Bruna Dantas Lobato
Horizon Stretchers: Translating Style in The Words That Remain
I first started translating when I was in college in Vermont, as an international student from Brazil studying literature and reading too much Flaubert and Henry James. I was doing well in school, I loved the books I was reading, I was writing my own fiction in English—I was a successful literature student by all accounts. But there was this other side of me I was relegating to the background, a whole lifetime of knowledge and experiences and meaning that was deemed unimportant and sometimes even a liability, something that could get in the way of me being a good student in America. For the most part, I did what I was told and lived in English, but soon I started worrying I was losing my Portuguese, that there was something wrong with only speaking Portuguese with my mom at night, when I knew no one was listening. So I started to rebel—as much as a nerd like me could rebel. I started taking classes in Latin American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Comparative Literature. And I had my mom mail me some of my favorite Brazilian books, including an old copy of Caio Fernando Abreu’s 1982 queer story collection, Moldy Strawberries (which would later become my first published translation). I’d read it when I was younger and loved the sexually charged scenes where nothing happened—the poetry, the metaphors.
The Portuguese was beautiful, musical, textured. There was this precise, rhythmic, agile, breathlessness to the prose, sometimes contrasted with writing so tightly controlled it was nectar-thick and stopped time. And it allowed me to try my hand at finding the words in English for things that felt inherently Brazilian, unique to the Portuguese language, and vice versa, to make sense of the English language within the constraints of Portuguese. Translation felt like a way for my languages and selves to be in conversation with one another, for me to be my full self. And for the first time in years, I felt like speaking Portuguese was doing more for me than marking my English with an accent.
Speaking both Portuguese and English made me hyper-aware of the strangeness and newness of language, of sound, style, diction, syntax, the way a word might live within another word, the way a sentence might carry different meanings. That is: being bilingual made me a writer, someone preoccupied with how the word “hoarse” could speak both to the animal and to someone’s voice, and that there wasn’t always a way to separate those two things, that when you said one, you always invoked the other.
Each language has its own possibilities, associations, sounds. What is a cliché in one language may not be in another (“an ugly vase never breaks,” it is said in Portuguese, and I like the way it sounds in English so I put it in my novel). What is wrong in one language (verb tense inconsistencies, mixed metaphors, comma splices) might be right in another. What is considered conventional in one might be considered experimental in another. Each language offers its own opportunities for jokes, alliteration, rhymes, sentence structures. I spend my days rearranging words on the page and every time I move a comma around, a new sentence emerges. I dreamed it and it became true: I’ve made a life in language.
There are so many metaphors for translation and translators: the bridge, the mirror, the actor playing a role, the pianist interpreting a score. My favorite came to me one winter in Vermont, as I tried to make my mom’s chicken soup. She sent me the recipe: potatoes, lemon, colorau. The potatoes I knew in Brazil were soft and silky, smaller than an Idaho potato but bigger than a baby gold. What I knew as a lemon in Brazil is supposedly a kind of lime, sweeter, more acidic and aromatic than a Persian lime, more bitter than a classic yellow lemon. I couldn’t find colorau and other spices anywhere. The chicken also felt different, somehow more fibrous, less oily (maybe it had been dead longer?). I spent that entire winter experimenting with vegetables, Googling things like, what is an onion? My goal was to capture this flavor and texture and appearance and feeling I knew from childhood in Brazil, but in order to do that, with my limited resources in New England, I had to make substitutions. As Gregory Rabassa (translator of One Hundred Years of Solitude, among others) writes in his seminal translation craft essay, “No two snowflakes are alike.”
A baguette isn’t naan, which isn’t Wonder Bread, which isn’t pita, though they’re all the standard bread that comes to mind in those various languages, though naan is literally bread in Persian, and pain is literally bread in French; even the same bread recipe might require more water when you’re baking in high altitudes. I had to introduce things that weren’t at all in the original but that might lead to the same dish in the end, to produce the same effect.
With the soup, I had to add two tablespoons of canola oil so it felt richer than the thin broth I’d initially managed to produce. Straight-up oil? My mom asked. She wasn’t happy about that. She said, that doesn’t sound right! But it is right. Though every part of me said my mom’s recipe was sacred and couldn’t be messed with, I’m thrilled I did, because messing with it, spending time making it, perfecting it, honoring it, is as important as the eating of the soup.
My process for translating The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel wasn’t that different from how I experimented with that soup. I had two copies of the book in the original Portuguese: a clean copy I liked to revisit and read out loud, and another I used to take notes in the margins. I’d jot down my reading of different passages—funny, haunting, quiet, loud—a list of goals in a way, something to write towards, a direction. I do the same thing with my own writing: this is the note I want to hit. I want it to be intimate, lyrical, slow, quick, dramatic or anti-climactic, loud or quiet, colloquial or formal. Stage directions of sorts. And I also write down any patterns of meaning I see, bits of repetition, echoes in the text, moments of rhyming action (as Charles Baxter writes in his craft book Burning Down the House). I wondered, how are patterns of meaning created and sustained? What priorities emerge? Some of this happens subconsciously, of course, through acquired instinct, but I also picture the piece in my brain, how it’s put together, its dramatic arc, the ups and downs of each sentence and chapter and book. I want to know how it works.
So much of The Words That Remain is about language, about how an older gay man who can’t read finds his way to the written word. This is a book interested in how language delights, yes, but also in how it imprisons and liberates and paralyzes only to liberate again. I recorded myself reading my translated sentences out loud, especially in the more critical chapters. Then I recorded myself reading the Portuguese text out loud too to compare the pauses, cadence, rhythm, the length of each articulation. The longer a unit of sound (even if it looks visually compact on the page), the more important it is, because time is tension in fiction.
There’s one particular sentence in the book that the author noticed right away because it sounded different in English. The original reads, “gostar de homem não é pra ser coisa de morte, é pra ser coisa de vida, cheia de vida, era cheio de vida que eu me sentia com Cícero.” A very literal translation would be, “a man liking another man shouldn’t be a death thing, it should be a life thing, I felt full of life with Cícero.” The phrases “a death thing” and “a life thing” sound natural in Portuguese, not marked by any strangeness, it’s simply something people say. Portuguese has a high tolerance for vague language while English likes specificity, concreteness. I came up with: “it shouldn’t be the stuff of death but the stuff of life.” Then another: “it shouldn’t be death-giving but life-giving.” The “shouldn’t be” part kept tripping me up so I decided to get rid of it and go with “is” and “isn’t,” a more direct approach, which is something the English language favors. Then I addressed the life-and-death problem. After thinking about it for several days, I made a list of alternatives on a yellow legal pad and eventually landed on an answer: “a man liking another man is not a death sentence, it’s a life sentence.” The word sentence in English also meaning a phrase, so also implying that the language around liking men, the discourse around homoerotic love, shouldn’t be centered on death but centered on life. Because English allowed it, I added a layer of meaning to this passage, and gestured toward an overarching theme already in the original text, though not in this sentence. That is, I added two tablespoons of canola oil to give it more body, make it a bit richer in this language.
This book is incredibly special to me, as it is the first book I’ve worked on that is from Northeast Brazil, where I grew up, written in the same regional dialect I grew up speaking. Spending time making it, perfecting it, honoring it, was as important to me as getting the finished product published. I put my own emotions and pain into this book, the way an actor might use their own sadness to understand a character’s suffering, their own sense of glee to convey their moments of joy. I see translation as an embodied practice: my relationship to English and Portuguese and all my lived experiences in two countries inform my reading of a book and my every decision on the page, which is why no translation could ever be the same. No two snowflakes are alike.
Language is vast, full of possibilities, and I go on trying to expand what I can do with it, how it can shapeshift and speak one through the other. I stretch the possibilities of English and squeeze my Portuguese into it, with its idiosyncrasies and associations and expectations. There’s a passage in The Words That Remain that describes something similar, one of my favorite moments in the novel:
[Words in poems are] “horizon stretchers,” our teacher explained. [. . .] Where words alone can’t go, with poetry they can, they fly, like the bird, the bird that can hear loud silences, the loud silences, that can open up dawns, shrink rivers. [They’re] horizon stretchers, only words can do that!