Posts featuring Beatriz Bracher

To Channel a Voice: Adam Morris on Translating Beatriz Bracher’s Antonio

April 22, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Nicole Bilan

[T]he concept of mediumship resonated with me as a metaphor for what it was that I was trying to do as a translator.

In Antonio, our Book Club selection for March, acclaimed Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher uses the mystifying, sustaining story of one family’s tragedy to paint a larger portrait of a tumultuous nation’s political and sociological landscape, reverberating through the discrete lives of its citizens. Constructed in a triad of narratives and rich with the fullness of voices in distinct oration, Antonio is both an electrifying mystery and a carefully constructed study of inheritance. In the following interview, Assistant Editor Nicole Bilan discusses with translator Adam Morris about the rigors and pleasures of translating this multifarious, scrupulously woven text.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Nicole Bilan (NB): I’m going to be really reductive with my first question and say that Antonio is like a book of stories—or various perspectives of the same story—and this makes it quite difficult to kind of pin down its continuity. How did you navigate this ambiguity, that dynamic of mystery?

Adam Morris (AM): Well, one thing that helped was that I actually decided not to read the novel the whole way through before translating it. When New Directions accepted my initial proposal to translate I Didn’t Talk, they wanted to make sure that they had a follow-up. I recommended Anatomy of Paradise (2015), the author’s most recent novel, but the editors decided on Antonio, which I had only sampled for the purposes of writing the proposal. After reading about four or five chapters, I decided that if there was a chance I going translate Antonio, I wouldn’t want to know the explanations behind the novel’s central family secret as I worked; I wanted to find out as I was translating, to see if I could replicate that sense of not-knowing the reader is supposed to experience. So that’s what I did.

NB: That is an absolutely incredible thing to do, because even encountering it as a reader, you’re just constantly thinking: Wait, hold on, hold on, I’m lost. And then it hits you all at once. So how did you find it looking back in retrospect, trying to untangle those pieces of information—how did you refine something that’s so messily constructed in a way?

AM: I think “tangle” and “untangle” are the right verbs to use here; that was what it felt like to be working with the three narrators of Antonio. The way this novel is constructed, the voices aren’t interwoven. They’re tangled. It feels deliberately very messy, as you said; there’s conflicting information disclosed by the three voices as they evolve throughout, each becoming more familiar with their silent interlocutor, Benjamim. And one of the ways that I handled the untangling of these competing strands was to look at the novel in continuity, with each voice isolated, to see how they individually evolved without interference from the others—it’s almost impossible, of course, because their interlocutor transmits portions of each of their stories to the others, and they respond accordingly. So I tried to look at the story as a whole, and then as discrete narrative lines, and then finally reconstructed a synthesis with my revisions. But for the first draft, I just went straight through; I wanted the conversational approach that Bracher adopts to feel as natural as possible. That’s why, when I’d first started reading the novel, I knew I needed to stop. I wanted to preserve and capture the narrative effects. READ MORE…

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Antonio by Beatriz Bracher

April 14, 2021  |  in Book Club  |  by Nicole Bilan

Bracher vaguely nods toward the uncanny, peeping out from behind confrontational realism.

Our Book Club selection for the month of March comes from one of Brazil’s most powerful contemporary voices. With Antonio, Beatriz Bracher brings philosophy and narrative in a deeply ruminative and immersive expedition through familial lineage, uncovering the various fragments of a tumultuous paternal relationship in order to understand the myriad forces that carries an individual from their origin to their present.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Antonio by Beatriz Bracher, translated from the Portuguese by Adam Morris, New Directions, 2021

“The spectators were part of the show, but they only realised it once they had gone by.”

To read Antonio is to become part of its story. In the conversational style that has become one of Beatriz Bracher’s calling cards, the narrative begins in a direct address to the reader, immediately situating us as characters for whom the story is told, as though one was crowded around a fireplace, listening to a relative tell stories from an armchair. Adopting the same hushed tones and subtle drama of the fireside orator in her writing, Bracher crafts a layered story which brims with mystery and tension. Effortlessly weaving her way through points of obscurity and shocking revelation, she plays with the reader-turned-listener as she leads us through the undulating landscape of a murky family history.

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In Conversation: Adam Morris

August 8, 2018  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Jacob Silkstone

History is not entirely objective; it is what posterity makes of conflicting memories.

“Talk… speak… voice”: each word appears dozens of times in I Didn’t Talk, our July Asymptote Book Club selection. Beatriz Bracher’s novel blends together a chorus of voices, orchestrated by retiring professor Gustavo, to explore one of the darkest periods of Brazil’s history.

In conversation with Asymptote’s Jacob Silkstone, translator Adam Morris outlines how the novel came to be translated into English, why it resonates with a contemporary audience, and why the central question of whether or not Gustavo talked is perhaps best left unanswered.

Jacob Silkstone (JS): What led to you translating I Didn’t Talk? It’s the first of Beatriz Bracher’s four full-length novels to appear in English: do you have a sense of how it compares to Bracher’s other work?

Adam Morris (AM): I proposed I Didn’t Talk for Bracher’s English debut because its thematic concerns, although universal, seemed to possess fresh urgency in the context of ongoing political upheaval in Brazil. Censorship and various forms of state repression have re-emerged, and so has openly expressed nostalgia for a law-and-order society like the one the dictatorships professed to uphold. The crisis of democracy in Brazil is so severe that occasional murmurs of a return to military rule must be taken as a serious threat.

Of course, in the time since I first proposed the translation in 2016, authoritarianism has been on the march all across the world. I did not foresee that happening, but it makes the novel that much more timely—some fourteen years after its publication and nearly half a century since 1970, a pivotal year in Gustavo’s story.

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Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: I Didn’t Talk by Beatriz Bracher

July 26, 2018  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Georgia Nasseh

With this translation, Adam Morris introduces a singularly powerful voice of Brazilian contemporary literature to English–language readers.

Under an authoritarian dictatorship, a single sentence can be the difference between life and death. In our July Asymptote Book Club selection, Beatriz Bracher’s I Didn’t Talk, retired professor Gustavo is preparing to leave São Paulo. First, though, he has a more demanding journey to make: a journey that will take him back to a darker time, when he and his brother-in-law were tortured by Brazil’s military regime. Did he talk?

Adam Morris’ English translation of I Didn’t Talk, published by New Directions, has been described as a “brilliant, enigmatic rumination of a novel.” We’re delighted to be sharing it with our Book Club subscribers across the USA, the UK, and Canada.

If you’re not yet a subscriber but want to sign up in time to receive next month’s selection, all the information you need is over on our official Book Club page. Meanwhile, subscribers are more than welcome to join the online discussion via our facebook group.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

September 22, 2017  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alice Inggs, Maíra Mendes Galvão, and Poupeh Missaghi

Your weekly dose of literary news

A quick zip through the literary world with Asymptote! Today we are visiting Iran, Brazil, and South Africa. Literary festivals, new books, and a lot more await you. 

Poupeh Missaghi, Editor-at-Large, fills you up on what’s been happening in Iran:

The Persian translation of Oriana Fallaci’s Nothing and Amen finding its way into Iran’s bestsellers list almost fifty years after the first publication of the translation. The book was translated in 1971 by Lili Golestan, translator and prominent Iranian art gallery owner in Tehran, and since then has had more than a dozen editions published. The most recent round of sales is related to Golestan giving a TEDx talk in Tehran a few weeks ago about her life in which she spoke of how that book was the first she ever translated and how its publication and becoming a bestseller has changed her life.

In other exciting news from Iran, the Tehran Book Garden opened its doors to the public recently. Advertised as “the largest bookstore in the world,” the space is more of a cultural complex consisting of cinemas, cultural centers, art galleries, a children’s library, science and game halls, and more. One of the key goals of the complex is to cater to families and provide the youth with a space for literary, cultural, scientific, educational, and entertainment activities. The complex is considered a significant cultural investment for the the Iranian capital of more than twelve million residents and it has since its opening become a popular destination with people of different ages and interests.

Finally, a piece of news related to translation from Iran that is amusing but also quite disturbing. It relates to the simultaneous interpretation into Persian of President Trump’s speech in the recent U.N. General Assembly broadcasted live on Iranian state-run TV (IRIB). The interpreter mistranslated several of his sentences about Iran and during some others he remained silent and completely refrained from translating. When the act was denounced by many, the interpreter published a video (aired by the IRIB news channel and available on @shahrvand_paper’s twitter account) in which he explained that he did not want to voice the antagonistic words of Trump against his country and people. This video started another round of responses. Under the tweeted video, many users reminded him of the ethics of the profession and the role of translators/interpreters, while others used the occasion to discuss the issue of censorship and the problematic performance of IRIB in general.

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