(Angelica Freitas, Tiffany Higgins, Hilary Kaplan, John Keene, Ellen Dore Watson) Translators of 20th- and 21st-century poetry and fiction by women from Brazil read from their work and discuss the art of translation and the craft and advocacy inherent in translating writing by women. This panel follows last year's on translating "Brazilianness" to focus on women writers, the stakes of that categorization, and the vibrant landscape of translations of women's writing into English. Form, feminism, gender and sexual identity, age, language, race, and class all come into play.

Published Date: August 10, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2016 A W P conference in Los Angeles. The recording features Angelica Freitas, Tiffany Higgins, Hillary Kaplan, John Keen, and Ellen Dore Watson. You'll now hear Ellen Dore Watson provide introductions,

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

Your heroes for coming to the last session of a W p. I wish that I had Nias and Ponche to hand out a last that didn't come through at the last minute. I'm Ellen Dory Watson. I direct the poetry center at Smith and translate from Brazilian, Portuguese. I'm also the poetry and translation editor at Massachusetts Review, so I'd be happy to read translations from people. And we read translations. The online submission program closes on May 1st, but if you send the regular email address, general email address, you can send things in over the summer as well. Delighted to be moderating this panel with some old friends and new friends. And what we're going to do is each person's going to speak for about 12 minutes, including talking about their work and reading some samples of their work. And then hopefully there'll be a discussion between them a little bit and questions from you. So write down your questions if you have any. First it's going to be John Keen. John is the author of the novel Annotations Mosis, a collection of poems with artists Christopher Stackhouse and Counter Narratives, which is short fiction. And he's the translator of Brazilian author. Hilda Heals novel letters from a seducer. He teaches at Rutgers University Newark, and we're very eager to hear what he has to say.

Speaker 2 (00:01:57):

Welcome John.

Speaker 3 (00:02:04):

I'm just going to plunge right in with several readings in Portuguese and translations. And the first part I'm going to read is Anna Christina Cesar. And I'm going to read the poem I would need to work to sink into Like You insane nostalgia into this art uninterrupted of painting Poetry Does Not telegraph, occasionally leaves me alone and free at the mercy of the impossible, the real selfishness, which is selfishness in English, selfishness. I'm trying to create a masterpiece and I attempt it come it and thing comes space writing. I'll just read this in English on a photo by man Ray to write in space the arc of the arm, more adroit than the startling of ideas and flight hooves clopping the trace that hands on heel, mad fluttering of wings, crisscross circums of improvisations in the frame. After the lapse remains clear, I itinerary of Medusas writing that lasts for the shutter, the armed eye, the shutters capture, and a little section from Hilda, letters from Mr.

Speaker 3 (00:03:50):

Seducer. And this was particularly important to me because Yoshi was a very famous poet and then she turned to prose. And in this little passage you can hear the poetry of her prose and I should have looked for coconuts and palm hearts. But I'm here writing with this lone stump and when I stop, I'll swap a coconut for another pencil stub over there at the ox shop. So named because an ox passed through their once and let out a huge fart. They sell casa peanut fudge Maria mole dried meat tins, cans of sauce. But I should have gone up to gather coconuts palm hearts and I didn't. I keep talking about what I don't want. My fingernails tiny and filthy and my toenails good to say they are clean. One crucial aspect of my work as a translator has been a focus on areas that other literary translators overlook for a range of reasons.

Speaker 3 (00:05:20):

These include literature, especially poetry by women writers as well as writers of African descent and L G B T Q writers and thinking intersectionally by writers who occupy these and other identities simultaneously working class and poor and so on, all of whom tend to be less frequently translated than writing by men, writing by white writers, even in multi-ethnic societies and cis heterosexuals straight writers, I have translated both poetry and prose fiction and nonfiction. And I find that I enjoy translating poetry much more, though I find it considerably more challenging because of poet's use of form and the inner resources of their native languages. And this, the interesting thing I think about all of the poets I just read is that all three of them are using specific resources that only exist in Portuguese that English does not have. And so for which I have to find an approximate resource in English, translating port form across languages can be extremely difficult.

Speaker 3 (00:06:15):

This was, I read one of the areas in which Google engineers were intensely focusing a few years ago. And every language's intrinsic resonances possibilities for semantic semia based on sound linguistic resonance is based on social, cultural and political context and so on often mean that poetry can be difficult to bring from one language into another. And same is true at times for fiction. So I'll just say one last thing because we have very little time. I just want to talk about with Dale's letters from Mr. Seducer, the US and Brazilian publishers who had a unique deal to issue several of Hill's books. And after inviting me to write an introduction to the first book, link translation of I into English, a collaboration effort by naan and hel gati ou, the two houses, night book books. And a bully editor asked me to translate this novel.

Speaker 3 (00:07:02):

I eagerly and perhaps Fullheartedly agreed to do it. And so it's really a crazy book, a wonderful book, but a crazy book. I'm very happy I did. I've written a paper about translating ILSs still appear in a collection on her edited by one of her superb translators, Adam Mars and the eminent young scholar, Bruno Val. But I should say that Ilsa is a challenge even for Brazilian readers. And this text in particular is tough because of the numerous registers, tones, illusions, and discourses she includes in it sometimes welding them into a single sentence. In addition, as the brief excerpt I read suggests SSU is not only a poet but a playful one. And there are moments of music and seniority in her prose that English cannot hope to convey except to a very different but analogous approach that is, as we know, frowned on in contemporary American fiction. So hills' writing fiction actually that is of a kind that really would be considered problematic in many M F A programs, which I think is important to note. I was very happy when the SSH book did appear because I think in introduced an utterly original voice, a Brazilian woman's voice into the American conversation. And I'll stop there.

Speaker 4 (00:08:17):

It's okay.

Speaker 2 (00:08:19):

And I forgot to even remind you that this is the Brazilian women writers panel. And so these are translators of 20th and 20th first century poetry and fiction by women in Brazil. And our second presenter is Tiffany Higgins, who is the author of and stares into her helmet, selected by Evie Shockley. Her poems appear in poetry, Kenyan review, Taos Journal and elsewhere, her Chapbook, the apparition at Fort Bragg is forthcoming in 2016 from Iron Horse literary Review selected by Camille Dungy. She translates the work of Alex Smo and other contemporary Brazilian

Speaker 4 (00:08:54):

Poets.

Speaker 5 (00:09:03):

Thank you Ellen. And I want to thank Hillary for bringing us all together this year. So I'd like to start by talking about Alii Santana, a Rio poet who was born in 1988. And it's very fitting that John should have started with Ana Christina Cesar because Alii sees herself in the lineage coming from Ana Christina and the marginal generation poets whose poetry was marked by colloquial language and informal tone. And you'll hear that and Elise's work as well. I want to say that Brenda Hillman is working very, very, very hard on a beautiful translation of Anna Christina Cesar's work. So I really hope to see that in the next year. Yeah, let me just start with a little poem that will just dive us right into Elise's work.

Speaker 4 (00:10:01):

Let's see.

Speaker 5 (00:10:03):

I'd like you to listen for how the poem moves from a little domestic predictable moment into a sudden shift of perspective into something that is public, outdoors and dramatic and unpredictable. After the bath, I cut my nails soft from the hot water. The sidewalks will be covered in ripe jackfruit. I thought fallen tumbled down ripe as if they were obese people who jump from the buildings, the jackfruit suicides. Okay, great. So yeah, I'd like to just hear some of more of those perspective shifts that are acts of the imagination on the part of Elise. And let's start with, I'll we just a couple lines in the Portuguese just to start us off and then go into the English superiority

Speaker 5 (00:11:41):

Straight away, that giant hill cutting the sky was facing us without the habitual superiority of mountains, the sensation of having to twist one's neck to catch sight there on high of the top by some error of proportion. Now I too was the mountain without any doubt. I was the mountain 130 stories high leaning over the seashore. I didn't feel too large, but taken by surprise by the arm and obliged to react, I could A embrace the mountain B, turn my back to it. She actually Alii began writing poetry because at the age of 15, her father, who's a photographer, Ana, took her to the archives of Ana Christina Cesar. She says, this was the time I decided to write poetry. My dad took me on a trip for him to photograph Armando Fre, one of Brazil's greatest poets and the curator of Ana Christina's archives.

Speaker 5 (00:12:54):

So I went to his house with my dad at 15 and I started to show my terrible teenage poems to Armando, who since then 13 years ago became my mentor advisor. Good friend. And I just want to note that Ana Christina's Caesar's work was happening during the military dictatorship. And as a result then Ana Christina and her friends published independently. I guess one question I have is either given that Alii takes her inspiration from that lineage, then is there any parallel in Brazil's society today? What are the political resonances that Alii is speaking to? I think I'll read just one more poem.

Speaker 5 (00:14:06):

I have to write letters to you calmly in a notebook covered in blue. I ripped them from the spirals and never send them to you because of laziness or even rage. I have a fear of waiting in the course of days or even weeks, a horrible animal arrives to pursue me from within or could it be I myself am the animal a rat who grinds and nashes me. I lose a lot of time trying to give names to the beasts who are climbing the curtain of this room. And I should say we have a chatbook coming up from Toad Press in August of excerpts from Habu Gal Tale of the Whale. So please look for that. And then also on Tuesday, world literature today is publishing a blog where I interview Alii and have some of her poetry. So that's just this coming Tuesday. So I'd like to just shift or rapidly and actually speaking to some of the questions that John brought up, I've been delighted at the reception that Elise's work has been greeted with.

Speaker 5 (00:15:17):

And then also I'm a little troubled as well to be honest, because I was here last year hanging out with these fine folks and reading the work of Alexi Moise identifies as a queer black writer from Salvador. And I've been sending his work out not really getting very much traction on that honestly, except from I'm very grateful for writing the walls down in anthology of queer writing edited by Amir Rabia and Helen Cloris, who bay area writers and are actually specifically looking for queer people of color writing and also international writers of color. So that's been fantastic. So just contrasting my publishing experience there. So what I've been asking myself is which Brazilian women's experiences are being represented are actually not being represented through publication and or translation of the brief answer in my observation, and I'd like to hear from other people is Afro-Brazilian writers and indigenous women's experiences as well and poor writers included in that.

Speaker 5 (00:16:26):

So the special grant issue on Brazilian fiction had few black writers, the 2013 Frankfurt Germany position that focused actually on BA state and had around 17 writers. And they published this enormous tome, translated into French and German and English, and none of them identified as black. And I followed Facebook threads from writers from Salvador, and this is very troubling and taken as an affront to the community. And the basic attitude was what they couldn't find a black writer of merit. Did you say? None? None. Say that again. Okay, so the Frankfurt, Germany, 2013 biannual exposition published around 17 writers from Baia state and none of them identified as black. And this was yeah, super, super troubling. And anthology was published kind of a response from the small collective from Salvador Negros, a small publishing venture, right, trying to kind of respond to that. I want to speak to a very, very brief debate.

Speaker 5 (00:17:43):

So recently in the past six months related to this abia writer, Livia Natalia and sga, our esteemed visitor here from Brazil, along with Angelica of course has been, we were talking about this yesterday. So Livia Natalia, there is a festival in I, which is in the south of Baia state called Po Poetry in the Streets. And a lot of writers came from Salvador and had their poems published on the sides of buses and other outdoor spots. So hers was a five line poem, their plays on Carlos's poem where he says like Maria loved und and Mundo loves so-and-so. But then once it ended in suicide and then the other one just lived with their aunt. So it starts with very romantic, but it just ends tragically. So she plays with that and has the same title, quad Lia. And this is published on the side of us.

Speaker 5 (00:18:41):

And her poem is from the point of view of Maria whose partner Jean has been assassinated by the military police and it speaks to a larger phenomenon, her poem of black Brazilian people being killed many times with absolute impunity by the heavily militarized police. So in response, the Association of military police in Baia criticized the poem, it was removed from the outdoor sites. It was prohibited in Baia to circulate this poem. So absolute censorship. So the poet herself, Natalia received death threats. The poet wrote, is this the same country that declares itself past the military regime of the 1970s and free of censorship? The writers involved in the poetry and the streets projects have been denied our right to free speech. So I think I'll just rest there and maybe we can converse more in the question period. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 (00:19:50):

Next we have Hillary Kaplan, who is the translator of real Khe. I just love the title of that and it's such a beautiful little book too. A book of poems by Angelica Freta, who's also with us. And Hillary has also translated ghosts, a collection of stories by Paloma Vidal. And she received the Pen Translation Fund award in 2011. And her translations of Brazilian poetry and prose have appeared on B B C Radio four and in journals internationally. Welcome Hillary who put this whole panel together.

Speaker 6 (00:20:26):

It was really a collaborative effort to put this panel together. And so thank you all. Thank you for being here. Hi. So I am going to read some excerpts from a few different writers and I'd like to begin with some poems by Marilia Garcia, who is a contemporary poet originally from Rio de Janero and now living in Sao Paulo. And I'd like to introduce also Angelica Es, who's here from pe, and she's going to do me the great favor of reading Maria's poems in Portuguese

Speaker 7 (00:21:05):

Emea, the poison Patagonia penguins,

Speaker 6 (00:22:30):

Ma Michelangelo antonioni. It's like the dangerous threat of things whispered on leaving the room before filming everything. Observed the position of the sun that afternoon with Mediterranean houses and imagine the sequence of dialogues and layers like a language in curves or holding still in the dark. The two women in front of the lens never saw each other. They reversed position the one in white smiled from under the seaweed near the ocean's floor. Then frame the displacement to Hong Kong on a delayed flight, how to continue trying an inverse angle if everything worsens as the days go on. How to follow the rotating schedule they acquire after years of scarcity, sat down on one of the benches facing the women. Something painful to say, but who knows what perhaps the general weight of things. Where does the name Patagonia come from And penguins how to detail the sequence of images and how swims so close to the rocks.

Speaker 6 (00:23:39):

And I'm going to read one more that I don't have in Portuguese unfortunately, but it's also inspired by Ana Cina Za as well as the poem Belfast, tune by Joseph Brodsky. So this is called The Girl from Belfast Alphabetizes at your feet, at your feet. Alpe is one of Ana C's most beloved books of poetry. The girl from Belfast Alphabetizes at your feet, 98 spins around the park and she falls in circles upon her own weight. 98 times she said one could get the impression or not of something definitive. Like the girl from Belfast, her memories folded like a parachute inside the fabric electrified by static. While she spoke, she descended the side stairs, slicing the clatter of the orchestra, the bicycle wheel loops like music, reducing her reflexes to dust in the air, and six hours standing at the drain, one could get the impression or not seated at the edge of the room.

Speaker 6 (00:24:43):

She looks from afar as the car passes by, goes out at night on the trails when everything is vengeance. Talks about bridges while crossing the tunnels of the city and puts at your feet in alphabetical order. Camera sweeping the surface, cheat consoled correspondence. Drinking tea nearly to the brimm evening surrounds the city. Hope intimacy was theater. I think you're lying. Open your mouth, beloved. Open the curtain pain. The voice unrecorded on the mountains. One could get the impression or not. It was her voice in mountain view at a speed of one kilometer per hour or a thousand before returning to Ireland. She had already begun to forget. She understands that only after the security glass crumbled against her head only a few seconds till her head against the glass, but it was just part of the root. No way to count the knights or tracks she would travel.

Speaker 6 (00:25:46):

Extracting the audio from a frozen image was the label she fixed to the walls to learn to reach the right place at the right time. In the background, the voice through the opening to arrange this book, mouthwatering. Now a bit emotional now I'm a professional now it's your turn, now the wrong way. Now we're in motion. Pricks of a needle. That's enough now, water or vertigo up high. You could wake 30 years later with the image even more vivid when the room is blind. Autobiography, no biography. Blue. I leave the keys loose on the terrace blue that does not frighten me. Crosses the bridge, crosses the endless bridge, crosses various city tunnels. I'm letting you know I'm becoming an airplane. Letters, letters when they arrived, magnifying glasses, give up wings, beating women and children. And I'd like to just read one. I'm going to read one poem in English from by Angelica Freis in the bathtub with Gertrude Stein.

Speaker 6 (00:27:07):

Gertrude Stein has a big butt slide over Gertrude Stein. And when she slides, it makes a great noise as though someone dragged a wet cloth across the huge glass window of a public building. Gertrude Stein. From here to there. It's you, the washcloth behind your ears, all yours from here to there. It's me, the rubber ducky mind. Gertrude Stein and thusly we're pleased. But Gertrude Stein is a charlatan, thinks it's fine to let one loose under the water. Hey, Gertrude Stein. It's impossible that anyone could so enjoy making bubbles. And because it's her tub, she pulls the plug and steals my towel and runs out stark naked huge butt to sending the staircase onto the streets of Sangerman Dere.

Speaker 6 (00:27:51):

So I just want to make a few remarks on these two writers as well as Paloma Vidal. And if I had more time, I would read a short excerpt from one of her stories called S, that's life. These are three contemporary women writers, poets and fiction writers whose work I've had the privilege of translating. And I wanted to speak just to a few issues that I have encountered translating their work in Marilia Garcia's poetry. The first two that I read, one of the interesting things that comes up is that she doesn't like to use pronouns, right? And this is a wonderful thing you can do in Portuguese and another romance languages. You can get away with not having a pronoun. And the verb can indicate and suggest who is being talked about or who is speaking and such. But when we try to write without pronouns in English, it becomes a problem for our English language readers, right?

Speaker 6 (00:28:51):

And it becomes a test for what the reader is willing to endure. So I've translated other poems by Maria in the past and just inserted a gender for the person being talked about, but actually it's quite intentional that she does not give the gender in the original poems. And so this is always a problem that I face and a choice I have to make. If a gender is suggested for this person, do I just describe it or do I not? And in the very first poem I read, I attempted, I think for the first time with Marilee's work, just not to have any pronoun at all. But I only arrived there on the 15th draft or the 20th draft. It took quite a long time to reach that point and then to talk with the editor about does it work essentially? Can I get away with this?

Speaker 6 (00:29:49):

And it's something that's been interesting for me working particularly with Lia because this is part of her poetry, quite a bit of it. Working with Paloma Vidal's collection of short stories, ghosts. It's a collection of somewhat linked short stories that are about transcultural identity. And Paloma herself was born in Argentina and at the age of two, moved to Rio with her family. And she writes a lot about being in between cultures and what it means to grow up with the transcultural identity. So Asla Vida, which is one of my favorite stories in ghosts, is about a woman who, a filmmaker who was born in Brazil and goes back to Buenos Aires to retrace her family roots and encounters a childhood friend who doesn't recognize her. So it's about that type of recognition that can go on. And I bring up this story in particular because it has quite a bit of Spanish in it.

Speaker 6 (00:30:54):

And so when I was translating this collection, I decided to leave the Spanish in Spanish because for me that is part of the experience of estrangement and recognition or not that the reader is supposed to encounter in Paloma's work. And that again, was a conversation, a different kind of conversation with an editor who at first resisted that story. In fact, I think, sorry, was published in England at first and then appeared as a radio piece on the b b on BBC four, and then was published in a full length collection in the United States. So in encounters with three different editors, I reached a lot of different responses to what do you do with the problem of having Spanish in an English story? And to me it wasn't a problem. And I do feel like we're at a point in, at least as readers in the United States where we can read some Spanish and nothing bad will happen, but the anxiety is there and it's been interesting to encounter.

Speaker 6 (00:32:05):

I want to wrap up and Angelica is going to read. I finally want to say that the experience of publishing real Kha was a really wonderful one here. And I feel very lucky to have been able to work with David Shook at Phony Media who shared so much excitement about this book and Angie's work. I don't know exactly what you're going to talk about, but Angie's second book, which I'm working on now, is Real Gache, is about influences and poetic identity. And her second book is called The Uterus is the Size of a Fist. And it really looks at the contemporary idea of woman in Brazil in particular, and it's quite satirical and it's a very exciting book, but it's been interesting to work on, I think as a female translator to be translating a book about woman, about which I have a lot of feelings, and to see my own sense of what this concept is come up against another cultural sense of this concept. So I'm going to leave it at that. Thank you all.

Speaker 2 (00:33:33):

Thank you, Hillary. So Angelica Freta is the author of two books of Poetry Real and the Uterus is the Size of a Fist, which has got to be a really fabulous book title I have to say. And it was a finalist for the 2013 Portugal Telecom Prize. And she's also written a graphic novel Guadalupe. Her poems have appeared in Granta The White Review and elsewhere, and she co-edit the journal, Moza and Company and lives in pta, Brazil. Welcome, Angelica.

Speaker 7 (00:34:12):

Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here in this panel about Brazilian literature. Well actually more than that about the literature made by women in Brazil. I think it's fantastic that you should have a panel like this. So I'm really happy and honored to be here, particularly now, because if you ask anybody who's been following what's happening in literature in the States, I mean someone who would have an interest for literature that's been done abroad. If you ask them do you know any Brazilian writers, they will probably mention the name of Clai Spector. And we have the translator of the complete stories of Clai here. Katrina Dodson, she just won the panel award for translation. So yeah,

Speaker 7 (00:35:13):

So yeah, I'm really, really happy that a woman's name should come up when you think of Brazilian literature. That is great. And also, I have to say, I was really happy that Christina Cesar was mentioned by everybody. I would like to think of myself in the lineage of Anna Christina Cesar. It would be better for me to say that if I hadn't read on a Christina Cesar, I wouldn't probably write what I not probably, I would certainly not write what I write now. So she certainly is the most important poet for our generation. So yeah, when you think of a woman's voice for poets who have been born after 1970, I would say Anna, Christina Cesar definitely. And to mention, but a few names. Well, he talked about Ali Santana and Mari Garcia too. I can think of a wonderful poet called Que, and I hope she's being translated into English.

Speaker 7 (00:36:19):

If you talk about Brazilian poetry now, you can't really miss that. I think of Hanson who was also influenced by an Ashina Cesar and er as well. I was jotting some names down when you were talking about Ana Christina was like, yeah, and this also is a great year because Ana Cina is, there's this literary festival in Brazil called Flip. It's in the historical town of Para Chi in Rio, and I think this year is their 12th edition. And so every year they pick a Brazilian writer to pay homage. And so far they hadn't chosen any women writers and people were really questioning that. Why is that? We have so many wonderful writers, why should you just speak men this year? Anna Christina Cesar is the patron saint of Flip. We're really happy about that. I hope they'll talk about poetry a lot because this is another problem.

Speaker 7 (00:37:28):

We poets don't get invited so much for these festivals anyways. I wouldn't like to complain anyway. So yeah, I was thinking when Hillary invited me to take part in this panel to talk about Brazilian women writers, that is really hard to talk about being a Brazilian woman writer, especially when I think that what I do in my work is question what is being a woman actually. And I also question my nationality, not just my nationality, I have to say I don't really buy into this nationality thing and I don't really buy into this woman thing either. So yeah, so the question of what is a Brazilian woman writer? I'm sorry, I can't tell you that because I'm not sure about that either. And I think the best thing is actually not to be sure about it. I think it's a poet's job to be constantly inquiring. So this is more or less what I like to do in my work. What motivates me to write is to try and find answers. And if I don't get the answers, that's fine too. I like the process of getting there. And I'm also really happy that you mentioned Livia Natalia's poem. It just goes to show that poetry can be really powerful.

Speaker 7 (00:38:56):

One thing I can tell you about being a Brazilian poet is that you have to be aware that people don't read in your country and much less poetry. So when you think that a poet could make such a fuss, and I call attention to the violence that to this day is being done by the police. And well, Brazil has known nothing but violence in its this year's 516 years. So yeah, nothing but violence in that. A poet can write something and call the attention to that. I think it's really wonderful. I think it's wonderful what she did.

Speaker 7 (00:39:38):

So what I do and what I've done so far, I've only got two books of poetry and a graphic novel. And my first book of poetry is basically a result of the readings I've been doing in my life. And I have to say, when it comes to influences, it was never really an issue for me to read Brazilian writers or poets. I never thought, well, I have to read a Brazilian, I have to read a derado because she's Brazilian. I would just read for pleasure, obviously. But when I come to think of it, I think my influences were mostly from abroad. And I think if you think of the work of Marilia Garcia, for instance, she's a very good reader. You will see that most of her influences are also from poets from abroad. And the other thing which is obviously in my case, I couldn't find any queer poets in Brazil that would really represent me.

Speaker 7 (00:40:54):

So I was always looking abroad for poets. I could identify with not just poets, I mean writers in general. We don't have someone, for instance, like Gertrude Stein in Brazil, or I dunno, if you think of queer writers, I think we are underrepresented. I've even written a poem for Gertrude Stein, which Hillary read. So in my second book of poems, which is called A Uterus is the Size of a Fist, its Origin is simply because I couldn't find poems written by women which were about women in Brazil. I kept thinking, why is it we write about everything but not about being a woman? And I was interested in what I could do with that idea, what sort of poems would come out if I, having the experience I have and reading the things I have had read, what sort of poems I would come up with.

Speaker 7 (00:42:10):

And also in this book, I have a series of poems, which is called Argentina, which questions identity, sorry, nationality. I spent two years and a half in Argentina, and I wrote this series from the point of view of what it would be like if I were an Argentinian poet. So basically for me, writing poetry is inquiring about things, and I think it would be so much better if I read a few poems now, then just keep talking about it. So I would just invite Hillary to come read her translations with me. I'll read a poem from my first book for you to get an idea of what I've done here. So this poem has no title, and it goes like this, Shakespeare and

Speaker 6 (00:44:00):

Perfect Teeth, listen up, you're not going to get anywhere. Tomatoes and onions sustain us and peas and carrots. Perfect teeth. Yes, Shakespeare is very nice, but beets, chicory and watercress and rice and beans and collared greens, lovely little teeth. The bull you're eating just yesterday was chomping in the field and you complained that the meat was tough. Life's tough, perfect teeth, but eat. Eat all you can and forget this. Chat and dig in.

Speaker 4 (00:44:37):

Can I read this?

Speaker 6 (00:45:20):

How lovely it would be to have a little mustache just beyond the lenses of your glasses, to hide behind a fuzzy caterpillar, a little stash to let you be a little stash, to go out and see the world, but not be seen a little stash to be as you are, an appendage from nose to mouth, mouth to nose, ot, like no one would bother you in cafes for beauty is in the eye of the disbeliever and to even hear at the end of the day. Thank you, sir. As you enter last the elevator.

Speaker 7 (00:46:00):

Okay, thank you very much.

Speaker 4 (00:46:04):

Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:46:09):

So to think about how to bring things together a little bit, one thing I found particularly really interesting was the sort of on one hand embracing of the idea. We were talking about women writers from Brazil and then questioning what is a woman? What is a woman writer, what is a Brazilian, what does it mean? And having the multiple identities come into it. And the other thing that comes up that I think we have to touch on and talk more about is the issue of who gets translated and who gets published even before who gets translated. And when I was living in Brazil in 1979 and I went to a bookstore to try to find someone to translate, I found, found the usual suspects, and it took me quite a while to even find a Delia Prada's work. And she was very well known in the country. So I guess I'd like to see what their cross currents there are that you want to pick up on each other's comments. And we've heard also, one thing I wanted to point to is we've heard many, many voices here because you translate various people. And I love that you gave us a list of other poets. So I don't know, do people have sort of direct connections you want to pursue? Anyone want to pick

Speaker 6 (00:47:28):

Up on? If I can just, and I didn't get to mention this before, but what John was talking about in terms of his commitments of writers that he seeks to translate, that resonated a lot with me. I share similar commitments to translate women writers, to translate Brazilian writers of color to translate queer Brazilian writers. And I mean, I think Tiffany shares some of those commitments as well. And it's interesting to me that we're all up here doing this work, and then I'm trying to think about that versus when we look at what's the landscape of Brazilian writing available in English, how does it match up? And I feel I'm very happy that we all share these commitments. And one of the things that I found is that, I mean, so far I feel that it has worked for me in terms of the translation that I do, but I also feel like there is a lot more work to do. I'm participating. Those poems by Marilia Garcia are coming out in an anthology of Brazilian women writers that will come out later this year. And it includes 10 women writers writing in all genres. So nonfiction, there's anthropology, there's fiction, there's poetry, a whole range. And of those 10 women, I believe that one is a woman of color. And when I saw the list, to me this was, it wasn't enough. It wasn't right.

Speaker 6 (00:49:03):

And there's a question for me about how do we change that? That's open question for me,

Speaker 5 (00:49:13):

So I don't know how we change it, but I think maybe what happens is that, for example, Ali Sanama is in one of the metro poles of Rio or Sao Paulo, so she's in Rio, and this is great for her poetics, but she had access to a lot of social capitals. She was went on three exchanges, one to New Zealand in high school and one to Paris in college. And then she was a fellow at Brown for three months, and she's publishing books in her twenties. And in terms of me sending out bio information, and she's won this prize in that she's been at flip. So all of this is very substantiating. And so I think editors probably are looking for that kind of substantiation versus me saying, oh, I have this dear wonderful poet from Baia who has no wonderful prizes. Maybe that makes a difference. I don't know. But it's frustrating, certainly, right? Because we feel there's some quality here and we want to communicate it to editors.

Speaker 3 (00:50:24):

I'll just say that with a writer like Eldest sst, I mean was if you think about the originality of her work and how prolific she was, it was really sort of shocking to me that the translation of the obscene Madame D didn't, that was the first full length English translation of I Schwar. And I mean, they're really, I believe night boat books and Ebola auditor have found that there's a constituency in English. But part of, I think one of the sort of key challenges was that she was a woman writing the things she did. I think had she been a male Brazilian writer, she would've been translated much more quickly. And one of the sort of heartbreaking things to me was that I first came across ILSs work on a website that she set up shortly before she died in 2004. And she actually had translation.

Speaker 3 (00:51:18):

She was, I believe, translated into French, and I want to say maybe German or Italian, but she actually had these little tiny little sections of the obscene Madam D and maybe one other, it might've been letters from Mr. Duo. And as soon as I read them, I thought, who is this person isn't, why isn't her work available? And the same is true, actually. I think of someone like Anna, Christina Cesar. I mean, there was a British translation of, and a few of her other books, but a kind of condensed version of a number of the books. But there hasn't been the kind of extensive publication. Again, you read the work in Portuguese or in English, and you think this person is so original, why? And I say, had she been a man, it probably would be in English,

Speaker 2 (00:52:10):

Not only original, but as we've seen on the panel, has been an influence and an inspiration to so many subsequent writers. So it even strains the brain further.

Speaker 5 (00:52:23):

And I do just want to remind us that Dear Brenda Hillman, who was here but left, has a translation that she's 99% through. And so hopefully we will actually be all able to read that in the next year. Translation of Ana c Cesar's, poetic Ure. Yeah, I should say it's a very wonderful story with her mother who's in her eighties, and they've been working on it together. Her mother grew up in Brazil, so it's a very beautiful story. That's

Speaker 3 (00:52:58):

Great.

Speaker 2 (00:52:59):

Yeah, sure. Yeah,

Speaker 8 (00:53:00):

I really liked a couple of comments and problems that Hillary raised. She had two really interesting observations from the point of view of the translator. One of them was, what do you do when a foreign language appears in the Portuguese text? Spanish appeared in the text, and I a hundred percent agree with that. She should keep it in Spanish. The American reader has to feel with the intervention of the other language, just as the Portuguese or Brazilian reader has to do. So there, I completely agree you on pronouns, it's a killer of a problem, not because of our position about sex or gender, but because in the English language, we have never had a structural way to present a verbal function without a pronoun. And so when you leave out the pronoun, what do you do to buffer the strangeness of the absence of any noun, of any substantive who is controlling, which is controlling the bird? How do you do that? It's a killer problem. I was just wondering.

Speaker 6 (00:54:24):

That's a great question, and it's something that in that first poem by Marilia, I had also considered, and I didn't want to do it because for me, the absence of the pronoun, I think was more the point. And so it was not necessarily trying to find something that is neither a male pronoun or a female pronoun, but it was to remove a pronoun altogether and see what happened. That to me, seemed like what she was trying to do. And part of the reason that I say that is that some of her poems, if they're talking about a particular character, she does have in mind a gender for that character. But she doesn't necessarily convey it in the poem. So I've had those conversations with her, oh, I read this as being about a man, but actually she thought of it as being about a woman, but she is, as a writer, she's very interested in the experience of the reader. So she has always said to me, you translated the way that you read it, which I find very interesting and very open. I mean, I think that's one possibility, but I haven't used it in this particular case because I don't think that it's what she's going for. But it's tricky. I mean, I don't know if you guys have encountered this either, but

Speaker 2 (00:55:53):

It just seems to me that if you use the they them, you're bringing into it a whole nother thing that's happening here with English. And if that's not in the original, and also for a Brazilian writer to leave out a pronoun, doesn't change the grammar. I mean, it's just normal people speak. They say the verb without saying, I mean, it's the structure of the language. So no matter what you do, it's going to be different than the effect on the original

Speaker 8 (00:56:22):

It. Synthetic language, Portuguese, Brazil, he says that Portuguese language general is the last of the ones to arise from the errors, errors, eras of all eras gathered linguistically, linguistically in Brazil. And because he thinks that Brazil is the gathering place of many languages, he thinks it created a language that escape, I think, from the formality of what's going on in. So for example, Brazil is in the process of creating a language different from a more beautiful Portuguese

Speaker 2 (00:58:34):

That should facilitate our translation because American English has a similar relationship to British English. No, a question over here.

Speaker 9 (00:58:43):

Yeah. I translate for movies documentary, and I find that it's really a big challenge for me to economize and get as few words on labor of the language translation as possible, experienced that,

Speaker 2 (00:59:11):

Especially since in the more familiar phrases, there's more words, right? So when you condense it, you're making it more formal kind of. People have experiences with that.

Speaker 3 (00:59:24):

Well, it's just a little difficult. I mean, there is a Brazilian writer who sort of fits us, but we're not talking about a woman. We're talking about a queer man, Jean Willis. Okay, so forgive me for a panel of talking about, I

Speaker 2 (00:59:38):

Think we can welcome

Speaker 3 (00:59:39):

This. Okay. Talking about Brazilian woman writers, just talk about a Brazilian man writer, but he's now a pretty famous politician, Jean Willis. And when he was still a journalist and teaching in Baia, I was also, I think, teaching at the Federal University of Baia. He wrote a beautiful little book called A Fleeters. And this book amazes me because it's very simple, it's extremely condensed, extremely the languages, I mean, every, which is in certain ways like ssh, but very different. I mean, his is the most basic Portuguese. And hers, of course, is just multiple registers welded together. But in both cases, they leave out a lot of the integument. And when I translated Jean Willis, almost every single person that I've shown it to says that this is just too bare. It does not sound right in English, because in English you would expect the ands and all of this extra language, but to me, you lose so much because that condensation, that compression. It's like prose poetry, right? So that's one example. And so it's been a struggle because it's how do you, I remain faithful to his prose and the spirit of that, because also the book is about people who have almost everything taken away. So in a sense, the prose is embodying, exactly, is embodying the experience of these anos. But the response is always, you need more. You got to fill it in, because English prose, particularly fiction, usually has that extra something added in.

Speaker 2 (01:01:18):

Well, thank you for coming. We have a great audience. We really appreciate it. And I just think it's great to get these names out and these poems out into the world. It makes me very happy. Thank you for your work. Yes, yes. Stay around.

Speaker 10 (01:01:39):

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