phenomenon that I also see a lot in the United States. I think it’s extremely important that authors representing those minorities are read and translated, and I advise everyone to look specifically for literature from indigenous, Afro-Brazilian, or LGBTQIA+ writers.
AMMD: What about translators? Are there Brazilian translators whose works you think the world should not miss out on?
CB: The art of literary translation in Brazil is unfortunately not properly honored. Translators, even the most renowned ones, cannot make a living from translation. A lot of them have other parallel professions. I really admire the strength of these individuals—the passion with which they keep going, despite everything. On the other hand, we need to build some kind of an organization, something like a trade union, by which we could fight for better working conditions. I know there is a translators’ union, but it deals more with technical translations. I, for one, am only able to do the translations I do because I live in Germany and have access to scholarships here. If this were not the case, I think I would have given up.
As for the translators from and into other languages in Brazil, unfortunately I can’t cite names, but I imagine that their conditions are even worse than those of translators from and into Portuguese. What I do know is that only now, in 2024, an official government program has been launched to translate the Constitution and other relevant legal texts into the most widely spoken indigenous languages in Brazil: the Living Indigenous Language in Law program. I don’t believe there is such a program for literature, unfortunately. Progress is being made, but there is still a lot to be done in this area of translating the other languages of Brazil.
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on contemporary Brazilian Literature, what books and works (in Portuguese and other Brazilian languages) would you wish to include as key texts? At the risk of handing a syllabus on a silver platter at the expense of your academic/creative labor, can you name some writers that you would be inclined to incorporate into this imaginary syllabus?
CB: Firstly, I think it’s quite important to read the Brazilian “classics” carefully, because there is no future without a past. But I also think it’s essential to read contemporary Brazilian literature—not least because the classics in Brazil were written by an elite, mostly white group; as I mentioned above, it is essential to dialogue with the “other Brazils” within Brazil. Another reason to read classic authors is that—quoting writer and creative writing teacher Noemi Jaffe—by reading them, we learn how we should no longer write, what language is anachronistic or no longer appropriate.
This said, I would like to name a few authors here—without any pretension of making an “academic” list and aware that I will invariably be leaving important names out, as every list is influenced by personal preferences and interests. These authors and books were and are innovative because they combine relevance in content, stories of a Brazil beyond the urban centers, and formal innovation—all in very original language.
Of the “classics” (as Brazil is a relatively young country, these authors I mention here are virtually our contemporaries in terms of the time they lived), I should mention Autran Dourado’s Uma poética do romance: matéria de carpintaria (one of the oldest Brazilian books on the art of writing that I know), Cecília Meireles’ Romanceiro da inconfidência, João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão Veredas, Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro, Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas secas, Clarice Lispector’s A paixão segundo G.H. and Água viva, and Adélia Prado’s Cacos para um vitral.
From the contemporary, I would like to include in this imaginary syllabus the following: Noemi Jaffe’s Escrita em movimento: Sete princípios do fazer literário (which, in my opinion, is the most concise and non-dogmatic book on creative writing of our time), Luiz Ruffato’s Eles eram muitos cavalos, Manoel de Barros’ Livro sobre nada, Conceição Evaristo’s Ponciá Vicêncio, Carol Rodrigues’ Sem vista para o mar, Ana Cristina César’s a teus pés, Carola Saavedra’s Toda terça, Ana Paula Maia’s De gados e homens, and Joca Reiners Terron’s Noite dentro da noite.
This list could go on indefinitely, but this is a small overview of works and names that were and are essential to the formation of Brazilian literature, and to my personal formation as a writer.
Carla Bessa is the Rio de Janeiro-born and Berlin-based author of the novel Minha Murilo (Urutau, 2021)—a finalist at the Prêmio Mix-Brasil. She has also written the short story collections Aí eu fica sem esse filho (Oito e Meio, 2017); Urubus (Confraria do vento, 2020), which won the Prêmio Jabuti and placed second at the Clarice Lispector Prize; and Todas uma (Confraria do vento, 2022). A professional actress by training, she studied acting at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and the Casa das Artes de Laranjeiras, and came to Germany in the 90s to act and direct in theater. She has translated the German-language writers Max Frisch, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Macho, Kerstin Geir, and others. She has attended German-Brazilian translator workshops at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB), and written short stories and book reviews for Brazilian publications such as Jornal Rascunho and Revista Gueto. Translations of her works have appeared in Asymptote, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Your Impossible Voice, and Revista Qorpus. In 2022, she won the Maria Martins Prize, conferred by the Brazilian Union of Writers. Two of her books have been translated by Lea Hübner into the German for Transit Verlag, and her first book was translated by Nikos Pratsinis into the Greek for Skarifima Editions. She is currently writing her first novel in German.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese and Swedish—appeared in BBC Radio 4, World Literature Today, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, The White Review, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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