Still, I considered it a tremendous injustice that Noll had not been more widely translated and was determined to rectify it.
ADAM MORRISOnce I looked into it, I was taken aback to learn that pretty much nothing by Joao Gilberto Noll was available in English translation.
More Adam Morris Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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I am surprised by the word psychedelic. João Gilberto Noll does not accept realism in a straightforward way, but I am more inclined to call Quiet Creature a realist text than I am to call it a psychedelic one.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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The 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.
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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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The transcendent aspect of the psychedelic experience is totally absent.
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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.
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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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When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily – English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
ADAM MORRIS