An easy example would be the Portuguese escuridão:
ADAM MORRISJorge 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.
More Adam Morris Quotes
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One of my methods for developing my own voice in fiction, a process I am taking very slowly and deliberately, is through these very intense encounters with certain writers.
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Still, I considered it a tremendous injustice that Noll had not been more widely translated and was determined to rectify it.
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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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When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily – English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
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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 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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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