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.
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.
More Adam Morris Quotes
-
-
Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers
ADAM MORRIS -
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.
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 -
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.
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 -
The transcendent aspect of the psychedelic experience is totally absent.
ADAM MORRIS -
Jorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers
ADAM MORRIS -
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.
ADAM MORRIS -
With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst got more exposure and reached far more readers than I ever expected.
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 -
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.
ADAM MORRIS -
I am not one of those translators who think that working closely with the writer will yield the best translation.
ADAM MORRIS -
Reading across three languages is a way for me to diversify my intake as a reader, not to tunnel into certain categories or demographics.
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 -
The authors I prefer are all very different and are not limited to certain genres or even certain time periods.
ADAM MORRIS