At its inauguration in 1960, Bras\u00edlia was baptized \u201cThe Capital of Hope.\u201d It is a city that was carved out from scratch in the cerrado, a woodland savannah in the middle of Brazil, in just 41 months of construction. It is also a city completely planned out, a city born without any residents.<\/p>\n
When Clarice Lispector, one of Brazil\u2019s most famous writers, visited the new capital in the early seventies, she was struck by how large Bras\u00edlia loomed over its residents, how its infinite spaces could conjure such unbearable loneliness, how everyone who lived there was from somewhere else. \u201cBras\u00edlia,\u201d she wrote \u201chas no inhabitants as of yet who are typical of Bras\u00edlia.” The oldest citizens born in Bras\u00edlia are only fifty-two years old today.<\/p>\n
Jo\u00e3o Almino, the novelist and diplomat, is—like the narrator of The Book of Emotions<\/em>—a photographer and an outsider to Bras\u00edlia. He was born in Mossor\u00f3, in the Brazilian Northeast. This is a poor region that has, much like the American South, produced a long list of influential writers such as Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, Jo\u00e3o Cabral de Melo Neto, and Guimar\u00e3es Rosa. In the beginning of Almino\u2019s career, one of his biggest dilemmas was whether to set his fiction in the Northeast or in Bras\u00edlia, where he had lived for ten years. He decided on Bras\u00edlia because it offered him the freedom to \u201ctrace a path that had not yet been followed, to try and create the sort of literature that had little to do with the picturesque, with clich\u00e9s, with what was already so well know.\u201d In an online interview for Saraiva Conte\u00fado<\/em>, the portal for one of Brazil\u2019s largest bookstore, he says, \u201cBras\u00edlia is a place with an open, erratic, multiple identity that can assimilate what comes from the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n Almino has published several previous books, all of which have been set in Bras\u00edlia, including The Five Seasons of Love<\/em> (translated by Elizabeth Jackson and published by Host Publications in 2008), and the to date untranslated Id\u00e9ias para Onde Passar o Fim do Mundo<\/em> [Ideas for Where to Spend the End of the World<\/i>], Samba-Enredo<\/em> [Samba Story<\/i>], and Cidade Livre<\/em> [Free City<\/i>]. The Book of Emotions<\/em>, Almino\u2019s second novel published in English, by Dalkey Archive Press was also translated by Elizabeth Jackson.<\/p>\n In The Book of Emotions<\/em>, set in the year 2022, Almino depicts a Bras\u00edlia that goes far beyond the Three Powers Square, the cluster of massive residential blocks known as superquadras, or the capital\u2019s legendary sunsets. The city serves as a backdrop and also as a reflection of inner turmoil, failure, and loss. The book\u2019s narrator, Cadu, is living alone in Bras\u00edlia, blind and nearing the end of his life. One of his friends suggests that Cadu return to working on a photographic memoir he had kept in 2002, when he left Rio de Janeiro and moved to Bras\u00edlia. Even though Cadu cannot see, he is able to reconstruct his photographic chronicles from memory with the help of a young assistant. \u201cThose photographs reveal themselves in rich detail in my memory, even more than if it were possible to see them. They\u2019re like Stieglitz clouds; each one equals an emotion. My blindness reveals their essence, for in the end, to best see a photograph, you have to close your eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n The Book of Emotions<\/em> is an attempt to follow the contours of memory. Almino sets up the novel as a memoir within a diary. The italicized diary entries describe Cadu\u2019s day-to-day life in 2022. Interspersed with these entries is his memoir-in-progress, also entitled \u201cThe Book of Emotions.\u201d Each entry from Cadu\u2019s \u201cThe Book of Emotions\u201d is based upon a photograph taken during his first years in Bras\u00edlia, before he went blind. It is through this memoir that we learn of the important facts of Cadu\u2019s life: his unemployment, the jailed son whom he has never met, an unsuccessful exhibit of his photographs, and his obsession with women, especially with his ex-lover, Joana. Through the fragments of his memories, Cadu tries to piece together his life, a life that for no apparent reason simply ruptured into a million pieces.<\/p>\n Memory is non-linear, sporadic, and self-selecting, and so are Cadu\u2019s recollections of his past. The novel functions as a dialogue between an older Cadu and a younger Cadu, much as in the Borges story, The Other<\/em>. \u201cThe idea for \u2018The Book of Emotions,\u2019\u201d the narrator explains in one of his first entries, \u201cis that the person speaking will not be me but rather another Cadu, someone twenty years younger who can see and who composes a photographic diary.\u201d<\/p>\n Elizabeth Jackson\u2019s translation clearly sets and strives to preserve the original flavor of the Portuguese throughout the novel. She is most successful in her translations of Cadu\u2019s descriptions of Bras\u00edlia, capturing Almino\u2019s lush Portuguese beautifully:<\/p>\n The night covered us with its dense, long blankets and carried us to the bottom of its black precipices. We decided to stretch it between silent stars and gusts of truth, and we heard the applause of the angels at the end of time. We were bathed more in certainty than in hope.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n A good translation takes its readers to a different world, one which they have not experienced first-hand. The only way for many of us to experience what it\u2019s like to live in distant places is through words:<\/p>\n The efficiency of the waiters was measured by the speed with which they brought another draft beer as soon as the glass was empty. Mine emptied five or six times, and Mauricio began to play with the cork coasters printed in red with the beer logo that came with every glass.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There are moments, however, when Jackson\u2019s translation becomes clumsy as she strains to capture the book\u2019s Brazilian flavor. In a passage in which Cadu describes how he experiences Bras\u00edlia, he refers to \u201cthe rot of the power dungeons, the spilt tears and laughs heard in the corridors of Congress.\u201d The phrase \u201cthe rot of the power dungeons\u201d fails to convey Almino\u2019s reference to the constant corruption scandals, past and present, that Bras\u00edlia has faced. A more elegant and accessible phrase might have referenced, say, power\u2019s dirty underbelly.<\/p>\n There are in fact quite a few culturally specific references in Almino\u2019s novel: religion, Bras\u00edlia\u2019s architecture, literary references, and nicknames. General explanations for the reader might have been offered unobtrusively on occasion. For instance, when Cadu and his girlfriend visit a religious temple whose followers believe in the healing power of spirits, the bishop gives them a blessing and a bottle of water that the bishop claims was magnetized by the temple\u2019s spirits. This spiritually blessed water has been translated as \u201cfluidized water,\u201d a choice that might not make much sense for a reader who is not aware of the hybrid form of Catholicism, Evangelical cult and Spiritism practiced in Brazil. Simply describing the water as \u201cwater magnetized by the temple\u2019s spirits, through its mediums\u201d might have made more sense.<\/p>\n It is through photography that Cadu attempts to make peace with his ghosts: past lovers, family, past failures, the myth of Bras\u00edlia, the beauty of youth. As he recalls each photograph, Cadu simultaneously recreates and shatters the image he had of himself. \u201cI\u2019m no longer sure that I\u2019m the handsome Brasiliarian of Clarice\u2019s [Lispector] stories, which I listened to again.\u201d In this novel of sensations and desires, Almino\u2019s narrative is like a photograph that mesmerizes his readers as Cadu filters his past through \u201cthe camera\u2019s objective eye, an eye that sometimes surprises by seeing more than the human eye.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At its inauguration in 1960, Bras\u00edlia was baptized \u201cThe Capital of Hope.\u201d It is a city that was carved out from scratch in the cerrado, a woodland savannah in the middle of Brazil, in just 41 months of construction. It is also a city completely planned out, a city born without any residents. When Clarice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":176,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[9196,17496,48796,48786,48806],"class_list":["post-291956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-brazilian-literature","tag-dalkey-archive-press","tag-elizabeth-jackson","tag-joao-almino","tag-proustian-themes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/176"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291956"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340496,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291956\/revisions\/340496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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