The book got to Michael Z. Wise, editor and co-founder of New Vessel Press, through Fernando Rinaldi, who works at Companhia das Letras, and was one of the first people who ever read the book along with my first editor, Julia Bussius. Fernando sent a description of the book and a translation excerpt to Michael. And Michael had very enthusiastic feedback from the commissioned reader as well as a very excited feedback from his assistant editor, Jennifer Shyue. It was Jennifer who recommended Bruna Dantas Lobato for the translation. Since Bruna comes from the northeast of Brazil, as I do. Everything happened quite fast after that. Actually, when I least expected it, I had the first version of the translation. It was very generous of them, Michael and Bruna, to let me be part of the process, and I couldn’t be happier with how the translated book turned out and with how far it has come.

 

 

Listen to Bruna Dantas Lobato explain how she came to translate The Words That Remain

For this book in particular, I had read it for a reader’s report I had to do for a scout, and I knew that it was doing the rounds with the book fairs and with all the presses. At one point, an editor who knew that I was interested in this kind of work just sent it to me and asked me to do a sample, and I feel so grateful it landed on my desk.

I feel like this is one of the rare instances where my advocacy happened first. The book came to me because of the advocacy work I’ve been doing. Where I usually, it’s kind of the other way around. A lot of books I really love don’t get a lot of attention, and I have to do all this fighting and the books go on unpublished forever. Like another Northeastern author, I’ve been trying to publish, Jarrid Arraes, and I have yet to find a home for that one.

This was just being at the right place at the right time and totally well deserved that it worked out so beautifully and everything has been falling into place. I adore Gardel’s writing. I think he’s a gorgeous prose stylist. I feel very honored I got to work on this book.

WWB: What particular translation challenges arose as The Words That Remain was brought into English? Were they points that the author anticipated, or was there something of a process of discovery in which the author found that the translator shed light on unexpected aspects of the original-language work?

SG: Before reading the first version of the translation, I had no idea what to expect as to possible changes in meaning or how some idiomatic expressions would be translated. But then I was very surprised. Bruna decided not to translate some words like forró (a typical music and dance) and corama (a plant), which was very smart because the original words in these cases, I think, enrich the representation of the environment and culture. As for new meanings, well, I got even more surprised, very positively, by the way. I recall two instances very clearly. In the first chapter, there is a sentence that in Portuguese uses the word presente in the sense of time, like “present tense.” But presente in Portuguese can also mean “gift,” and that was Bruna’s choice, and it gave the sentence a whole new perspective, bringing the idea of heritage, of expectations that parents have of their children, even in terms of bloodline and determinism. For example, the sense that Raimundo had no choice but to follow in his father’s footsteps. Those ideas are crucial to Raimundo’s story, so I was very happy with the translation. The other example I loved was the translation of coisa de morte, era pra ser coisa de vida, which in a literal English language version would be something like “thing of death, it was supposed to be a thing of life,” referring to Raimundo’s feelings toward Cícero. Of course, coisa has its purpose to be there, as something that Raimundo could not quite figure out at the time, but Bruna translated that phrase to “not a death sentence, it’s a life sentence” (p. 129) and the translation gained not only a more specific idea, in comparison to a vague “thing,” and referred to life as something you write, like a sentence, and writing is a nuclear theme in the book, but also added a meaning of judgment, as well as its outcome, prejudice and violence, which are also central to the book.

BDL: It was important to me to get his input on the English text as a whole, and especially on how we were portraying the queer characters. We had many conversations about when to use a word like travesti and when to let a character’s identity appear without a label. I’m wary of imposing American conventions or categories, of queerness and otherwise, onto a Brazilian text. In the end, I’m happy I got to incorporate some words that feel uniquely Brazilian into the English, like in the examples above. And Stênio was incredibly generous throughout the whole process, and very open to letting me push the English anywhere I felt there were opportunities to do so.

WWB: Bruna, you’ve spoken before about your own background as a translator into English who was born and spent much of her childhood in the Brazilian Northeast. Those familiar with Brazilian culture—literary or otherwise—are privy to its pivotal place in Brazilian culture. Stênio is from Brazil’s Northeast, as well, and you’ve spoken before about how important you feel that’s been to this translation. I wonder if you could elaborate on that. Interestingly, perhaps, Stênio is from the rural Northeast, while you’re from the urban Northeast. The Northeast, of course, is no more monolithic than any other region of the world, but I wonder how that fact might have played into your translation.

BDL: Both of my parents are from the rural Northeast: my mother is from rural Paraíba and my father still lives in a small town in Ceará, not too far from Stênio’s hometown. Growing up in Natal, the Portuguese I spoke at home and even at school felt very personal, completely different from the dominant Portuguese I heard on TV or read in books. To my ears, Northeastern prose tends to sound spoken, witty, and direct, with quick turns of phrase and a sharp sense of humor. I’ve seen English translations that make it sound quaint and dated, too idiomatic and bordering on comical, which only downplays and flattens the emotional palette of the writing. In my translation, I’m more interested in highlighting its contemporary inventiveness, speed, tone, rhythm, and cadence than the otherness of the text per se.

Being well versed in “the Northeastern novel” has also paid off. Gardel’s book does a lot to counter some of the more stereotypical tropes of the genre, that we see in the work of Rachel de Queiroz, Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado, and even Clarice Lispector. I had to be careful not to insert or delete anything that would push it in the wrong direction. In those books, it’s common to see characters leave their impoverished region for the white cosmopolitan south of Brazil to find enlightenment, for example. I love that in The Words That Remain, Raimundo stays in the Northeast and finds his answers at home.

The flood scene at the beginning of the novel was also very moving to me. I grew up hearing Brazilians from other parts of the country make fun of us drought people, and most of our movies and books always show the same historical drought that ravaged the region in the 1870s. But the truth is that I’ve never ever experienced a drought in my life. Instead, our house flooded every year and we’d have to put our fridge on top of the table so it wouldn’t get ruined. It meant a lot to me to be able to write that scene and to see it portrayed like that in a book. I’d like to think I brought some of the pain of my own experience to it.

SG: I believe that both of us, Bruna and I, being from Brazil’s Northeast played a decisive role in the translation process. She was able to capture the Portuguese text in a especial way, by knowing and listening to its rhythm, by understanding the range of vocabulary and by knowing from her own experience, to some degree, the place I was coming from, both as a person born here and as an author writing about characters from Brazil’s Northeast. Our common background really paid off in very concrete terms: When I first listened to Bruna reading an excerpt in English that I myself had read minutes before in Portuguese to the same audience, I realized how close the two texts were, how they shared the same essence.