My first encounter with Prêmio-Jabuti-winning Brazilian writer and dramaturg Carla Bessa was through Elton Uliana’s translation of her “After the Attack, the Woman,” published in the first volume of The Oxford Anthology of Translation, for which I was also a contributor. In Elton’s translation, Carla’s genre-bending prose—part crime noir, part narrative poetry, part journalistic account—stretches its numbing hands towards the Anglosphere, cutting across the enclosures of language and making us rethink the ever-evolving questions of genre. Active in the Lusophone translation scene, Elton is also part of the Brazilian Translation Club (BTC) at University College London (UCL) and the Portuguese-English Literary Translators Association. In the HarperCollins anthology Daughters of Latin America, he has translated the prose of Carla Bessa, Alê Motta, Carolina María de Jesús, and Conceição Evaristo. His translation of Evaristo into English is also included in the Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction (out last September from UCL Press).
In this interview, I spoke with Elton, currently in London, about his translations from and into the Brazilian Portuguese language, the landscape of contemporary Brazilian Lusophone prose, and the necessary confrontations among translators regarding ‘untranslatability’ and ‘equivalence’.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): There is multiplicity to the Brazilian Lusophone writers and texts you translate—actress and theatre director Carla Bessa, novelist and scholar Jacques Fux, short story writer Alê Motta, journalist Sérgio Tavares, children’s book author Ana Maria Machado, among others. I’m curious about your translation process: Are there parallelisms and variances, process-wise, in translating across the differing genres, aesthetics, and movements from which these writers write?
Elton Uliana (EU): I absolutely love working with the diversity of writers that are currently emerging from Brazil, like Carla Bessa, a writer that I have been working with a lot recently who has become a leading force in contemporary Lusophone fiction. (Bessa won the 2020 Prêmio Jabuti, the most prestigious literary prize in Brazil, and is currently being published globally).
I am also delighted to be working with Alê Motta, a master in concise social critique with a unique style of micro-fiction, and Conceição Evaristo, whose stories irresistibly incorporate the accents and oral tradition of Afro-Brazilian culture. All of them were recently published in Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women, edited by Sandra Guzman and published by Amistad and HarperCollins.
It has also been wonderful to work with the incredibly talented Jacques Fux and his worldly-wise autofiction that, with touching lyricism and humor, takes us into a detailed and complex world of Jewish culture. Other favourites of mine that I have recently translated include Mário Araújo, Sérgio Tavares, and Ana Maria Machado, all prize-winning authors in their own right.
I am always interested in looking at authors who are doing something completely different with form. A common feature of my translation method, regardless of author, has to do with the musicality of the piece, the fine-tuning procedure of finding and developing appropriate aural features such as voice, rhythm, and tone in such a way that the translation becomes seductive and attractive to the reader.
For me there is a huge difference between translating, for example, a dramatic text, where words become physical and affect the body immediately, and a children’s story, which, even if it is meant to be read out loud, does not necessarily involve a performance. I guess it’s the same with poetry or a dialogue in a novel. I’m always aware of the context from which the piece I’m translating emerges and also the genre or kinds of genre it incorporates. Indeed the form develops and grows in the translation because of the context and the literary conventions and devices the author is exploring, experimenting with, or setting aside.
Another important translation focus for me is the dialogue. Patterns of speech in Portuguese are completely different to those in English. I find a useful technique is to read the speech out loud to myself—indeed, it is even more enriching and useful when I have other people or fellow translators to read the words out loud for me. Reflecting on how the rhythm can be configured and how the words sound and even feel in the mouth is something I am constantly considering as I progress with any translation, regardless of genre, sub-genre, or writer’s style.
AMMD: You are also a translator of legendary Afro-Brazilian storyteller Conceição Evaristo. Could you tell us about the experience of translating her work?
EU: I was privileged enough to work closely with Conceição Evaristo during one of the Brazilian Translation Club series. We had a detailed discussion about my translation choices for her story ‘The Dancer’s Feet’. She was extremely kind and supportive, and gave me a strong sense of creativity and autonomy with my translation. She had an aura of charisma, intelligence, and warmth around her—rather comforting—and our discussion could not have been more enlightening. A good part of it was realized via explanation in Portuguese and back translation, since Conceição doesn’t speak English, which added another layer of complexity to the theoretical and pragmatic dynamic between author and translator. The story was subsequently published in Daughters of Latin America and again in Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction (out last September from UCL Press).
My encounter with Conceição happened in a moment in which the ethnicity of translators was being questioned following the controversy generated by the Dutch translation of Amanda Gorman’s poem, which she recited at the inauguration of Joe Biden in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2021. Conceição’s position was that, in an ideal world, if the translator shares the same ethnic experience as the author, it would improve the quality of the translation. She also suggested that this is not a necessary condition. My own view, which she graciously understood and I think endorsed, is that translation is a research activity, and if the translator lacks practical experience in relation to the author’s ethnic background—which in Afro-Brazilian culture includes a long and traumatic period of colonizing obliteration and unimaginable horror—a lot can be respectfully learned from investigation and inquiry. Just like an acute reader, the translator could be seen as a perceptive absorber of an author’s work, taking everything in, and then, in addition, producing or trying to re-create or write the work in another language.
In the workshop with Conceição I devised the concept of traducência, which I am still developing, to expand on Conceição’s own concept of escrevivência, a play-on-words involving the terms ‘writing’, ‘life’, and ‘living experience’. With escrevivência, Conceição conceptualises a political and aesthetic form of writing that seeks to give voice to the experiences and stories of Black women, involving the construction and problematization of a collective memory and the decolonization of language, among other things. In fact, this idea is not too distant from Tony Morrison’s theories on rememory, through which Morrison explores how African Americans’ shared consciousness of the past, including the traumas and consequences of slavery are passed down through generations, shaping identity and influencing the present moment. If in escrevivência, an author’s identity and collective ethnic experience shape their writing, in traducência, a translator’s living experience, their socio-political background and perhaps, more importantly, their capabilities for rigorous research and collaborative action directly impact their work.
This idea of seeing translation as research involves more than ideological or aesthetical ‘positioning’ and is, in my view, extremely advantageous to everyone involved in the translation process, including the writer, allowing translators to a large extent to convey an author’s fictional world with nuanced authenticity. I was thrilled that Conceição really engaged with and liked the idea of traducência. She thought it was a timely and interesting concept.
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?
EU: I rely a lot on my gut feeling and intuition. I am particularly attracted to authors that are experimenting with subject matter and doing something daring with literary form, writers whose work disrupts our typical or routine perceptions rather than reinforces them, unsettling the reading experience, hopefully in mesmerizing, immersive, and emotionally powerful ways. Some of the Brazilian authors I work with I discovered through the first series of the Brazilian Translation Club at UCL in London, where I live. Examples include Carla Bessa, Jacques Fux, Sergio Tavares, and Alê Motta.
With my English authors, there has been a certain amount of serendipity. This is certainly the case with Howard Barker, in my view one of the greatest living English playwrights, whose plays I am currently translating for a publisher in Brazil. As a theatre lover I saw a production of his play Lot and His God in 2012 and fell instantly in love with his work. Barker has written more than one hundred plays, which for me are poetic and even violent dissents from everything else we normally see on stage, at least here in the United Kingdom. Ironically, his work is vastly produced in other Anglophone countries and translated into many European languages, but in the UK, he is for the most part neglected. I can only presume this is due to his radical anti-establishment aesthetic ideology.
Another writer I fell in love with by chance during one of my frequent visits to the wonderful Oxfam second-hand bookshop on Portobello Road in Notting Hill is the English poet Rufo Quintavalle. I instantly connected with his powerful and electric work. I have translated one of his books and some of his poems have already been published in Brazil. We are hoping to make a full collection of his poetry available in Brazil soon.
A project I have in development at the moment is the translation of Ross Raisin’s much praised novel God’s Own Country, a fascinating tale of twisted adolescence and rural seclusion written in vivid Yorkshire vernacular and the best English novel I have read in recent years.
AMMD: In a recent Linguagem & Ensino article you co-wrote with Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (UCL) and Rafaella Andréa Fernandez (UNILA), you mentioned that “’Favela’, a short autobiographical narrative [by Carolina María de Jesús] describing in strikingly vivid detail Carolina’s life in the Canindé Favela in São Paulo, unpublished until 2014, is composed by a blend of exquisite and anachronistic vocabulary, and the narrative is continuously immersed in the syntax of the spoken language”. Could you talk further about the translation challenges posed by Carolina’s idiosyncratic method?
EU: I have been equally privileged to work on this special text by Carolina Maria de Jesus, with the kind permission and support of Vera Eunice, Carolina’s daughter. Carolina was born in 1914, had relatively little education, and her writing, fresh and fascinating as it is today, was often perceived as ‘uneducated’ by many critics, primarily because of her radical departure from traditional punctuation and spelling. In recent years, there has been a complete shift in this perception and aspects of her writing that were before frowned upon are now celebrated. In fact, her language is magnificently poetic and sumptuously colloquial, full of particularly endearing marks of orality. The narrative in ‘Favela’ is embedded in a web of evocative intertextual references, full of charmingly old-fashioned popular wisdom and surprising allusions to other literary works, especially from Portugal and the Brazilian Parnassian and Romantic periods. For me there was nothing ‘uneducated’ about her. She was very well read, so much so that you can see in ‘Favela’ a sophisticated stream of consciousness technique quite unusual for an author perceived as illiterate. This technique allows the reader a revealing insight into Carolina’s private thoughts. It is a phenomenal text!
My strategy for dealing with Carolina’s perplexing use of punctuation (or complete lack of it), as well as her challenging spelling—which in ‘Favela’ is often the phonetic representation of words—involved a lot of research and help from scholars that are now committed to a renewed understanding of Carolina’s work. This also involved handling issues of orality, ‘inadequacies’ of verb agreement, and the archaism of certain words. I was asked to publish the story in the HarperCollins anthology, so a lot of my decisions had to consider the codes and conventions of a large international publisher. I found myself having to consciously engage not only with linguistic and cultural complexities and the usual conundrum regarding domestication and foreignization, but also with the tangible pressure of the company in expecting a ‘publishable’ text, with fluent readability, crafted to fit the printing and editorial conventions of the English-speaking market in which they operate.
AMMD: In another academic article, you have written about the concept of translational equivalence. Could you say more about that?
EU: My research on equivalence began during my time at UCL. At the time, I was working with quite a lot of technical translation using Machine Translation software, as well as studying in depth translation theory. Translation theory was gradually moving away from the concept of equivalence, but translation technology seemed to be going against the grain of the theoretical evolution. All terminology management features built into translation software inevitably involve a theory of equivalence (or equal value) in meaning. Machine translation strives for ‘consistency’, for example, there are many ways of translating the word ‘meadow’, but the software will often generalize by using the most used word, due to the algorithm or string match, in many cases irrespective of semantic context. This increasing automation can diminish space for ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty, which is part of the value of literary texts. Machine translation with its mathematical rather than cognitive intelligence can be a very useful tool as a starting point, but I use it cautiously in my work.
AMMD: In a Medium post, you made the case against ‘untranslatability’, a topic debated once in a while among us translators. Could you speak further about your take on untranslatability?
EU: It is definitely true that we often encounter undecipherable difficulties in translation, but it is also true that we never entirely fail to translate. Translation processes inevitably involve the displacement of linguistic and cultural elements of the source text, some of which may be more resistant to conversion, assimilation, or transformation than others, but this is not to say that translation cannot allow for cultural and linguistic surplus or non-equated connotations. If anything can be thought, articulated, or said in any given language, surely it can also be translated in one way or another. And indeed, this has been the case for thousands of years, one only has to think of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew Bible, Don Quixote, and Shakespeare, to name but a few. To imply that translation can do no more than give us an idea of what we are missing out might be true in some ways but is a problematic idea as it always leaves out the compensations and gains that translation can, and indeed often does, offer.
AMMD: The Brazilian Translation Club (BTC) at the University College of London seeks to:
foster a collaborative translation environment for the dissemination of prominent Brazilian writers and emerging translators working into English. If it is a general assumption that translators should work into their first language, in this sense the project has adopted an unusual, and often controversial dynamic in that we have encouraged many of our translators to work in the opposite direction, into their second language.
Could you tell us more about the BTC?
EU: The project was created both to provide a platform for contemporary Brazilian literature in the UK and to champion the work of translators working from Portuguese. The reason why we encourage translators to work into their ‘second’ language is primarily related to the pedagogical aspect of the project, in which translation and collaboration becomes a learning tool.
The first series of the BTC was visionary in scope. Some of the authors who were then emerging in the national scene went on to win or were selected for major literary prizes both in Brazil and internationally, which is the case of Carla Bessa, Itamar Vieira Júnior, Nara Vidal, Jacques Fux, and others.
The new BTC anthology published by UCL Press is a partnership with Julio Ludemir from FLUP (Literary Festival of the Periphery in Rio) and Dr. Maria Aparecida Salgueiro from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), and our editor Dr Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva, who is also a senior lecturer in Brazilian Studies at University College London. This sophisticated collection of short stories includes authors that have already become literary icons in Brazil and abroad, like Cristiane Sobral, Geovani Martins, Cuti, and Ana Paula Lisboa, as well as translators who since have made their names internationally like Victor Meadowcroft, Emyr Wallace Humphreys, and Andrew McDougall. We aim to give expression to Afro-descendant authors from a colonized nation, whose aesthetic preoccupations develop around a vibrant, and yet silenced, excluded, and marginalized section of Brazilian society. In doing so, we hope to be contributing to the literary and political conceptualization of such an unrepresented world. The stories in this book are absolutely gripping, lyrical, and captivating. Refusing to perpetuate a literary canon made by white, male, middle-class writers is part of, I believe, a new form of literary activism.
AMMD: I spoke with Mozambican publisher and translator Sandra Tamele, in a previous Asymptote interview, on Mozambique’s literary scene and the prestige held by Continental Portuguese over the Portuguese from Lusophone postcolonies such as Mozambican Portuguese. As a Brazilian and a translator from and into the Brazilian Portuguese language, would you say there is a centre-periphery tension between Continental Portuguese vs Brazilian Portuguese and other Portuguese varieties? And in what ways is that reflected in Lusophone writing and publishing at the global level?
EU: There is definitely a degree of centre-periphery tension between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. Brazil was a Portuguese colony for centuries, leading to significant divergences in language development due to an evolution that was more or less isolated, as well as enduring influences from indigenous and African languages and other immigrant groups (German, Italian, Jewish, Spanish).
It is clear that Brazil’s emergence as a global power in recent decades has led to a growing sense of linguistic identity, sometimes expressed as a desire to distance itself from European Portuguese. Having said that, traditional linguistic norms often favor European Portuguese, which can create a sense of marginalization for Portuguese from Brazil.
The Lusophone world touches the Americas, Europe, and Africa, but these historical exchanges were muddied by slavery, genocide, and war, leaving indelible marks on all these different colonized nations. While mutual intelligibility is perhaps never a problem, the two varieties—European and Brazilian—have distinct phonological, lexical, and grammatical features, and of course, there are other varieties from other colonized nations, which are similarly distinctive in their own way.
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?
EU: I have always been fascinated by Brazilian Modernism. Like English, Brazilian Modernism was a complex and diverse movement, with different trends and strands. One of my favorite writers in my youth was Mário de Andrade, one of the movement’s leading figures along with his brother Oswald. I especially loved his masterpiece ‘Macunaíma’, a real landmark of modernist Brazilian literature published in 1928. I was completely enthralled during the time of my A-levels in Porto Alegre when I first read what to me then was this really weird book portraying the adventures of a characterless hero, Macunaíma, on his epic journey from the Amazon to São Paulo. Andrade uses a rich mix of indigenous myths, popular legends, colloquial language, and formal experimentalism. The reader can never pinpoint the ambiguous and transgressive character of the protagonist, which makes the story so immersive that it never left my mind. I read it many times and I still go back to it.
After school, I discovered critics like Antônio Cândido, a towering figure in modern Brazilian cultural history, and authors like José Saramago, my number one favorite writer—I have read all his books, some of them more than once, as well as every English translation available, most by the brilliant translators Margaret Jull Costa and Giovanni Pontiero. More broadly, I love the work of Italo Calvino which I know through both his Portuguese and English translators, as well as Marguerite Yourcenar, Margaret Atwood, Tony Morrison, F.S. Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Clarice Lispector, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and many more. I must also mention the most influential English literary critic for me, and one of the kindest gentleman as well, the ‘terrible’ Terry Eagleton.
AMMD: What’s the literary scene in Brazil these days like? 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?
EU: There are a lot of authors in the literary scene in Brazil nowadays who seem to be emerging more from the peripheries rather than the classrooms. Whoever read Geovani Martins’ The Sun on my Head in Julia Sanches’ irresistible translation knows exactly what I am talking about. This riveting and searing account of life in the Rio favelas is ‘un-put-downable’. Similarly, there are Djamila Ribeiro and José Faleiro, all of which are already available or in the process of becoming available in English translations. Daniel Galera and Adriana Lisboa are also worth looking at, both translated by my colleague Alison Entrekin, as well as Ana Paula Maia, whose prize-winning novel Of Cattle and Men was beautifully translated by Zoë Perry.
Perhaps two names to pay close attention to at the moment are the best-selling authors Carla Madeira and Micheliny Verunschk, whose novel O som do rugido da onça (The Sound of the Jaguar’s Roar), portraying the story of two indigenous children kidnapped in 19th century Brazil, is magnificently absorbing on every level and won the 2022 Jabuti Prize.
AMMD: What about translators? Are there Brazilian translators whose works from and into Brazilian languages you think the world should not miss out on?
EU: In addition to the many wonderful translators I’ve already mentioned, I absolutely love the work of José Francisco Botelho and Caetano Galindo. Botelho translates Shakespeare and Chaucer, among others, in fact he won the 2014 Jabuti Prize in Brazil for his translation of The Canterbury Tales (Contos da Cantuária), which I had the opportunity to read. As a demanding Chaucerian fanatic, I found it extremely compelling. He is an absolute legend for me. Galindo is very well known for his masterful translations of Eliot, Becket, Joyce, Salinger, Pincher, and dozens of other iconic writers.
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 labour, can you name some writers that you would be inclined to incorporate into this imaginary syllabus?
EU: As Terry Eagleton says about the novel form, the novel is a mongrel amongst thoroughbreds, it cannibalizes every other genre and mode of writing, and so my imaginary syllabus would encourage similar unconventional, creative, and oblique ways of thinking. It would certainly include, in no particular order: Moldy Strawberries by the genius writer and dramatist Caio Fernando Abreu (trans. Bruna Dantas Lobato), who sadly died during the HIV pandemic; Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of the Skin, which was also translated by Lobato; The Apple in the Dark by Clarice Lispector (I love both Gregory Rabassa’s and Benjamin Moser’s translations); Ideas to Postpone the End of the World by Ailton Krenak (trans. Anthony Doyle); Atlantic Hotel by one of my top Brazilian writers, João Gilberto Noll (trans. Adam Morris); and the beautiful novel, Hugs and Cuddles also by Gilberto Noll (trans. Edgar Garbelotto).
The list couldn’t go on without Mário Quintana, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Moacyr Scliar, Rubem Fonseca, Conceição Evaristo, and many more. I think it is important to emphasize that to understand Brazilian literature you have to look back to Eça de Queirós, Cervantes, Sterne, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Woolf, Stein, Becket, Kafka, Pound, and a multiplicity of other Anglo-European contemporary writers, not least because more than 60% of the books published in Brazil are translations from the English and other European languages, so that Brazilian literature is in constant dialogue with what is being produced elsewhere.
Elton Uliana is a Porto-Alegre-born Brazilian translator of literary and theatrical texts from and into the Brazilian Portuguese. A co-editor of the Brazilian Translation Club at the University College London (UCL), his translations and critical writings appear in Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, Your Impossible Voice, Alchemy, Jill! A Women+ in Translation Reading Series, 128 LIT, The Fern Review, Tablet, Translators Aloud, Art in Translation, Qorpus Magazine, and anthologies such as The Oxford Anthology of Translation, Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women (HarperCollins, 2023), Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel (University College London Press, 2020), Ana Maria Machado: Entrevista (Editora Medusa, 2021), and the forthcoming Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction (UCL Press). He is also affiliated with the UCL Centre for Translation Studies and the Translators Association UK, and is a member of the Portuguese-English Literary Translators Association (PELTA) and Out of the Wings, a research-led project on theatre in translation at King’s College London. Uliana was on the judging panel of the PEN America Translation Prize 2023, and he was also a reader for the Royal Court Theatre, London, 2023 International New Writers Project, specializing in Lusophone playwrights. He holds an MA in Contemporary Literature & Culture from Birbeck College – University of London and an MA in Translation Studies from UCL.
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 (Pan 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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