Translating myself #4: Adventures in the Lusosphere
Hello.
With only one week to go before the publication of Violeta Among the Stars, I have been thinking about my introduction to the Portuguese language, and to Portuguese-language (Lusophone) literature more generally.
Here's a story I haven't shared before:
In 1996 I spent two weeks travelling across Portugal, carrying a copy of José Saramago's Journey to Portugal (in its Spanish translation by Basilio Losada).
At the end of the holiday, as I waited to catch a flight from Lisbon to Madrid, I noticed a familiar face. It took me a while to realise it was the same severe face that had been staring at me from the back cover of my book for the past fortnight.
I stood behind the familiar stranger as passengers queued to board the plane. "Is that Saramago?" I asked the gate attendant? "It is," he replied, offering as proof the boarding pass stub that the future Nobel laureate had handed in at the gate.
He was travelling with his wife, Pilar. They sat at the front of the plane (naturally). I sat at the back (naturally). The couple disembarked in Madrid, Saramago grumpily wheeling his carry-on suitcase behind him. I followed closely (reader: I was stalking him!) until they reached a large flight of stairs.
Suddenly, Saramago was struggling with his suitcase. I seized the opportunity to step in. "Can I help?" I asked. He gave me a withering look from behind his furiously bushy eyebrows. "Não!" he barked. His wife scolded him: "The young man is only trying to help". Saramago made amends: "Não! Obrigado."
I walked away feeling rejected, though quietly confident that some day this minuscule anecdote might be worth telling.
*
I was thrilled to be asked, years later, to join Saramago's wonderful English translator, Margaret Jull Costa, on a jury awarding a prize for young translators. I had, by then, edited and translated a collection of new writing by Brazilian authors, Other Carnivals.
That book was the result of my long and delightful association with the Festa Litéraria Internacional de Paraty, or Flip -- the literary festival that all other literary festivals dream of being -- and its Suffolk-based spin-off, FlipSide.
Until last year's Big Interruption, Flip took place yearly, in July or August, in the seaside town of Paraty, three hours south of Rio de Janeiro. (To get a flavour of the event, here is a piece I wrote about my first Flip foray, which I attended as a journalist, before the festival founders invited me to join the circus).
It has been one of the most ineffable of good fortunes in my life to have been invited back to Paraty, year after year, to chair literary events with authors I admire, and to discover many more authors in the process.
And it was in Paraty, of course, that I first crossed paths with Dulce Maria Cardoso...
*
In response to yesterday's musings on my first paid translation, a reader asks: "Do you still have access to that first translation? Was it (modesty aside) any good?"
That issue of Artes de México is still in print (look here). I haven’t seen it since, so can’t say how good it was. Alberto and Magui did, however, commission more translations from me. I will always be grateful to them for opening their doors, trusting me, and setting me on the path that brought me to where I am now.