Posts featuring Italo Calvino

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…

New Year, New Horizons!

January 1, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reading resolutions for 2020—brought to you by the blog team.

Happy New Year, reader! To ring in the ’20s, we are getting personal and sharing our own reading resolutions. From literature engaged with the effects of climate change to classic theological texts, here are the reads we have on the radar for 2020. Maybe our titles overlap with some of yours? If you’re inspired, share your resolutions with us in the comments below.

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor:

We are becoming ever more impelled by the worst-case scenarios, the ultimate consequences of our carelessness. Climate change is cemented at the pinnacle of every engaged mind, consuming the concerns of those on the forefront of human progress—the writers. December is a month of returns, and a trip across the Pacific on my part meant a reabsorption into the beloved stacks of books left behind by a past self who had endlessly imagined the present. I found in those volumes an incredible vitality—it takes considerably more courage to speculate on the future now, yet in our infinitely ideating language, we can’t help it, we imagine naturally, as we have always done.

Usually my reading directives are predictable, by which I mean they’re somewhat “in accordance” with my being a female Chinese poet—the tendency veers towards a healthy majority of women writers, plenty of Chinese literature, and as much poetry as possible. As we approach the new decade, however, I’ve turned my attention to literature more specifically in dialogue with our planet. In Amitav Ghosh’s beautifully urgent book-length essay, The Great Derangement, he convincingly argues for an overhaul of the fiction genre so that it may better address and reflect upon our contemporary precarity. Though the best of our stories are inevitably engaged with our environment, I found Ghosh’s take riveting in its insistence that we continue to build and invent language that is ever more precise, alert, and curious. READ MORE…

“Unintentional Unity”: Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini on translating Amelia Rosselli’s Obtuse Diary

September 5, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Translating Rosselli’s prose is not different from translating her poetry. Her language is equally challenging, her syntax equally subversive.

Amelia Rosselli’s work is deeply marked by her family and personal history. Born in 1930 to a British activist and a martyred Italian-Jewish antifascist, she lived as an eternal outsider in France, the US, the UK, and Italy. A polyglot with persistent depression, her poetry challenges. It challenges the confines of genre and conventional syntax, it challenges the society with which she was ever at odds, and it challenges the reader to accompany her through her brave literary wanderings. Rosselli ended her own life by jumping out the window of her fifth-floor apartment in Rome in 1996.

Obtuse Diary, published by Entre Rios Books in late 2018, is the first and only collection of Rosselli’s prose. The writing spans a number of years and is organized into three sections and two illuminating afterwords, one by the author and one by one of the translators. Asymptote’s Lindsay Semel spoke with Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini, two of the collection’s three translators, about the joys and challenges of rendering Rosselli’s stunning and difficult Italian into English.

Lindsay Semel (LS): Tell me about the origin of this project. How did you come to translate this text together? What was the collaboration process like?

Deborah Woodard (DW): Translating Amelia Rosselli’s Diario Ottuso into Obtuse Diary was quite the saga. It’s a little book, but it took forever to translate. Giuseppe Leporace, my first co-translator, and I brought out some sections of the Diary in The Dragonfly, a selection of Rosselli’s poetry, back in 2009. After we finished The Dragonfly and brought it out through Chelsea Editions, I decided to rework Obtuse Diary and publish it in its entirety.  When Giuseppe became too busy to review it with me, he graciously stepped down from the project. On Giuseppe’s suggestion, I worked on the Diary with Vanja Skoric Paquin, a talented young linguist with a particular gift for unraveling snarled syntax. When Vanja gave birth to her daughter she, in turn, stepped down. A year or so passed, and then I recommenced with Dario De Pasquale. Dario and I tore the earlier translation apart, sentence by sentence. When Dario became too busy to continue to translate with me (do we see a pattern here?), I was extremely fortunate to join forces with Roberta, my current—and from here on out, sole—co-translator on the final version. READ MORE…

Translator Profile: Jennifer Scappettone

November 13, 2017  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Allegra Rosenbaum and Jennifer Scappettone

The notion of a unitary, homogenous, and monolingual “America” is as much an alternative fact as Spicer’s attendance numbers at the inauguration.

Former Asymptote blog editor Allegra Rosenbaum interviews translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, whose profile appeared in our Winter 2016 issue. Her translation of Italian poet Milli Graffi was featured on the Asymptote blog last week and her translation of F. T. Marinetti’s futurist poetry appeared in our Spring 2016 issue. 

Who are you? What do you translate? (This is just a preliminary question! To be taken with an existential grain of salt.)

I am a poet and scholar of American and Italian nationalities who grew up in New York, across the street from a highly toxic landfill redolent of the family’s ancestral zone outside of Naples (laced with illegal poisonous dumps). I translate Fascists and anti-Fascists; Italian feminists and a single notorious misogynist; inheritors of Futurism and the historical avant-garde; and contemporary poets who are attempting to grapple with the millennial burden of the “Italian” language by channeling or annulling voices from Saint Francis through autonomia.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Blind Spot” from Brief Cartography for Places of No Interest by Marcílio França Castro

September 5, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Heath Wing

"We banished from cartography all lions, mermaids, pygmies, and dragons. The sterilization of maps only confirms the disdain we have for nature."

When I first met Marcílio França Castro at a coffee shop in Brazil during the winter of 2016, he showed up toting a bag full of presents for me. When he dumped the bag onto the table, out came books, like he was some sort of combination of Jorge Luis Borges and Santa Claus. What most impressed me was his eagerness to promote Brazilian literature in general; several of the books were from his peers and not just ones he had authored. And perhaps Borges is a good comparison for Marcílio; indeed, his writing is in line with the likes of Borges, Calvino, and Cortázar. Yet he does not simply imagine other worlds, he perceives with brilliance unsuspected oddities in places of absolutely no interest. In his short stories, which range from traditional length to flash fiction, and with a prose that is at once economic and yet never lacking in precision, Marcílio França Castro transforms his culture’s most unsuspecting spaces into fantastic reading. The author and I have worked together in producing translations for many of his stories, overcoming differences in idioms, metaphor, sentence structure and other obstacles found in the passage from Portuguese to English. Most importantly, this project kept the translator sane during the subsequent North Dakotan winter of 2017. 

—Heath Wing. 

The manuals say such devices are made to take anything. Bumps, turbulence, high winds, lightning. Even crashes and hurricanes. It’s said they come out unscathed from the most intemperate of weather. You know the protocols. For every inconvenience there is a plan, an automatic fix. An aircraft like this one, with all its resources, ought to be, according to the manuals, practically uncrashable. That’s why, if it were up to manuals and manufacturers, our role would be merely to maintain course and keep her steady, taking advantage of the dignity of flight and the charm of our profession. And that’s really what we do here, before this gorgeous instrument panel, full of buttons and colorful lights: with the prudence it conveys, we relax and commend our fate and everyone else’s to the invisible wisdom of the display.

Look ahead. The sky’s magnificent, full of stars; someone might say it’s a painting commissioned to decorate the cockpit. A captain, from the moment of departure, always has his beard well-groomed, his uniform impeccable; he pilots the plane with swan-like indifference. That’s how the passengers see you. We fly calmly. The seats are anatomic and dinner well-balanced. An almost anesthetic experience. The Pacific is nothing more than an enormous tapestry of black silk that clips the horizon. We think and act as if the world outside no longer existed, as though the clouds and the ocean below us were but unfailing radar bleeps or a set of geographical coordinates. In truth, as we fly we simply ignore the substance found in Earth’s elements. Try this coffee, it’s wonderful.

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William at the Loom

November 21, 2013  |  in Essays  |  by Zack Newick

William Weaver, 1923-2013

Reading often fools us into feeling like we’re conversing—the words touch our eyes and yet seem to come in through our ears. It is no wonder that people often feel a bond to their favorite writers, their favorite books. They think of them as friends—that first person voice is talking to me, this story was crafted with me in mind. We extract secret meanings: my definition of blue is not the same as yours (I think of a butterfly my mother captured when I was in elementary school); I render Middle Earth far differently than Peter Jackson. Every book is a Choose Your Own Adventure, that way.

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