Carolyne Wright has studied, written, and translated in Chile, Brazil, West Bengal, and Bangladesh on Fulbright and other fellowships. In 2018, she held a residency at the Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil; a 2020–21 Fulbright Scholar Award will take her back to Bahia after the worldwide COVID-19 travel advisory is lifted. A Seattle native, Carolyne has sixteen award-winning volumes of poetry, essays, poetry in translation, and coedited anthologies, including This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017). She met and began translating Márcia Tiburi during the 2019 Brazilian Literary Spring event at the University of Washington. Her translation of Márcia Tiburi’s story “A mãe” (“The Mother”), can be found here. It appears in the July/Aug 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review.
How did you begin working on this project? What drew you to it? What in particular would you like the audience to know about the work, the writer, and/or the context?
I first learned some Portuguese as a Fulbright scholar (to Chile!) when I visited Brazil for several weeks during and after Carnaval season. A few decades later, I discovered teachers of Afro-Brazilian Dance in my native Seattle and started to dance, and speak Bahian Portuguese, with them. Soon thereafter, I began studying Portuguese at the University of Washington, every quarter for the last five years. An artists’ residency at the Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil, in mid-2018, presented the opportunity to improve conversational Portuguese with fellow artists and institute staff who spoke no English. I also met and subsequently began translating poets based in Salvador, Bahia. In 2019, before three Brazilian writers were to visit the University of Washington as part of the “Brazilian Literary Spring,” the Director of the Portuguese Program asked me to serve as a bilingual moderator for this event, and also to translate some work by each visiting author. One of these writers was Márcia Tiburi, prominent political philosopher, teacher, and public intellectual whose books How to Talk to a Fascist (Como conversar com um Fascista) and Delirium of Power (Delírio do poder) have a wide readership in Brazil for their opposition to authoritarianism, especially that of current Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro. After Bolsonaro took office, Tiburi received death threats, and neo-Fascist actors associated with him violently disrupted her book launches and talks. Her life became so perilous that she left Brazil for the first time in December 2018, on a three-month City of Asylum residency in Pittsburgh; then she appeared at universities and conferences on her way to the University of Washington, where I met her!
Could you briefly explain your translation process?
I had not known of Márcia Tiburi or her work prior to preparations for the Brazilian Literary Spring, so it was an honor to be asked to translate her. After introductions via email, she sent me a PDF of her recently published book of short fiction, Quatro passos sobre o vazio (Editora Nós, January 2019). I selected the final story, “A mãe” (“The Mother”), in part because I was captivated by the mystery and pathos of its first sentence: “Para muitos é triste ver a mãe a limpar a folha de papel fotográfico na parede do quarto com a imagem do menino desbotando ao sol”. (“For many it is sad to see the mother cleaning the sheet of photographic paper on the wall of the room with the image of the boy fading in the sun.”) These stories posit a closed, dystopian society marked with a hovering sense of dread, a society in which everyone has a fixed role, and any deviation from that role leads to the individual’s undoing—annihilations obliquely referenced but never clearly stated. Translating this prose was an engaging task: for all the indirections of the narrator’s voice, the sentence structure and level of diction of the Portuguese was quite straightforward. With a deadline for completion, I sat down with Portuguese-English dictionaries and translated the story straight through, consulting occasionally via email with Márcia (by now we were on an informal, first-name Brazilian basis) about the meanings in context of a few words and phrases.
What were some of the challenges you faced? How did you meet those challenges? What did you learn in this process?
The major challenge was how to render the word otária / otário in English, in a manner that would resonate faithfully with its context in this story. A few days before her arrival in Seattle for the Brazilian Literary Spring, I sent Márcia an email with the subject heading “Apresentações e otários,” and asked if she could clarify for me the meaning of this term so key to the world of the story.
She replied that “otária would be the opposite of cynic. Let’s think of it like this: in a society in which cynicism has triumphed by turning everyone into suckers—fools, dupes, easy prey for all kinds of scams—this woman is just one more.” (“Otária seria o contrário de cínico. Pensemos assim: em uma sociedade em que o cinismo venceu transformando a todos em otários—bobos, tontos, presas fáceis de golpes de todo tipo—essa mulher é mais uma.”)
Mulling over these possiblities, I mused that words like fool or sucker sounded too abrupt, curt, Anglo-Saxon. None of these had the elevated and even official tone that I sensed in the Latinate otária, which in the story designates a group of women (including the narrator) with specific tasks to perform for the state. Márcia and I briefly considered other possibilities such as “believer” (too many religious connotations) or “Pollyanna” (used in Portuguese, Márcia told me, in the same sense as otária; but with cultural associations that would pull the English-language reader out of this story). Finally, Márcia suggested simply to leave the word otária to convey the strangeness of the story (“Mas eu acho que Otária é mais estranho. Vamos deixar Otária?”). I also preferred this choice: the term bears the resonance of officialdom, the sinister work of functionaries, mainly female, who labor for the state.
What is the state of translation of the literature of the source languages you work with? What would you recommend to translators and editors interested in working with this material?
At this point, I translate from three languages (Bengali, Spanish, and Portuguese) with Portuguese the most recent addition. Lusophone (written in Portuguese) literature is perhaps the most globally far-flung of all literary cultures, since the countries where this language is spoken as a principal, or at least an official, language, follow the exploration and trade routes of sixteenth-century sailing ships across the Atlantic, around the coast of Africa, to western India and southeast Asia. Active literary cultures exist in Portugal and Brazil, with major works of leading authors and some poets (José Saramago and Fernando Pessoa of Portugual; Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade of Brazil) represented in English translation. American poet Elizabeth Bishop, who lived in Brazil for 15 years, did seminal translations of selections of several twentieth-century Brazilian poets—Manuel Bandeira, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and Drummond among them. In the last couple of decades, a few Lusophone novelists and poets of the more recently developing print cultures of Angola and Moçambique are being translated: Ondjaki (Ndalu de Almeida) of Angola is probably the most internationally recognized so far.
Among American translators from Portuguese, outstanding are Alexis Levitin for a few dozen volumes of work by poets Eugénio de Andrade of Portugal, Salgado Maranhão of Brazil, and others; and Ellen Doré Watson, with several volumes in translation of poet Adélia Prado of Brazil. But many younger Lusophone writers and poets have not been translated to the degree of Spanish-language writers and poets of the Americas and Spain. So there is more scope for translators from Portuguese. But to do justice to translation, I recommend thoroughly learning the language and reading the literature, preferably with native speakers, in classroom study and in country. If you are interested in translating an Angolan author, for example, it would be ideal to live in Angola for a time, because the vocabulary, pronunciation and intonation are very different from the music of the various regional accents and vocabularies of Brazil, or of the accents of Portugal. Not to mention the influence of local African cultures and languages of Angola and Moçambique on the Portuguese of these countries; or of West African and indigenous languages and cultures of the tribal communities on Brazilian Portuguese.
Could you share the names of your two favorite books of or on translation with our readers?
Though I am principally a poet, my current favorite books in translation from Portuguese are the novels Captains of the Sands by that giant of Brazilian fiction, Jorge Amado (1912-2001), of the state of Bahia—a novel translated by one of the greatest translators of Latin American fiction, Gregory Rabassa; and a novel essentially for young adult readers of any age, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret by Ondjaki (1977- ), of Luanda, Angola—this one translated by Stephen Henighan of Toronto, and recently made into a film by Moçambiquan director João Ribeiro.
Let me clarify that I actually have not read these translations—I have read the originals, Capitães da areia and AvóDezanove e o segredo do soviético, respectively. I glance at the translations to clarify local terms and slang expressions not clear in context, also to see how these translators negotiated some tricky passages! I bought these translations for my husband, who is also studying Portuguese in preparation for the Fulbright US Scholar Award to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, that I had the honor to receive last year. Because the Fulbright program is on pause, though, until at least 2022 due to the pandemic, my husband and I have more time to prepare, including reading as much Lusophone literature as we can.
Let me mention one more volume in translation, The Diary of “Helena Morley” by Brazilian writer Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant (1880-1970), titled Minha vida de menina in Portuguese. This volume of diary entries from 1893-1895, during young Alice’s adolescence in the then-remote mining town of Diamantina, state of Minas Gerais, was first published in 1942 in Brazil under the author’s pseudonym, Helena Morley; it was translated to English in the early 1950s by Elizabeth Bishop, during her first years in Brazil. I read Bishop’s translation a few decades back, and two years ago, a Bahian friend gifted me with Minha vida de menina, and I have made a habit of reading a few of “Helena Morley’s” diary entries every night before sleep.