“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.”

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.

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 primarily write nonfiction. Research, reflection, and spending time with ideas are important to me. So, this is how I spend most of my time writing – in thought.

English offers both obscurity and dark or darkness, and some translators will tell you the Latinate word is generally reserved for poetic and figurative expressions, while the Germanic word is used for colloquial and idiomatic use.

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.

Which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject.

We can do nothing ourselves; God must do it. To speak to Him thus is easier by nature for woman than for man because a natural desire lives in her to give herself completely to someone.

If I wanted to make a quick buck, there’s far easier ways of doing it. What I want is to provoke people. If you want a hit song, all you need to do is rewrite an old song. It might have been proven to work, but you won’t be remembered the same way.

there is no independence and pertinacity of opinion like that of these seemingly soft, quiet creatures, whom it is so easy to silence, and so difficult to convince.

Other men’s pains are easily borne.

How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?

Lovers are commonly industrious to make themselves uneasy.

Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.

Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.