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.
ADAM MORRISThe fiction I’ve written and published is certainly inflected by the work of authors I was reading or translating at the time.
More Adam Morris Quotes
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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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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.
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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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With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst got more exposure and reached far more readers than I ever expected.
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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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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.
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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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And these are universal relational matters, not necessarily particular to any country.
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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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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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I am not one of those translators who think that working closely with the writer will yield the best translation.
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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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An easy example would be the Portuguese escuridão:
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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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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.
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