Even my editor at Melville House, who championed the project form the outset, told me she was surprised by the response. After this, editors began asking my opinion about which Latin American writers ought to be translated.
ADAM MORRISThe 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.
More Adam Morris Quotes
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Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers
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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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I was confident that I could find an editor and the readership for a translation
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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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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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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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The authors I prefer are all very different and are not limited to certain genres or even certain time periods.
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If João Gilberto Noll were writing in French or German or even Russian, it’s likely he’d be more broadly translated.
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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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With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst got more exposure and reached far more readers than I ever expected.
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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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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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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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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.
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