I translated the novel and still it remains a mystery as to how exactly how this works. Noll thinks more like an experimental filmmaker than a novelist.
ADAM MORRISI was confident that I could find an editor and the readership for a translation
More Adam Morris Quotes
-
-
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 MORRIS -
With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst got more exposure and reached far more readers than I ever expected.
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 -
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 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 -
The authors I prefer are all very different and are not limited to certain genres or even certain time periods.
ADAM MORRIS -
English can be tricky because there are so many false cognates, but sometimes, as long the idea conveyed is not wrong, these false cognates can themselves offer synonyms or lead to a better alternative word or phrase in translation.
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 -
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 -
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 MORRIS -
Which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject.
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 -
I was confident that I could find an editor and the readership for a translation
ADAM MORRIS -
Some critics have commented that understanding the specific Brazilian political context of the novel is helpful for reading Quiet Creature. This may be true, but it’s not prerequisite for understanding it.
ADAM MORRIS -
I 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 MORRIS