National Endowmen for the Arts Eric M B Becker

Eric M. B. Becker is a literary translator, writer, and editor ofWords without Borders. In 2014, he earned a PEN/Heim grant for his translations of Mia Couto'due south Pelting and Other Storie s (Biblioasis, 2019). In 2016, he earned a Fulbright fellowship to translate Brazilian literature. Becker's other translations include work by Lygia Fagundes Telles, Paulo Coelho, Lima Barreto, and Milton Hatoum. Other work has appeared in the New York Times, Strange Affairs, Freeman's, Guernica, and elsewhere. He is the co-founder of the Pessoa International Literary Festival, an almanac issue bringing together celebrated writers from Portugal, Brazil, and the United States in conversations about their work.

In many ways, this fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts brings me back to the very beginning of my career as a translator, which began in earnest in 2013. Lygia Fagundes Telles was i of the very first writers who I read. (If memory serves, a collection of her stories was the second book I ever received in Portuguese, dorsum during my first visit to Brazil in 2005.) Lygia—every bit she's known in Brazil—is Brazil's greatest living writer, a master of the short story often mentioned in the same breath as Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, and Hilda Hilst, and she counts among her legion of devotees the late Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago and the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Lygia's piece of work plumbs the tension between real retention and imagination to render denoting, biting critiques of power and of the vicious social relations of everyday life. Her scope ranges from tales about real people grappling with sexual liberation and social upheaval to satirical allegories and romances—in other words, the very stuff of life, and very nigh all of information technology, from every bending. Her precise linguistic communication and the way she elicits the myriad paradoxes contained in a unmarried moment are what drew me to her work, and these are just some of the qualities that make her literature timeless. Considering so much of her work is subtext, the challenges for the translator are many, requiring patient and exacting work that cannot be rushed. As I've begun to assume the position of mid-career translator (though information technology ever feels as if I'm merely beginning over again), this fellowship provides me with the resources to dedicate myself to a projection that I've been developing throughout the years while meeting more than pressing deadlines. Thanks to the support of the NEA, Lygia Fagundes Telles will now find the English-language audience she deserves.

from "It's Chilly in Here, Don't You Think?" past Lygia Fagundes Telles

[Translated from the Portuguese]

Yet how I ignored the nigh of import matter, she thought, and let her mitt drop back down over the bed sheet. Total oblivion, at least until the moment he answered the door and said, Kori, so skillful to see you lot. Followed by an encompass with nothing adept about information technology, he could have at least pretended. Just he didn't. Come up on in, sweetheart. If just she'd invented some pretext as presently equally she'd felt something in the air sending her signals, warnings even. Say that Otávio showed upward all of the sudden, the forcefulness of the unexpected, and for that reason y'all can't stay. Or say that your son is burning upwardly with fever, or that there was a gas leak, that's serious, a gas leak! The cook inhaled also much gas and now she's in the infirmary, quick, say any just go out of in that location! She took off her jacket and stayed. Stayed, as if she needed to be sure, as though she had to sentinel Armando brand the gesture he did now, picking up the album, a motion only similar Begetter Severino raising the sacred host. In such ecstasy, revelation. And then this is how it is, she repeated to herself every bit Armando thumbed through the pile of albums asking what she'd like to hear now, how nearly an opera? She barely recognized her own voice equally she responded in falsetto, she had a habit of speaking in falsetto when she was being phony, Cracking, Armando, Carmen. He walked slowly back toward her in his rubberband gait, and in a low voice, correct on pitch, said, In that location yous become, sweetheart, Maria Callas, kissing her gently on the cervix and ears but fugitive her mouth. She started to feel lightheaded, what am I doing here? As well late to run out of the room, Something came up! She felt every bit though she were on stage when he began caressing her on the burrow without the least fleck of passion, simply could there really be any passion? The pillows he'd arranged carefully to brand her more comfortable, the half-lite softening the embarrassment of the situation. What a pathetic, pathetic, pathetic role to play. She asked for more whiskey. Witting of the ridiculous smile etched across her confront, still she attempted to assist him as he tried to remove her bra, but, tripped up by the clasp and his own impatience, irritation even, he exclaimed, "Jesus, Kori, what's wrong with this claw!" She made a indicate of property the straps in her fingertips for a few actress moments, delaying earlier she revealed her breasts, which resembled fried eggs. Cold ones. Armando's irritation grew. And then she released the straps. Good god! She turned her head when he kissed her nipples almost without touching them. He seemed more interested in staring at her breasts than kissing them. She thought about the pic she'd seen the night before, Indiana Jones, and so many snares to avoid. She'd fallen into a however bigger snare, a well-set trap to satisfy the marvel of her lover—her lover?—who wanted merely to see every last freckle and bony limb. She recoiled. Hold on, sweetie, my earring barbarous, agree on! she managed and bent over to look for the earring between the throw pillows.

(© Lygia Fagundes Telles. Translation © Eric 1000. B. Becker)

Original in Portuguese

Near Lygia Fagundes Telles

Lygia Fagundes Telles is a giant of 20th- and 21st-century Brazilian literature and widely considered Brazil'due south greatest living writer. In the words of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, neck-and neck with Fernando Pessoa for the distinction of greatest Portuguese-language poet of the 20th century, Lygia's stories "capture the underground truth to people, that hidden backside social norms." The lack of an English translation of Lygia's brusque stories non just deprives Anglophone readers of a fundamental voice on par with Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, and João Guimarães Rosa but of one of the most important women writers of the 20th century in any tradition.

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Source: https://www.arts.gov/impact/literary-arts/translation-fellows/eric-m-b-becker

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