I only translate authors whose work already interests me as a reader, and that’s a decision I make based on multiple encounters with an author’s work.
ADAM MORRISOne of my methods for developing my own voice in fiction, a process I am taking very slowly and deliberately, is through these very intense encounters with certain writers.
More Adam Morris Quotes
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Still, I considered it a tremendous injustice that Noll had not been more widely translated and was determined to rectify it.
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I don’t think there’s anything that I would call essentially Brazilian in João Gilberto Noll work. In that regard, it translates very well to a cosmopolitan audience.
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The main reason I decided to study Latin American literature was because I’d gotten somewhat bored by the American fiction I was reading. I am not drawn to a specific style or aesthetic.
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Jorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers
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I am not one of those translators who think that working closely with the writer will yield the best translation.
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I translated the novel and still it remains a mystery as to how exactly how this works. Noll thinks more like an experimental filmmaker than a novelist.
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The authors I prefer are all very different and are not limited to certain genres or even certain time periods.
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And these are universal relational matters, not necessarily particular to any country.
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So likewise in João Gilberto Noll, readers shouldn’t expect samba and Carnival and football. The Brazilian national identity is not one of his primary concerns.
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Which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject.
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Once I looked into it, I was taken aback to learn that pretty much nothing by Joao Gilberto Noll was available in English translation.
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I am surprised by the word psychedelic. João Gilberto Noll does not accept realism in a straightforward way, but I am more inclined to call Quiet Creature a realist text than I am to call it a psychedelic one.
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The fiction I’ve written and published is certainly inflected by the work of authors I was reading or translating at the time.
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This neglect of a very important Brazilian writer is, in my view, the result of Brazil’s relative isolation from what metropolitan tastemakers.
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The Brazilian national identity is not one of João Gilberto Noll primary concerns. This does not mean social critique is absent: race, gender, and class relations are considered in Quiet Creature.
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