“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.”

An easy example would be the Portuguese escuridão:

Jorge Luis Borges was lamenting a variety of Orientalism that was used to measure the alleged authenticity of Argentine and Latin American writers in the midcentury.

One that actually relates to all Latin American literature: that is, not every author is interested in being a representative of his or her national culture on the global stage.

Still, I considered it a tremendous injustice that Noll had not been more widely translated and was determined to rectify it.

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.

Jorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers

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.

I was confident that I could find an editor and the readership for a translation

Dreamlike sequencing is perhaps one of João Gilberto Noll’s most remarkable triumphs in Quiet Creature on the Corner.

This neglect of a very important Brazilian writer is, in my view, the result of Brazil’s relative isolation from what metropolitan tastemakers.

Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers

When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily – English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Noll is highly respected in Brazil, and at the same time divisive, somewhat like Hilda Hilst. Neither of them enjoys the universal acclaim you might associate with Clarice Lispector, whom everyone adores, myself included.

If João Gilberto Noll were writing in French or German or even Russian, it’s likely he’d be more broadly translated.

This makes his writing very pleasing to read: João Gilberto Noll pays attention to detail, but only to certain details. And it’s never easy to foresee which details will send the narrator or the plot in an unsuspected direction.

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.

I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.

Anything can change, because the smartphone revolution is still in the early stages.

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

I don’t think anything of Laura Frank. You heard me – Laura Frank. Not Lawrence. Laura… It’s not that I blame him, I just wish he’d go to a manly tactic and just fight me. Don’t whine. When he whines, that’s when I change his name of Lawrence Frank.

Anything we take in the Universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way, the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be

I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything.

When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.