writing
“A gestação do menino diabo”
revista piauí, Jun 2020
Só agora consigo ter algum prazer ao revisitar os desafios do meu processo de tradução; mas tenho também a certeza desagradável de que, assim que a tradução se materializar em livro, não vou querer passar das primeiras páginas. Traduções encontram a sua melhor e mais aterrorizante forma enquanto elas são ainda um mar instável de possibilidades – como Brás Cubas imagina o seu filho com Virgília: “Esse embrião tinha a meus olhos todos os tamanhos e gestos: ele mamava, ele escrevia, ele valsava, ele era o interminável nos limites de um quarto de hora.” Uma tradução em curso é um quebra-cabeças infinitamente maleável; assim que termina de ser montado e perde a sua iridescência, provoca um forte sentimento de perda.
Review of The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
Machado de Assis em linha, Dec 2019
This range of versions of the same text provides a rich basis for comparison. To judge the nature of a translation and arrive at a more specific sense of the patterns that it displays, it is often more productive to read it against existing interpretations in the same language than to hold it to the virtually impossible standard of the origin language.
Reading Machado Through the Looking-Glass: Case Studies from the Translation of Memórias Póstumas
Machado de Assis em linha, Dec 2018
Translation of Machado thus promises to shine a bit of a spotlight down into the Mariana Trench of his prose – by no means definitively illuminating its cavernous, shifting depths, but illustrating some of the many possibilities the text may contain. This is made most powerful with the construction of a tradition of translation, a record of different readings which may be apprehended both simultaneously, alongside the text they have in common, as well as at the time and place of each. Multiple translations can be put to the service of literary criticism, revealing both the places in which the text forces readers to do the heaviest lifting and giving a sense of the directions it may lead them.
a note on the Calabouço
revista piauí, May 2018
I kept thinking of Cotrim, the model citizen, “the treasurer of a fraternal order and a member of several religious societies,” would pay the state a fee to have his slaves whipped bloody. “One cannot honestly attribute to a man’s original nature that which is the pure effect of social relations,” Brás says. Of course, that’s much easier to say of a man who outsources bloodletting, keeping his own hands clean and sparing his neighbors’ ears. And there were many like Cotrim. In the year 1826 alone, 1,786 slaves were punished at the Calabouço at the behest of their masters.
#charlottesville
revista piauí, September 2017
Last December I finally moved to Rio de Janeiro, after six years with one foot in my homeland and another in my adoptive country. My hometown is decidedly not a part of the Brazilian collective imaginary. My new friends tended not to know anything about it, and would be hard-pressed to locate the place on a map. Moreover, my vague description of it as “a little city in the middle of Virginia” always struck me as insufficient. During my first stay in Rio I went so far as to carry a nickel in my wallet and show it when I was asked where I was from. The coin, with Thomas Jefferson’s head on its obverse, bears an image of Monticello, the house he built on the reverse. It sits on the crest of a mountain: its name comes from the Italian and means, fittingly, “little mountain.” From the summit, you can see Charlottesville, just below.
Mapas no fundo/ não são o mundo: the Cartographies of Ana Martins Marques
BRASIL / BRAZIL, 2016
In these “Cartographies,” just as an alteration to a map can change that which the document seeks to represent, the document can also infect the world with its logic – perhaps in the promise of a new insect born with geopolitical frontiers tattooed on its carapace, or in the danger inherent in the fact of having a canyon resting on one’s desk.
Finale allegro, accelerando: Revisiting the Erratum of "A Saída"
Machado de Assis em linha, 2013
A reinterpretation of a proclamation by the narrator of Dom Casmurro; instead of taking chapter XCVII at face value as an erratum, I suggest that, rather than constituting a rupture, it constitutes one manifestation of a larger phenomenon within Machado’s works, ushering in and hastening the work’s end. If we agree with the old tenor Marcolini that life is an opera, then, we might label this gesture a “finale allegro."