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 MORRISAnd these are universal relational matters, not necessarily particular to any country.
More Adam Morris Quotes
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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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English can be tricky because there are so many false cognates, but sometimes, as long the idea conveyed is not wrong, these false cognates can themselves offer synonyms or lead to a better alternative word or phrase in translation.
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One 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.
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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 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 Argentine literary tradition was believed by many, including many Argentines, to be concerned with a national imaginary in which the gauchos and the pampas and the tango were fundamental tropes.
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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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Strength and power in fiction is being able to resist these intoxicating voices, recognizing that they are the signatures of other writers and not one’s own.
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I have a few minor rules for myself but I break them all the time. For example, when translating from Romance languages to English, there is often a choice between a Latinate cognate and a Germanic equivalent.
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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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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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Borges, in part to legitimize his own Europhilia, correctly pointed out that expecting writers to engage with these romantic nationalist tropes was arbitrary and limiting, a genre that was demonstrative of its own artificiality.
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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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When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily – English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
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And these are universal relational matters, not necessarily particular to any country.
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