Posts by Elton Uliana

To The Beginning of Everything: Elton Uliana on Brazilian Lusophone Prose and Untranslatability

November 25, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Elton Uliana

We often encounter undecipherable difficulties in translation, but it is also true that we never entirely fail to translate.

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? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Vultures” by Carla Bessa

October 15, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

It is astonishing the perfect imperfection of a human body.

This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to bring you a grotesquely disturbing yet distinctly lyrical short story from the pen of past contributor Carla Bessa, translated by her longtime advocate Elton Uliana. If vultures appear in popular imagination as the ultimate symbol of death, the reader of this tale will have other distinct associations to make. Surely the first such act of ventriloquism (although we have also featured whale narrators) in our pages, the gifted Brazilian author channels a group of vultures circling an unusual find on a deserted beach: an abandoned foetus. Within its darkly illuminating labyrinth of language, this powerful vignette reinscribes vultures as recycling agents in these urgent times of decay.

But we never deprive ourselves of the pleasures of gliding in giant circles, making the most of the rising currents of hot air, and the wind blowing on our wrinkled, hairless faces, flying without haste, despite the hunger. The prey down below no longer defends itself, devotion is in its nature, it is in the end: a carcass. We spend the days soaring, patiently waiting, confident in our luck, unafraid of not finding a single morsel. Here, remains are never in short supply, the entire city is a wasteland. Down there, however, on the beach, by the shore, we stare, what is it?, unrecognizable-inconceivable, neither person nor animal, neither end nor beginning.

The foetus was only a tiny dot, a mollusc, a soft invertebrate body, muscular head and foot, but without shell. Blossoming and putrefying at the same time. The skin, was it skin?, a very thin, very tender membrane already disintegrating, it would be easy to pierce with the beak. What was once a face, is now facing down, being brushed by the sand as the waves come and go, polished by innumerable shells, sand grains and pebbles.

We land with caution. One, two, seven, many of us, skittering around, still not in a hurry, and we approach the prey. As predicted, the skin gives way to the slightest touch, it rips and tears like paper. We open cracks, holes from which we pull guts, nerves, a small heart?, tearing and lacerating the exceptionally soft and sea-tempered little body.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “a day (like any other)” by Carla Bessa

November 22, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

walk the dog, here comes the neighbour, hello!, help!, sorry?, how are you?

This Translation Tuesday, the inimitable Carla Bessa plunges us into the frantic interior of a woman (like any other) and her everyday frenzy. If you’ve read Bessa’s work in our pages, you’ll recognise her work as mining the dramatic possibilities of text to revelatory effect; today’s story is another stellar instance. Drawn from her recent book Todas Umas, which explores the effacement of women after marriage and motherhood, Elton Uliana offers us the gushing rhythms of an inundated mind in his tightly woven translation. Read while listening to a recording of the Jabuti Prize winner’s new microfiction!  

a day (like any other)

get up early, have a shower, make some coffee, wake up the kids, kiss them, wake up the husband, kiss him, welcome the housekeeper, good morning!, help!, hi?, good morning!, have breakfast with the husband and kids, help!, did you say anything, honey?, me?, strange I heard something too mum, come on, time to go to school, take the husband and kids to the car, say goodbye, help! walk the dog, here comes the neighbour, hello!, help!, sorry?, how are you?, very well thank you, see you later, help!, turn around, keep walking, go to the bank, go to the hairdresser, help!, help!, go to the beautician, go to the shops, come back home, cook, iron, clean the house, no need for the cleaner it’s done already, visit the mother, help!, help!, help!, make an appointment at the gynaecologist, smile to the doorman, help!, all right, ma’am?, all great and you?, give the car park man some change, help!, help!, take the blender for repair, help!, come home, help!, hang the new painting in the dining room, or perhaps in the bedroom, help!, help!, help!, pick up the kids from school, help with their homework, help!, help!, help!, help!, help!, dinner, put the children to bed, read them a story, sing them a lullaby, stroke them, smother them with the pillow, welcome the husband, poison the husband, go to sleep.

wake up in the middle of the night thinking, shit, forgot the dog.

Translated from the Portuguese by Elton Uliana READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Competition” by Mário Araújo

September 13, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

The landscape trembled, like when a person shakes while taking a picture.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a charming story of a family race on an open field by the Jabuti Prize-winning writer Mário Araújo. In that brief stretch between the starting gun and an imaginary finish line, Araújo captures the kaleidoscopic psyche of a young girl at play. In Elton Uliana’s translation, we glimpse in “The Competition” a nimble adolescent mind figuring out the language to articulate her ambition, fear, affection, in short, her complexity. 

It was their father who, imitating the sound of a gun with his voice, gave the signal to start. The boy lagged behind right from the beginning, while she and her father thrust their legs forward, side by side; she was trying to perfect her incredibly fast steps to compensate for his much longer strides. The boy was behind mainly because, between the excitement and the distraction, he had delayed a couple of seconds before reacting to the starting gun.

Her head only came up to her father’s waist, but the fact is that, at that moment, she was barely looking at him, focused entirely as she was on her own performance. All she could manage was to feel his presence next to her, a dark, solid figure of great size, wearing the trousers he always wore. She was frustrated that his body needed to make much less effort than hers. Her father looked like he was floating in mid-air, but even so he still seemed invincible. It seemed as if he was moving forward, pulled by the power of the real propellers that were her feet, attracting everything around them like magnets. She could swear that he didn’t know where and how his daughter had learned to run as fast as that. The truth is that she learned a lot in the time she spent away from him and her mother. Hour after hour, day after day playing in the open field next to the house, dressed like a boy, wearing trainers—sometimes even barefoot—t-shirt and shorts, very different from the pretty little Beatrice her father saw at night, in pink or light-yellow pyjamas, or on Sundays, when she dressed up or went for lunch at their relatives’ house.

Now they were all in the open, her father, little Luke and her, and that would give her even more advantage, since she knew the field like the back of her hand. Her father shouted something and, by the way the words were framed by his lips, he seemed to be smiling, but she didn’t quite understand as she was concentrating on her task and the wind was howling heavily in her ears. She felt annoyed when she realized that her lazy dad, in addition to being carried on the wings of her jet propellers, still looked relaxed and happy. She quickened her pace even more to the point where her heart was almost touching that little thing in the back of her throat the doctor calls tonsils, and her mother calls bells.

As for little Luke, she didn’t have time for him now, he was such a baby. She only hoped that he wasn’t sitting on the grass crying and forcing their father to interrupt the competition and help him. But she couldn’t hear any crying, perhaps because the wind was blowing in her ears, the wind of that open field, a wind that lived there. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “It Was Then That I Lost That Child” by Carla Bessa

July 20, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Elton Uliana

And so then, I had: my children, I had: seven children, I mean: six

The fate of a working class mother who loses her child is the focus of this week’s Translation Tuesday, which features an unforgettable experiment with the short story form. Devised through a verbatim technique, Carla Bessa—actress, director, and winner of Brazil’s most prestigious literary award, the Jabuti Prize—mines the genre for its dramatic possibilities. Bessa’s moving story switches deftly between a confessional monologue with eclectic punctuation that lends the mother’s voice a searing, staccato quality and, on the other hand, a set of intricate stage movements revolving around a domestic scene. The effect is a casual meeting of tragedy and mundanity. Indeed, for translator Elton Uliana, this story conveys “a reality of marginality and crime which is becoming increasingly prevalent in Brazil, particularly with the rise of far-right politics, its contempt for and disenfranchising of the lower classes.” This social commentary is achieved with great formal and emotional intensity in “It Was Then That I Lost That Child.” 

(She takes the chicken out of the freezer and puts it in the microwave. She rinses the thermos with boiling water, she puts the filter holder over the mouth of the flask, she places the paper filter in the holder and fills it with coffee powder, five level soup spoons.)

And so then, I had: my children, I had: seven children, I mean: six. Because: the one who got killed, I never really got to raise him. I couldn’t. I only: I only had him for the first month, then his father: stole my child from me, yes, it was his father: he kidnapped my boy.

(She pours the hot water carefully over the coffee until the filter is full. She stops, and waits for the water to seep through. The microwave beeps. With the kettle in one hand she goes to the microwave, presses the button that opens the door to remove the chicken. She realises that she has only one hand free and pauses.)

He beat me up. I’ve got the scars here on my face, see, ruined: it was him. That’s why I’ve got a face like this, all: destroyed, have a look. 

(She pours more water on the coffee, she stops and waits.)

He stole my son, and: I reported him. And so: it was his mother that had to look after my son. He and his mother raised my son, but: they never let me visit him. Then: I took them to court again: and I won: I won the right to see my own son. A right that was already mine. READ MORE…