In 2023, LALT’s Managing Editor, Arthur Malcolm Dixon, was honored to form part of the judging panel for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. As a judge, he had the chance to become quite familiar with the winning book: The Words That Remain by Brazilian writer Stênio Gardel, a fast-paced and moving novel of queer self-realization translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato.
In February 2024, Arthur spoke with Bruna via Zoom about this award-winning translation and other aspects of her practice. The full video of their conversation will soon be available in English on the new LALT blog.
Arthur Malcolm Dixon: Today I’m excited to talk to a wonderful translator and writer, Bruna Dantas Lobato. She translated The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, which won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. It’s great to have the opportunity to talk to Bruna about this book.
First, how did this project come to be? How did you first hear about Stênio and how did this project end up in your hands?
Bruna Dantas Lobato: People kept telling me about this book because of my interest in Northeastern literature. I grew up in the Northeast of Brazil, which is an area of the country that is marginalized, that isn’t as represented either in Brazil or abroad. And we speak in a certain way, we have a certain accent, there’s a dialect, and many cultural influences that are unique to that region. The population is made of more people of color than in other parts of the country that had different waves of European migration. We have a bigger Indigenous presence, a bigger Black community, etc. I’m very fond of the Northeast. I love everything about it. My Portuguese is accented in that way. Any Brazilianist or anyone from Brazil would say, “You talk like one of the underdogs.” It is what it is, I was born into it.
So I’ve been trying to push more literature from that part of the country. Not always very successfully, because I hear, “It’s niche” or, “It didn’t get big recognition in Brazil,” but it wouldn’t get big recognition in Brazil, you know? It’s not like it’s a cosmopolitan white man being a flaneur in São Paulo, that’s not the kind of literature that is being made, and it shouldn’t be.
But this book did well in Brazil. I kept hearing about it, and I got a PDF from the agency that represents Stênio, and I wrote some reader’s reports for publishers. I ended up also reading some samples by other translators, and they were interesting, but they mostly erased the fact that the book was spoken in a certain way. There is a spoken quality to the prose, and it is very much written in the Portuguese I grew up speaking. It’s not the dominant, national-TV Portuguese.
So I wanted to highlight that, and I ended up getting an email from Michael Wise, the editor at New Vessel Press, saying that he was interested in buying the rights to the book. He wanted to know if I had a take on this kind of dialect, what would I do differently, or how could I capture this dialect in English? I did a little sample for him and wrote quite the long treatise explaining my ideas and what I thought was important to privilege, and that’s how the book came to me.
A.M.D.: What were some of the things you chose to privilege? How did you emphasize elements of a very specific place while changing the language?
B.D.L.: Well, not a single word has remained, but all the words remain. First, I didn’t want to write the dialect in a way that was foreign just for foreignness’s sake. To me, what is interesting about the Northeastern way of speaking is not that it sounds different from dominant Brazilian Portuguese, but that it’s witty and self-deprecating and poetic and full of imagery and sometimes full of exaggeration: everything is huge and aphoristic. That’s what I wanted to highlight. And there’s an oral quality to it. Everything needed to sound very literary, very written—because it is a very literary book—but it also needed to sound spoken, like this could be somebody waxing poetic at home or on the phone telling their life story. That was my goal.
A couple of different kinds of imagery were really important to me. One was the river. There are all these floods and rivers and drownings and these different images there, in a place that is marked by droughts, so it’s quite the counterpoint to how the region has been portrayed before. I saw the crossing of the river—and there is a cross that marks the river as well, a physical cross—I saw that as representing the book itself. It needs to cascade and flow and follow its course in its own way. That’s not something I ascribed to the book, it’s already built into the prose. You saw the punctuation, the unusual stream of consciousness: that is how the book was written. That was important to me.
It was also important that a character like Suzzanný, who’s hyperbolic and noisy, could be noisy in her own way. She has two labels that are pretty heavy on her shoulders: one is that she’s travesti and the other is that she’s from the Northeast, and a person of color and all of that, so she needed to be loud in a way that was not just going to be Black or just travesti or just Northeastern: it needed to be all her own. This is pretty much what I did with all the characters. I didn’t want to think, “Oh, they’re supposed to be a certain way, this is signalling Northeast, so I’m going to go in that direction.” That might have meant making them sound folksy, as if they were from the American South or something like that. Instead, I wanted them to seem invested in language.
A.M.D.: I’d like to hear more about your own novel and other writing projects. To what extent do you differentiate between the practices of translation and writing? Do you feel you’re doing something similar when you do these two things, or do you see them as completely separate disciplines?
B.D.L.: I do think I’m doing something similar, though when I’m translating I’m writing on style alone, which is every writer’s dream, to just be surfing on words. And, of course, in my own writing, I have to take care of the content. For example, there are structural concerns: it needs to rush a certain way and escalate a certain way and land with this particular emotional effect. Those are the same concerns I have when translating, it’s just that I’m using slightly different material. In my own writing I think, “Okay, maybe I need a more dramatic outburst from this character,” while as a translator I think, “Maybe here I need to switch out this sentence or I didn’t do a good enough job with this character’s words because I’m not getting enough of the outburst that Stênio put in.” They go hand-in-hand.
My own novel is also short. I guess that’s in line with what’s in vogue in Latin America. I like a short novel. Mine is about a young Brazilian woman’s first year at an American college and the relationship she forges with her mother over video calls. Long before the Zoom era, so many of us were already celebrating the holidays over the computer. I wanted to use a space like this one, the split-screen, as a sort of stage. It’s all the characters can see of each other, and what can we do with that? I really loved it, I thought it was an experimental, form-oriented approach, and it was an interesting way for me to explore loneliness, financial precarity, foreignness, all of that. And I’m very dialogue-driven, so all of that is in there. But it doesn’t have the kind of plot that Stênio’s book has. They have completely different intentions. It’s not meant to be that expansive, to show a character’s entire life from youth to old age. It has completely different ambitions. As much as we share a style, or at least an interest in style and poetics, and we have a solid sense of aesthetics for our writing, we are using completely different tools. That’s fun.
But translation is a part of my process. There’s one short story by Caio Fernando Abreu that takes place entirely over the phone, and I adore that story. It taught me a lot about how to sustain a narrative with only two characters, and with limited physicality—one person can hear the other one coughing, or clearing her throat, or making a sound, and they think, “I wonder if she’s playing with the cord.” Many other stories I’ve translated have taught me a great deal. Stênio has certainly taught me a great deal as well, though I translated his book after I was done with my novel. But maybe my next novel will use some of his influence too.
A.M.D.: Speaking of Caio Fernando Abreu, we featured an excerpt from your translation of Moldy Strawberries, which is now out from Archipelago Books, in a previous issue of LALT. Caio Fernando Abreu was a key writer of queer literature from Brazil, and The Words That Remain is a standard-bearer of that literature. Do you see that as an important part of your practice? Why should these voices be brought from Brazil to English-speaking readers?
B.D.L.: I didn’t set out to translate only queer literature, but I think my interests are clear. In a way, it chose me. I’m drawn to that kind of perspective. I’m drawn to books that show a side of Brazil I don’t see often, mostly because I see the translator as a curator. I have a lot of responsibility in choosing the very limited facets of Brazil to which we have access in English, and I usually go for the books I haven’t had the chance to see in English yet. Queer books are a big part of that. Translating a book from the eighties that’s known for being cosmopolitan and going through the AIDS crisis and all of that felt like an important dialogue for American literature to have with Latin American literature. I can’t believe Caio hadn’t been translated widely before—it still shocks me. But I think a lot of it has to do with homophobia. Not just on the translator’s part, but the general market not being welcoming or prepared for it. Translators like Gregory Rabassa touched on all the authors around Caio and never touched him. So there was some kind of barrier there, I think.
I’ve since worked on other queer books. I just finished one, I’m still working on a title in English: E se eu Fosse Puta by Amara Moira. It’s a trans sex worker’s memoir. In many ways I’ve ended up writing and researching and doing a lot of translating around queerness or around identity in general. I also translated The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório, a book about race in the south of Brazil—the whitest part, really. It’s about a Black man in this very white place and police brutality and all of that. All these books around identity show Brazil in a way that might not be the easiest to market or reconcile—those are the books I tend to be drawn to. And I’m very happy and privileged to be working on books around queerness.
A.M.D.: Speaking of unfair biases, for many years we’ve been told people should translate into their “native language.” But now a lot of people are realizing that’s not the case: people can translate in all different directions. What’s the importance of recognizing the work of translators like yourself, who are translating books and languages from their own place of origin?
B.D.L.: I love talking about this. There are many entry points we can have into a text. For example, I’m not a queer person and I translate queer texts. My entry point for that, a lot of the time, is being an immigrant. I understand how this character feels lonely or excluded. I may have different experiences I’m drawing from, the way an actor might draw from personal experiences of grief to render grief they have not experienced. Of course, it’s perfectly fine for anybody to translate books from the Northeast, but maybe I will bring something they wouldn’t. In the same way, Toni Morrison writes in Beloved about the African-American experience in ways I can imagine, but I can’t feel. I can empathize, but I can’t know. I think there is great value in that too.
As for my relationship with the English language, I think I am a better translator for being a foreigner. I think my English is thoughtful in different ways. I think when it’s just me and the page, when I’m writing and there isn’t an audience in front of me, my relationship with the language has to do with hearing it, feeling it, it’s sensual, it’s textured, it’s artistic. Honestly, it was being a foreigner that made me so self-aware of language, of syntax, of shifting connotations and the weight of a different word if I shift the order around. All of that.
The Words That Remain is available now from New Vessel Press. Watch out for these other titles in translation by Bruna Dantas Lobato:
The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório (Charco Press)
Tokio Suite by Giovana Madalosso (Europa Editions)
E se eu Fosse Puta by Amara Moira (Feminist Press, English title TBA)
No Point In Dying by Francisco Maciel (New Vessel Press)
And don’t miss Bruna’s own novel, Blue Light Hours, coming this October from Grove Atlantic!
Photo: Brazilian writer and translator Bruna Dantas Lobato, by Ashley Pieper.
