Which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject.
ADAM MORRISAn easy example would be the Portuguese escuridão:
More Adam Morris Quotes
-
-
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.
ADAM MORRIS -
If João Gilberto Noll were writing in French or German or even Russian, it’s likely he’d be more broadly translated.
ADAM MORRIS -
When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily – English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
ADAM MORRIS -
I was confident that I could find an editor and the readership for a translation
ADAM MORRIS -
Once I looked into it, I was taken aback to learn that pretty much nothing by Joao Gilberto Noll was available in English translation.
ADAM MORRIS -
Still, I considered it a tremendous injustice that Noll had not been more widely translated and was determined to rectify it.
ADAM MORRIS -
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.
ADAM MORRIS -
Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers
ADAM MORRIS -
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.
ADAM MORRIS -
I realized I had some cultural capital to spend, and I wanted to use it to introduce another author who might be considered a risk by conventional publishers. Michael Noll was at the top of my list.
ADAM MORRIS -
And these are universal relational matters, not necessarily particular to any country.
ADAM MORRIS -
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.
ADAM MORRIS -
With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst got more exposure and reached far more readers than I ever expected.
ADAM MORRIS -
The fiction I’ve written and published is certainly inflected by the work of authors I was reading or translating at the time.
ADAM MORRIS -
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 MORRIS