Language: Brazilian Portuguese

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.

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Guilty But Not Intentional: Carla Bessa on Traversing Germanophone and Lusophone Literary Worlds

October 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

We [translators] have to . . . make the text breathe (like an actor on stage) in the language, time, and culture of the target audience.

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.

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Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Floresta

September 10, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Alex Brostoff and Jamille Pinheiro Dias

in the garlic crushed / into my mother's beans / the form of the verb that names me / was

This Translation Tuesday, we present three meditations from Brazil on the fluid qualities of the words that describe and “name” us. Floresta’s first poem rankles at the tyranny of the verb “to be” at its categorical, othering, murdering worst. In his second, the verb approaches us far more softly and trepidatiously; it’s domesticated and unthreatening now—a balm, even. The forth swings us back and forth across the tenses, exploring the miraculous potential of the word to both travel into a minutely specific past, and telescope forwards ad infinitum. 

Translators Jamille Pinheiro Dias and Alex Brostoff were drawn to Floresta’s poems for their evocative treatment of the contradictions of grammar. They explain in their note: 

“Paradoxically, while “the form of the verb” is murderous, it also summons a matrilineal bond that recalls rice and beans, the lack and excesses of gendered evocation. That language others us by naming who we are not, “pressed in a time / that is not mine,” recalls the very forms through which translation at once opens up and shuts down possibilities of naming. The form of the verb genders us, and through the violence of nomination, it precedes and exceeds us: across time, bodies, languages. Such forms constrict and proliferate in translation.”

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Skin Has Two Sides: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Translating Jeferson Tenório

January 11, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

. . . racism and colorism affect all of us . . . there’s no interpersonal relationship that isn’t shaped by it.

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?

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Merely Looking: On Orides Fontela’s One Impossible Step

October 18, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Meenakshi Ajit

Fontela compares language to a stone, dense and infinite in possibility.

One Impossible Step by Orides Fontela, translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels, Nightboat Books, 2023

In 1624, the English poet John Donne wrote that “no man is an island,” a line intended to succinctly describe the relational existence of individuals in the world. In One Impossible Step, a new collection of the work of the Brazilian poet Orides Fontela, the focus is not upon the relationship between individuals in the world, but rather in the connection between man and his island. The collection, translated from the Portuguese by Chris Daniels, compiles works from across Fontela’s entire corpus and is buttressed by a section titled “Poetics,” which explores her literary style through a thoughtful translator’s note, interviews with the poet, and several critical essays—all of which serve to form a clear understanding of the poet’s fascination with the natural, physical Others that compromise our world, ranging from a bird, to a rose, to a star. In the very first poem of this work, “Speech,” the reader is told that “all will be aggressively real,” but that the consequence of this realness will be our wounding.

From this fascination with the natural emerges Fontela’s idea of the poem as “an idea expressed in a very concrete image . . . something closed, a strong defined image.” The question then arises: why does this image wound us? Perhaps because it exists only through language, the collection suggests. Any mode of expression divides the poet from the world, and if language is the tool that allows for communication, it is also the obstacle between the elements of the world and the poet. The sequencing of the poems in this collection is worth noting here. Daniels, in his translator’s note, describes the translation as following the original texts by beginning with sound and ending with silence, almost as if each section is an exploration into the futility of language as it meets the elements of the natural world. Indeed, in the fittingly titled “Poem,” Fontela writes about the subject thusly:

To know silence by heart
—and profane it, dissolve it
in words

She takes this a step further in the poem “Rose,” describing writing as akin to murder:

             I murdered the word
And hold my living hands in blood.

For Fontela, the act of writing is an act of profanity against life itself, reducing it to the image alone. That profane act of reinforcing the impossible distance between the world and the writer is further complicated, then, by the act of reading, and particularly the act of reading in translation. The poet is necessarily separated—always an “impossible step” away from the bird, the star, the rose—and language concretizes this “distance of looking”; the reader is never able to see what the poet sees, while the reader of the translation will never even see it in the same language. The natural world is understood through perspectives all at a degree of separation from each other, and the bridge of translation, here, is a reconfirmation of the distance between one side and the other. But what is left behind is a longing that can never be fulfilled. “[T]he real,, Fontela writes, “will ache in us forever.”

That is, to the poet, man is an island and yet distinct from the island itself. The paradox lies in being part of the world—being able to observe the flight of a bird, the twinkling of a star—and knowing that one is wholly separate from it:

The star completes
the unity it does
not inhabit.

The state of isolation is also one that leads to unrecognition:

the stars do not interconnect
and the greatest distance
is merely looking.

This “distance” that “is merely looking” is a gaze that only serves to highlight the lack of recognition, even when the other is a sister star or brother strangers. To Fontela, the star may be forgiven; she has no mirror and therefore necessarily lacks empathy and knowledge of her shared form. However, when Fontela turns her attention to humanity, her poetry becomes far more barbed:

It is the stranger (the brother) who knocks
But there will never be
a reply:

welcome’s country
is far to go.

The stranger has a face one can recognize—perhaps even a tongue one can understand as well, if only one chooses to stay in “welcome’s country.” But the fact that the Other may share your face and your tongue does not reduce the isolation of one’s existence. Nor can it reduce the inherent narcissism of perspective. Unlike the star, we may look in the mirror—having the capacity to recognize the commonality between ourselves and others—but in the mirror, only “I” exists only “I” stares back.

A god
I eye
eye
to
eye . . .

. . . We see by mirror
And riddle
. . . but would there be another
way to see? . . .

the mirror devours
the face.

At one point in this collection, Fontela compares language to a stone, dense and infinite in possibility. That infinity, however, can only exist within silence, or within the wholeness of the stone. To borrow heavily from the philosophy of John Searle, the tool of chiselling is perspective. Individual consciousness is necessary to move from the dense silence of the totality of language into speech. The stone, when it is simply the raw material for a sculptor, has the possibility to become anything. It is the artist’s perspective which creates the sculpture and the poem, but it is the very act of chiselling, or rather the tool of perspective, that the isolation of the impossible step is reaffirmed:

To construct abstract towers
yet the struggle is real.

The poet can never understand the flight of the bird nor its settling, despite an endless observation of the Other. In constructing the poem, the image is created, an image that profanes the real; the actual language of flight is one that we, as readers of this English-language collection, must encounter through translation, through the perspective of the translator. Language, here, is an isolating act of love.

The translator’s situation itself is indicative of this “deep, profound love,” as Fontela puts it. Daniels must face the difficulty of translating poetry that is, at its core, concerned with both languages beyond those of the human and with the grammar of silence. How do you approach these images knowing they are marked with isolation, that such a mark must be made visible to another audience? How do you translate a work that is so focused on the silence of the world?

In One Impossible Step, the approach is to explore, chronologically, a few select subjects in Fontela’s oeuvre before moving to a study of her poetics. The resulting benefit is that the reader is provided an opportunity to consider Fontela’s evolution as a poet, as she plays with form and plumbs for deeper insight into the world. In this collection alone, the bird is mentioned eighteen times; yet, for all those eighteen poems, the reader understands that the poet is unable to move closer to the subject itself. Every poem takes her away from the hermetic language of flight, and the bird will never know of her desire for it.

For though the “impossible step” is the central preoccupation of this collection, none of the poems themselves use this term; it is an implicit understanding, constructed through the conspicuous absence of the poetic figure of an “I.” The ache of perspective cannot be avoided, but the struggle to get beyond oneself, to reduce the step to the world, is ever present. The focus may be on the image and the ethical struggle involved in its crafting, but it is ultimately a struggle made all the more powerful for its backgrounding of the poet. Daniels captures this effect when he writes, in his translator’s note, that:

. . . she wished to express ideas, to write about the world, the universe, and perception itself, while taking herself out of the picture, however impossible that may be.

One Impossible Step is a lonely work. Yet, paradoxically, its loneliness is that of any living being; we are able to understand it and empathize with it, while never getting away from the fact of our own seclusion. “Lucidity / maddens.” We will never be able to sing with the bird, nor with the poet—the privilege is to be told the story of the birdsong through the voice of the poet and her translator.

Meenakshi Ajit is currently a MA student at the University of Chicago. She is interested in comparative literature and theatre studies, particularly the drama of the ancient world.

*****

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Translation Tuesday: “Clarice” by Marília Arnaud

May 2, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Ilze Duarte

During the day, the Girl would look at the chicken for a long time, sitting on the doorstep, her chin resting on one hand, smitten.

This Translation Tuesday, we present a child’s eye view of the habits of a beloved pet hen. Marília Arnaud’s girl is filled with the intense curiosity that true love engenders; watching her Clarice for hours on end, she is alert to every detail, her wonder unending. Compassion abounds in this story, which has been translated by Ilze Duarte with all concomitant warmth and care.

“Why don’t we eat chicken feet?”

“Don’t you know who pecked at the straw where Jesus was born?”

No animal should be cursed, innocent as it was of its own existence, the Girl mused in her own, peculiar musing way, while Esmeralda treated the chicken’s wounded foot.

Clarice, as the Girl decided to call the chicken, arrived on a Saturday. Esmeralda had bought her at the street market, and Mother didn’t seem to mind, maybe because chickens were animals of little noise and presentation. She would always move about in the green, sun-bathed rectangle behind the laundry area in the back of the house, pecking at worms in the dirt here and there in her silly way, shaking off the rest of the world with her indifference.

Clarice was a chicken of much elegance in her reddish-brownish color. Her comb, a bit paler and drooping to one side, gave her a playful look. She would hop on her spring-coil feet when the Girl came near her. Teek, teek, teek… Clarice would scratch the warm dirt and swallow corn kernels as the Girl threw them on the ground for her. Then, she would wet her beak under the dripping faucet and close her eyes in a trembling of the greatest pleasure.

The Girl soon found a place for Clarice. The unoccupied kennel at the edge of the backyard, set up with a pole and everything because Esmeralda said chickens only liked to sleep perched up. The Girl herself would sweep and wash the little henhouse every other day so that Clarice could spend her nights in comfort.

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Writing Against Tradition: A Conversation with Stênio Gardel and Bruna Dantas Lobato

February 23, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

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.

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. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

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. READ MORE…

Poetry Beyond Words: An Interview with Patrícia Lino

February 8, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

. . .the traditional academic essay will never be able to say so clearly what the “infraleitura” does not say.

In this whirlwind and evocative interview, Asymptote contributor Alan Mendoza Sosa sits down with poet and professor Patrícia Lino to discuss just one of her many innovative approaches to poetry critique and response, the “infraleitura.” Based in expanded poetry, in which the word is not the ultimate form of expression, the “infraleitura” bypasses text to reach a visual, sonic, and tactile dialogue between poetic works as well as between poets. The “infraleitura” is ultimately a work of community; here, we are brought into the dialogue with a call to—in Lino’s words—“use it and transform it endlessly.”

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AMS): Could you tell our readers who are unfamiliar with expanded poetry what it is? 

Patrícia Lino (PL): On the one hand, the association of the terms “poetry” and “expanded” is paradoxical. Poetry, since its beginnings, has always been expanded and has been linked to the idea of ​​making something both corporally and intermedially. On the other hand, the association between “poetry” and “expanded” contradicts the logocentric and occidental tendency of modern poetry and reminds us, at the same time, of the importance and validity of the plural, unoriginal, and infinite qualities and possibilities of the poem, which, in addition to being verbal, can be visual, audiovisual, three-dimensional, performative, interactive, olfactory, gustative, or cinematographically conceived—as is the case for the poem in comics. In other words, the expanded poem is a composition contrary to the hierarchy of expressions, in which the word traditionally (and colonially) occupies the top, and image, sound, or gesture are relegated to, respectively, second, third, and fourth places.

AMS: You coined the term “infraleitura”; what does it mean and how does it relate to expanded poetry?

PL: The analytical tools of traditional literary criticism, which developed in the context of the aforementioned logocentric inclination, do not, by focusing primarily on the word, account for the various dimensions and materials of the expanded poem. The “infraleitura” arises, against interpretation, to respond to the absence of a bodily and decolonial way of reading poetry. It could be defined as an-impossible-to-define form of intermedial and creative essay, in which, as well as the poet’s body that expands to make the poem, the essayist’s body expands itself to understand. This other method of comprehension considers not only the word, but also any other useful means to grasp the poem in analysis. It is about reading with the whole body.

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Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel

January 30, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The necessity of casting off shame and regret, of rejecting violence instead of our identities, are crucial messages in this book.

In Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain, everything hinges on the unfolding of a page. Through the Brazilian author’s vivid prose, a world unfurls between the covers: of unrequited love, of shame and survival, of rurality and history—all of it circulating a letter that its protagonist has never opened. Asymptote is proud to present this incredible debut work as our first Book Club selection of the year, a book that merges its triumphant celebration of language with the pivotal interrogation of marginalization, all along the long journey towards self-acceptance.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, New Vessel Press, 2023

Much like the relationship that dominates it, The Words that Remain is just long enough to leave an indelible impression—but finishes in a flash. Stênio Gardel’s debut novel packs a literal and figurative punch, its brief pages flecked with contrasts: pleasure and pain, pride and shame, love and violence, peace and regret, strength and submission, what is spoken and what is kept silent. The storytelling moves fast, spanning half a century in its 150-odd pages, but Gardel’s sparse prose never creates a sense of freneticism. Through swirling reflections, the novel moves like a steady whirlwind, conveying inner turmoil and external inaction, punctuated by powerful, sometimes devastating change.

The Words that Remain tells the story of Raimundo Gaudêncio de Freitas, who paints his life as framed by two transformative events: learning to read and write at age seventy-one and falling in love at seventeen. Almost everything between the book’s covers oscillates between these two experiences, the chasm between them held taut by a letter—“half blessed, half cursed, wholly mysterious”—that he has never before been able to read. Penned by his past lover, the letter hangs over his life like a talisman, a burden, and a beacon of hope all in one.

Raimundo is gay. He and his lover, Cicero, are able to embrace their sexuality and one another for two years, but always with the fear of rejection from their families and community persisting in the background. This is rural Brazil in the 60s and 70s, and life is hard. Prevented from going to school by his father at an early age because “writing was for people who don’t need to put food on the table”, Raimundo must instead do backbreaking work to help support his family through floods, poverty, and infant death. While he longs for an education and the freedom to live with Cicero, the harsh realities of working-class life and widespread bigotry are so pervasive as to be almost completely internalised: being together gives them “a good taste, but [one] that left something sour in the back of their minds”, and even when they fantasize about living together, it is only imaginable in a big city—where no one will know they are more than just roommates. Sadly, their fears prove to be well grounded; when their families find out about their relationship, they are forbidden from seeing one another, and Raimundo is beaten mercilessly by his father for days, until he is driven away by his mother. In the long aftermath of this rejection, Raimundo thinks of himself as fated to wandering in a shadowy husk, his sexuality locked away, his life and love suspended in Cicero’s impenetrable letter, completely opaque like Cicero’s own destiny. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A True Story” by Natalia Timerman

January 24, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Meg Weeks

A man who writes. A man who writes in a notebook, seated next to me on a plane.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a work of metafiction from Brazilian writer Natalia Timerman’s collection, which was a finalist for the Jabuti Prize. In “A True Story,” a chance encounter with a man on the plane—her seat partner—leads to an intense connection mediated by the act of writing. Translated from the Portuguese by Meg Weeks, this story conveys the electric atmosphere of first meetings.

From the aisle of the plane I spotted row twenty-seven. I sat down in the middle seat. The seat by the window was already occupied by a young guy in a baseball cap, his attention focused on his phone. I was praying that no one would occupy the seat on my other side so I wouldn’t feel the need to make myself smaller, when a man, tall and blondish, his skin scarred by acne, approached.

He greeted me almost imperceptibly with his eyes and sat down on my left-hand side. Ok, patience. I took my book out of my bag, which I then placed below the seat in front of me, and opened it to the marked page, 174.

The man had large hands.

I tried to read but I couldn’t stop observing those hands moving to take a notebook and a pen out of a black backpack, also placed on the floor. 

I looked surreptitiously at the man’s face. From my brief glance, he struck me as interesting. His lips were red and thick, his eyelashes long and pale. Handsome, almost.

I returned to my book, but the movements of the pen executed by those large hands gripped my attention. A man who writes. A man who writes in a notebook, seated next to me on a plane.

I adjusted myself in my seat to achieve an angle that would allow me to both read my book and peer at his notebook as well. I was about to begin deciphering the handwritten words when the plane began to move.

I closed my book and my eyes and adjusted myself again in my seat, this time to face forward. I get sick to my stomach when planes take off. I took care, however, to leave the cover of the Bolaño I was reading face-up.

Once the plane had achieved its cruising altitude, I opened my book again. The man was still writing . . . delicate hands, I was able to make out while I pretended to stretch. He fidgeted a bit in his seat and in the same movement, rested his notebook on the armrest between our seats. Ah, now it was easy to read what he was writing—which he didn’t stop doing, even momentarily—all I had to do was tilt my body diagonally towards him. READ MORE…

Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

November 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Annilee Newton, Barbara Halla, Bella Creel, Caridad Svich, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, Megan Sungyoon, and Sofija Popovska

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

I think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Prodigy” by Nei Lopes

August 2, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Robert Smith

Rumor had it the festival in the bay was being watched from the highest parts of the city too.

This Translation Tuesday, dive into a short story from Jabuti Prize-winning author Nei Lopes that takes the reader a century back to Guanabara Bay in Brazil where a circus troupe disembarks. Drawn from a short story collection (Nas águas desta baía há muito tempo: Contos da Guanabara) that zooms in on complex and forgotten chapters in Brazilian history. Hear from translator Robert Smith how Lopes, in Smith’s own words, “undertook meticulous historical research to offer a sweeping view of the place and era, celebrating Afro-Brazilian culture and exploring the history of systemic racism.”

“In portraying a dynamic period of upheaval, the narrator Prodigy occasionally overwhelms readers with the feeling that too much is happening too fast. At the same pace that his story becomes entangled with that of the geographical region, two revolts, and the historical figure João Cândido Felisberto, his ebullient mood overlaps episodes of horrific violence. This translation took some liberties in altering punctuation to maintain this disorienting effect. When translating idiomatic expressions indicative of a past era, I looked to rough English equivalents that would sound similarly dated to contemporary readers. A challenge specific to this short story is the multivocal narrative, which leaves the question open as to whether we are facing a carnival storyteller who is cordially inviting us to suspend disbelief, a folktale with elements of magical realism, or an unreliable narrator whose traumatic experiences as a victim of abuse and a soldier have led him to rewrite his life story.”

—Robert Smith

This island has a lot of stories. They all do, I should say; the whole bay: land and sea. The day the first circus arrived, for example, was like the world was starting all over again.

When the barge docked and started unloading all that stuff, we had no idea what it might be. But a strange joy took hold of everybody, made us want to sing and dance to do something to please that gift that had fallen from the sky without saying what they had come for. Little by little, the colorful poles, the boards, the wheels, the iron braces, the motley flags appeared… Then the cages with the animals.

It was the Seventh of September¹, and, while we were watching everything in awe, the fireworks were going off. The ships, Tamandaré, Trajano, Liberdade², were sailing by in the bay, shooting their fireworks toward the city, way over on the other side. Right then and there, we knew that something truly beautiful had begun in all of our lives.

Disembarking in the quay, the caravan of oxcarts and wagons continued down the bumpy old road. The company was directed by the famous artist Benedito de Lima. And it arrived on our island, straight from Niterói, to save us from our isolation and change our daily routine. It popped up out of nowhere, the only attraction in our village, stirring up the hopes and daydreams of rich and poor, young and old, black and white; everybody.

No one had known the circus was going to come. But when it arrived, even without announcements or pamphlets or newspapers, word got round. READ MORE…

The Blurriness of Intimacy: On Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries

June 1, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Abreu has the ability to narrate big emotions while undercutting them with a self-consciousness that means these moments never feel trite.

Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, Archipelago Books, 2022

Moldy strawberries: just past the point of ripeness, bursting with life until they exude decay. Sweet yet bitter, delicious yet spoilt, nourishing yet rotten. It is this dichotomy that sustains Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries, tenderly translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato: a collection of short prose pieces and stories that brims with life even as its flesh bruises.

Abreu (1948-1996) came of age in a turbulent time in Brazilian political history. In 1968, the Department for Political and Social Order put him on the watch list they used to target their ideological opponents, and Abreu subsequently spent time in exile across Europe—in Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, England, and France. While his writing was heavily censored by the Brazilian authorities, he nonetheless became one of the country’s most beloved queer writers, winning the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction three times for his luminous work.

Moldy Strawberries is considered by many to be his magnum opus. Published in 1982, its vivid depictions of queer communities amidst the perils of the military dictatorship, rising homophobia, and the looming AIDS crisis serve to affirm life even when the threat of death feels ever-present. In eighteen prose pieces, which range from dialogues and vignettes to fully developed stories, Abreu’s writing bears witness to humanity in all its fragile glory. His prose affirms the possibility of love, desire, and connection—or at least indulges that dream. READ MORE…