{"id":300976,"date":"2015-04-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-16T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2015\/04\/16\/why-this-book-should-win-btba-judge-daniel-medin-qa-with-john-keene-about-letters-from-a-seducer\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:22","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:22","slug":"why-this-book-should-win-btba-judge-daniel-medin-qa-with-john-keene-about-letters-from-a-seducer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2015\/04\/16\/why-this-book-should-win-btba-judge-daniel-medin-qa-with-john-keene-about-letters-from-a-seducer\/","title":{"rendered":"Why This Book Should Win: BTBA Judge Daniel Medin Q&A with John Keene about Letters from a Seducer"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Keene is the author of<\/i> Annotations<\/a>, and<\/i> Counternarratives<\/a>, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection<\/i> Seismosis<\/a>, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel<\/i> Letters from a Seducer.<\/p>\n

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators and is Associate Series Editor of<\/i> The Cahiers Series.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Letters from a Seducer<\/i><\/a> – Hilda Hilst, Translated by John Keene
\nNightboat Books<\/strong><\/p>\n

Daniel Medin<\/strong>: How did you discover Hilda Hilst’s writing? What led you to want to translate this book?\u00a0<\/p>\n

John Keene<\/strong>: My first real encounters with Hilst\u2019s writing are a decidedly 21st century phenomenon. I had seen her name mentioned several times in various critical texts, and finally did an online search for her work about a decade ago. What I found and dove into was the old Angelfire website, still live, that Yuri Vieira dos Santos set up for her in 1999, and launched from her Casa do Sol. It was via that site, which features links to many of her works, photos, and lists of translations, that I was able to immerse myself in Hilst\u2019s world. I only wish serendipity had led me to it before she passed away in 2004, so that I could have contacted her to let her know how deep my enthusiasm for her work was and is, just based on what I found there. After learning that although passages of her work had been translated into English, none of her books had, I immediately wanted to do so (I often have delusions of being the one to translate this writer or other\u2019s work into English to introduce her or him to Anglophone readers), and fortuity again intervened when Rachel Gontijo Ara\u00fajo invited me first to write the introduction to her collaborative translation with Nathana\u00ebl of\u00a0The Obscene Madame D<\/i><\/a>, and then to translate the deeply challenging but exhilarating\u00a0Letters from a Seducer<\/i>.<\/p>\n

DM<\/strong>:\u00a0Letters from a Seducer<\/i>\u00a0is a part of Hilst’s famous “pornographic tetralogy.” How are these works different from what she was had been doing before? What distinguishes\u00a0Letters<\/i>\u00a0from the others?<\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: Let me begin by saying that all of Hilst\u2019s prose fiction is experimental, from her initial fiction text,\u00a0Fluxo-Floema<\/i>\u00a0(1970), on, and is informed by her prior primary focus as a poet and a playwright. (She continued writing poetry throughout her life, I should note.) Her earliest poetry, published in the 1950s, is fairly conventional, but by the 1960s you can detect subversive notes, experiments with earlier Lusophone (and Iberian) forms, etc., so that when she began writing prose, it was hardly surprising that she would not follow the standard route. Yet I think it\u2019s fair to say that her fiction is distinctive even from parallel experiments that were happening in Brazilian literature at the time, as a comparison between her texts of the 1970s and those of her close friend, Lygia Fagundes Telles, one of the major fiction writers of Brazil and in the Portuguese language, will suggest. While a book like\u00a0The Obscene Madame D<\/i>\u00a0(1982) does overtly treat sexual themes, in the \u201cporno-chic\u201d works, as she called them, she more openly and directly uses and plays with pornographic language and discourse, and the works themselves turn in part on themes that might be considered pornographic, except that Hilst\u2019s artistry, irony and wit transform them into something quite different.\u00a0Letters<\/i>\u00a0(1991) is the second novel and masterpiece of the four texts; one of them,\u00a0Contos d\u2019Escarnio: Textos Grotescos<\/i>\u00a0(1990) is a collection of stories;\u00a0Buf\u00f3licas<\/i>\u00a0(1992) comprises poems; and\u00a0O Caderno Rosa de Lory Lamby<\/i>,\u00a0or\u00a0Lory Licky\u2019s Pink Notebook<\/i>\u00a0(1990),\u00a0as I think the brilliant translator Adam Morris dubbed it, is an extremely ludic, graphic precursor to\u00a0Letters<\/i>\u00a0written in the voice of a child. (And possibly not publishable in the US, despite its relentless humor.) With\u00a0Letters<\/i>,\u00a0Hilst reaches the pinnacle of the tetralogy and, I think, her art, fusing all the strands that have come before into a profound text about writing, living, sex, human mortality, and so on. It is also quite funny; she never sheds her humor, even at some of the most outrageous moments in the text, which is one of the things I really appreciate about her work.<\/p>\n

DM<\/strong>: Could you point out one of your favorite passages, and tell us what you like about (translating) it?<\/p>\n

\u2028JK<\/strong>: To anyone who has heard me expound on this passage before, my apologies, but towards the beginning of the \u201cOf Other Hollows\u201d section, there\u2019s a passage where Stamatius (T\u00edu) is meditating, as he\u2019s won’t to do, about what he should be up to instead of agonizing of his writing and his life, as practical Eul\u00e1lia is off keeping things together for them, and Hilst writes:<\/p>\n

E deveria ter procurado os cocos e os palmitos. Mas fico a escrever com este \u00fanico toco e quando acabar o toco troco um coco por outro toco de l\u00e1pis l\u00e1 na venda do Boi (tem esse nome porque um boi passou certa vez por ali e peidou grosso). Vendem cacha\u00e7a pago\u00e7a maria-mole carne-seca latas de massa. Ent\u00e3o deveria ter ido a cata dos cocos, dos palmitos, e n\u00e3o fui. Continuo dizendo o que n\u00e3o queria. Minhas unhas. Curtinhas e imundas. E as dos p\u00e9s?\u2026\u00a0que\u00a0bom est\u00e3o limpas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Now, this probably won\u2019t register immediately if you don\u2019t read or speak Portuguese (or Spanish), but what Hilst is doing here is playing repeatedly with the word\u00a0\u201coco,\u201d such that you get a string of those\u00a0\u201chollows\u201d (\u201cocos\u201d) one after the other, as well as other rhymes, assonances and consonances, a veritable seemingly untranslatable\u2014into English—music, through the words that she uses: os cocos (coconuts), toco (stump\/stub, also: I play, touch), troco (I exchange), etc. In fact, the\u00a0\u201co\/ou\u201d (OH) and\u00a0\u201cu\/o\u201d (OOH<\/span>) sounds appear in sentence after sentence, sometimes in a string of words, so that even when you don\u2019t exactly get the\u00a0\u201chollow,\u201d you get the sound that embodies it. This is the work of a true poet, and someone incredibly attentive to language. There\u2019s also a great deal of polysemy here at the phonemic level. So this was a huge challenge: how to bring this into English, since it will by necessity be lost? I had to find an equivalent but distinctly English music, and realized that English does have musical resources of its own that would work. But it wasn\u2019t easy, and when I felt I\u2019d figured it out, I was exhilarated. There are many such moments, but this remains my favorite, and I could read the Portuguese aloud over and over. It\u2019s amazing how she pulls it off.
\nMy translation:\n<\/p>\n

And I should have looked for coconuts and palm hearts. But I’m here writing with this lone stump and when I stop I’ll swap a coconut for another pencil stub over there at the Ox shop (so named because an ox passed through there once and let out a huge fart). They sell cacha\u00e7a peanut fudge maria-mole dried meat tin cans of sauce. But I should have gone to gather up coconuts, palm hearts, and I didn’t. I keep talking about what I don’t want. My fingernails. Tiny and filthy. And my toenails? good to say, they are clean.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0
\nDM<\/strong>: You’ve a new collection of fiction publishing soon, some of which is set in Brazil. Have the two projects—your translation of Hilst and your writing of\u00a0Counternarratives<\/i>—overlapped in any way? Or did they largely run parallel to one another?\u00a0<\/p>\n

JK<\/strong>: This is an excellent question. I wrote or began several of the Brazil-related stories before translating Hilst, but I did draft and complete one\u2014“Anthropophagy,\u201d about the great Brazilian Modernist poet M\u00e1rio de Andrade toward the end of his life, during his short stint in Rio de Janeiro\u2014after finishing the translation. When I reread, sometimes aloud, the galleys after New Directions President and Editor-in-chief sent them to me, I could hear\u00a0my\u00a0poetry and music asserting itself in the prose. This is a tendency of mine, but I also think Hilst\u2019s work played a role. It is probably most evident in a story called \u201cCold,\u201d about the great minstrel performer, composer, actor, director, and impresario Bob Cole. In the story, which is about a musician who cannot get music out of his head to the point that it drives him to the mental brink, I have text boxes with snippets of his lyrics, and I also collage in lyrics into the main body of the text. This was all quite deliberate. The prose at certain points\u00a0breaks into music<\/i>; it isn\u2019t just lyrical, though. There are moments, I realized during a reading at Kean University the other day, where the music of the words themselves takes material form, sounding almost like drumming or hip hop, and I have to admit I was a little startled, because I had written the story and could hear it in my head, and had even read it before an audience last spring at the University of Montana, but this time, I was quite aware of what I\u2019d done, under, I am willing to admit, the influence and sign of Hilst. That is just one example, and I\u2019m sure there are more. Like other great authors, she shows in her work that anything is possible, if you can pull it off. That also was something I took to heart when finishing\u00a0Counternarratives<\/i>. <\/p>\n

—
\nThe preface to <\/i>Letters of a Seducer was published in the 2014 Translation Issue of The White Review; you can read it here.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Keene is the author of Annotations, and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[60346,6616,32616,50116,54586,54096,50146,3286,1646,54536],"class_list":["post-300976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba2015-fiction-longlist","tag-brazil","tag-daniel-medin","tag-hilda-hilst","tag-john-keene","tag-letters-from-a-seducer","tag-nightboat-books","tag-portuguese","tag-review","tag-the-white-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300976","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\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300976"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316806,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300976\/revisions\/316806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}