To Be My Full Self Again: A Conversation with Bruna Dantas Lobato
(Interviewed by Cameron Finch)
Image Credit: Journal for a trip to Yellowstone National Park, Richard T. Jones
Cameron: How did you first come to the work of literary translation, and especially to the work of translating Caio Fernando Abreu?
Bruna: I first tried my hand at translation when I was in college in Vermont, a foreigner majoring in English and reading too much white American literature. I missed my life back in Brazil and had started to feel like I'd renounced this huge part of me that spoke Portuguese. There were so many books I loved, so many wonderful phrases, images, and kinds of experiences I wanted to share with others and invite back into my life. Translation felt like a way to be my full self again, to make my Brazilian self and my American self be in dialogue with each other. I asked my mom to send me a few things from home and she mailed me my old copies of Moldy Strawberries and No Dragons in Paradise. I reread them in one weekend and was struck by Abreu's beautiful rhythmic prose all over again. Every sentence was a gem. I felt so lucky I spoke Portuguese, something I hadn't felt in a long time.
C: What was a favorite story in Moldy Strawberries that you enjoyed translating? Can you walk us through that particular translation process, and why does this story stand out to you?
B: "Beyond the Point" was pure joy to translate. The story is so expertly paced, so agile and breathless and sexy, it demands to be read out loud. I recorded myself reading it in the original, then in my English translation multiple times, to compare the cadence and dramatic effect of each version. I ended up doing more than thirty recordings in the end, and listening to each one over and over as I made small changes to the translation to bring it closer to the music of the original. I learned so much about translation and writing from this piece, about how to sustain the momentum of a story with little plot, how to be lyrical without overwriting, how to create and modulate tension, and how to trust the reader to understand it all.
C: How does a translation assignment land on your desk? When reading through a manuscript, what are you reading for? What signifies 'yes, this is translating gold' to you?
B: Most of the time I pitch projects to publishers myself, books I've read and loved and hope to see in English one day. But sometimes editors will also come to me with a book they think fits my interests and taste and we go from there. I'm drawn to books that are formally innovative and show a side of Brazil we don't see often in English, especially if there's room for me to play with the style and be surprised and challenged by it. That's how I've ended up translating such a wide range of texts, from stories and novels to poems and a children's book, and now I'm working on a memoir.
C: Sometimes, a line in a translated story -- an idiom or a song lyric, say -- will remain in the mother tongue, a brief pause with no English on the lips. I yearn for those untranslatable moments! Could you tell us about how you intuit or make the deliberate choice to keep a word or phrase in the original language?
B: I also love those unstranslated moments! Every case is different, of course, but I have a few arbitrary rules I made for myself: if it's a line from a real song, I'll probably leave it in Portuguese or French or Spanish or what have you so we can hum along, unless (there's always an exception) the meaning is integral to understanding that scene. If it's a cultural, religious, historical, or geographical reference or name and I can afford to leave it as is, I'll take that opportunity. And finally, if it's an expression or idiom or bit of language that makes sense to protect and/or display rather than erase, I see it as my responsibility to leave it untouched too, which accounts for a lot of the Yoruba-Portuguese words I kept in Moldy Strawberries.
B: Read broadly in your source language, to get a sense of the literatures, history, and art of that country. And read broadly in English too, for the same reasons. And don't give up on a piece that seems broken!
C: Do you have advice for people who would like to begin or deepen their study of literary translation?
C: I loved your recent Literary Hub article about relearning how to play in your art. Are there any other art forms beyond literature that influence your work, or that just bring you joy?
B: Thank you! I'm always trying to work with my hands, to get out of my head for a bit. In addition to making miniatures and dollhouses, I journal every day, sketch, paint watercolors, bind little books, make paper, carve stamps, sew, embroider, write letters to friends, take pictures with my old point-and-shoot camera. I love working with images and textures, and I'm always trying something new I'm not very good at. My goal is to remain an amateur, interested and curious, but never striving for perfection. This private play reminds me that genuine engagement with the material comes before any accolades or recognition. First and foremost I'm doing it for myself, then for an audience.
C: You also write your own fiction. I'm curious how your translation skills seep into your personal writing career, and vice versa. Do you feel a light blaze in different rooms of your brain when you are in translation mode versus writing mode?
B: Both writing and translating require me to have a good sense of narrative and style, so practicing one always helps the other. Abreu's "Passing through a Great Sorrow," for example, taught me most of what I needed to know about writing a dialogue-based story, and I went on to use a lot of that knowledge in my novel manuscript, about a mother and daughter talking over Skype. On the other hand, maybe I was able to translate that story the way I did, because I was already invested in turning a phone call into a complete narrative. The two modes still feel very distinct to me, though, like looking at the same house from the inside versus from the outside.
B: A few themes show up again and again in all my work and even hobbies: home and homeyness, identity, foreignness, personal history, language, the space between parents and their children. I'm deep into novel revision right now, so I've been trying to look at these from every possible angle.
C: What projects, obsessions, or questions are thrilling you / challenging you / nourishing you these days?
B: There are too many to name, especially when I think of all the Brazilian writers who haven't appeared in English yet. Jarid Arraes, for example, is a phenomenal Brazilian writer I've been dreaming of co-translating with Julia Sanches for the past couple of years. Fingers crossed she can reach a wider audience soon.
C: And lastly, who are some writers you wish more people were reading?
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a Brazilian writer and literary translator based in St. Louis. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, The Common, and other publications, and her literary translations include Caio Fernando Abreu's Moldy Strawberries (Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize), Stênio Gardel’s The Words that Remain, and Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin.