Marcelo Lotufo is a literary translator and founder of Edições Jabuticaba, an independent Brazilian press with a unique focus on poetry in translation. In today’s post, he sits down with Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Brazil, Lara Norgaard, to discuss the burgeoning indie publishing scene in São Paulo and the role of translation in Brazilian literature.
Lara Norgaard (LN): What was your vision when your started Jabuticaba? How did you see it fitting into the Brazilian publishing scene?
Marcelo Lotufo (ML): I had the sense that an indie scene was starting in Brazil. Lote 42, for instance, was a press that had started a few years before Jabuticaba. Editora Patuá had started around the same time. And Marília Garcia, who is a poet, she and her husband, Leonardo Gandolfi, who is also a poet, also started a press, LunaParque. The scene had been around for four, maybe five years before Jabuticaba started. Before, there were some smaller presses that didn’t last for very long. People would start self-publishing and then a bigger press would invite them to their offices and then they would close the press. You saw that happen with Daniel Galera and other groups.
Poetry has always been sidelined, though. Brazil doesn’t have a big poetry market in the big presses, so smaller presses tend to crop up and do a lot of poetry. 7Letras and Azougue, which are both from Rio, have been around for almost twenty years and they’ve done a lot of poetry. But for a long time there wasn’t exactly a scene.