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.
ADAM MORRISI 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.
ADAM MORRISStill, I considered it a tremendous injustice that Noll had not been more widely translated and was determined to rectify it.
ADAM MORRISUnless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers
ADAM MORRISThe Argentine literary tradition was believed by many, including many Argentines, to be concerned with a national imaginary in which the gauchos and the pampas and the tango were fundamental tropes.
ADAM MORRISWhich sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject.
ADAM MORRISBorges, 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.
ADAM MORRISI 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 MORRISI 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.
ADAM MORRISWhen I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily – English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
ADAM MORRISJorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers
ADAM MORRISThis 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.
ADAM MORRISEnglish 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 MORRISI 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 MORRISAnd these are universal relational matters, not necessarily particular to any country.
ADAM MORRISThe transcendent aspect of the psychedelic experience is totally absent.
ADAM MORRISStrength 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 MORRIS