Translating myself #6: Return to 'The Return'
“Writers make national literatures and translators make literature universal.”
José Saramago
Hello.
Welcome back.
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It is publication week for Dulce Maria Cardoso’s Violeta Among the Stars. (Over on Good Reads, people have been saying some nice things about it.) In an earlier post I started telling the story of how I ended up translating her novels into English.
I had not read any of Dulce’s books before she arrived for the 2012 edition of Flip. I was unable to attend her panel session – the theme was the family in fiction – because I was preparing to chair other events.
But we ended up sitting at the same table in the hotel dining room where lunch is put on for authors. Embarassingly, I mistook her travel companion for a another well-known Portuguese author. They laughed, and put me at ease by confessing that this happened often.
Her novel O Retorno (The Return) was being published in Brazil. After lunch, she handed me a sample chapter, translated into English. “I’d love to know what you think,” she said. We exchanged contact details.
We shared a small moment of complicity later in the festival. Dulce was going onstage to read a poem by Brazil’s Carlos Drummond de Andrade, to whom the festival paid homage that year. Also in the authors’ backstage “Green Room” was one of that year’s star attractions – a Great American Novelist – who was appearing onstage after her.
Dulce and I tried to start a conversation, but the Great American Novelist was already slipping into a pre-event ritual involving earphones and a blindfold. We looked at each other and giggled, in the knowledge that we were neither seen nor heard.
I bought O Retorno at the festival’s pop-up bookshop. The hardback was, in itself, a thing of beauty, stunningly designed as are all books published by Tinta da China. I started reading it on the flight back to the United Kingdom, and couldn’t wait to get home to finish it.
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Like many translators, I am sometimes asked by publishers to offer my opinion on books they hope to acquire. Shortly after finishing O Retorno I wrote, umpropmted, a breathless readers’ report. Here are some of the lines from that report:
“Loss – the obvious loss of war, but the more subtle and inevitable loss that comes with growing up – is one of the main themes of this affecting novel…”
“Its critical reception in both Portugal and Brazil has been rapturous…”
“Composed in a language that is plain yet laced with a brutal clarity and quiet beauty, Cardoso has successfully pulled off the trick (so often attempted but seldom well executed) of offering a sidelong view of human affairs glimpsed through the eyes of a narrator who is both innocent and wise beyond his years…”
And finally:
“I cannot recommend its English-language translation highly enough.”
I sent the report, unsolicited, to a few editors and publishers I knew (with the not-so-secret hope that they might commission me to translate it). Alas, nothing materialised.
It took another chance meeting in Paraty for something to finally happen. Two years later, over Brazilian finger food and caipirinhas, I was introduced to Christopher MacLehose, a tireless champion of literature in translation. He asked if I knew of any interesting authors or books he should look out for. I promised to pass on my recommendations.
When I finally sent Christopher my reader’s report for O Retorno, he wrote back (and I hope he won’t mind me quoting him):
“Just one question: how could a book so plainly interesting in subject and so vividly written have had to wait all these years?”
Thanks to Christopher and his colleagues at MacLehose Press, the book would not have to wait much longer.