A Q&A with Itamar Vieira Junior and Johnny Lorenz, author and translator of Crooked Plow

What was the experience of working with the book’s translator, Johnny Lorenz, like? How closely did you work together on the English edition? Were there any surprising moments during your collaboration, or joyful moments, or challenges?

The English translation process was a challenge. Of all the translations that the book has received, perhaps the translation into English by Johnny Lorenz was the one to which I dedicated the most time. Lorenz is a perfectionist and non-conformist; he is always looking for the word or phrase that will best express what the author wrote. He is not satisfied with easy solutions: he researches, writes, rewrites; he is not afraid to bother the author if it benefits the translation. 

A number of questions arose during our discussions, but we’d talk and exchange bibliographies and even relevant photographs. From Lorenz I learned that the author does not know everything about the story: readers and translators will always illuminate obscure passages in the text.

Tell us about your reading habits. Which book or books are you reading at the moment, and why?

I’m writing my third novel, and I need to be immersed in language as a reader to be able to write well. The book I’m currently reading is Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman. These extraordinary women have inspired me to write my next story.

What was your path to becoming a reader – what did you read as a child and what role did storytelling play in your younger years? Was there one book in particular that captured your imagination?

Reading arrived quite naturally in my life. As I became literate, as I grew more fascinated with the world of literature, I began writing in order to reproduce the sensations that literature gave to me.

Children’s literature was crucial in helping me develop, early on, the habit of reading. I remember one book in particular, O caso da borboleta Atíria by Lúcia Machado de Almeida (an important Brazilian author of children’s books). This book, featuring insect characters, opened up an experience to me that transcended human life, my life.

How does it feel to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024 – an award which recognises authors and translators equally – and what would winning the prize mean to you?  

Working to recreate the power and immediacy of the original text in my translation, I am trying, in some sense, to disappear. The translator is often an invisible presence. The International Booker Prize, however, brings a welcome visibility to the figure of the translator – and, of course, to brilliant novelists from around the globe. Literary translators spend so much time alone, moving between texts, contemplating the texture of an adjective, the nuances of a figure of speech, the weight of a noun; to now be part of this very public and joyful celebration of literature in translation is tremendously gratifying.

How long did it take to translate the book, and what does your working process look like? Do you read the book multiple times first? Do you translate it in the order it’s written? 

I translated Crooked Plow over the course of three years. My first step was to get everything down in English, but the first draft of a chapter is like a shipwreck on the page. I return to it and keep returning; I tinker and fix and reassemble. Sometimes a hammer is needed, sometimes sandpaper. When things are going well, the translator can feel the energy shifting, and the mainsail fills with wind. 

Aside from the book, what other writing did you draw inspiration from for your translation? 

I found inspiration in the fiction of Raduan Nassar. A passage from his novel Ancient Tillage (translated to English by K.C.S. Sotelino) serves as the epigraph for Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow. Nassar, incidentally, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2016. My translation of Crooked Plow also found inspiration in Gabriel Banaggia’s book, As forças do jarê, an ethnographic study of Jarê, the African Diasporic belief system that features prominently in Crooked Plow. In all three of these books, the reader can almost smell the damp earth of the countryside; the stable and the wood-burning oven; the medicinal herbs.

Tell us about a book originally written in Portuguese that you would recommend to English readers. How has it left a lasting impression on you?

I recommend reading Clarice Lispector. I’ve translated two of her novels, but here I’ll recommend a book I didn’t translate: The Hour of the Star, translated by Benjamin Moser. Lispector is the queen of the arresting phrase. Another recommendation: Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis – a classic! A twisted and tragic love story from the 19^th century. The gaps and silences and ellipses of this novel are just as meaningful as the words on the page.

Which work of translated fiction do you wish you had translated yourself, and what aspects of this particular work do you admire most?

Since we’re in the realm of wish-making and fantasy: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, beautifully translated by Richard Zenith. That book was a revelation. Zenith also translated the great poet João Cabral de Melo Neto; the poem ‘The Wind in the Canefield’ is a description of a landscape, and it’s almost unbearably moving to me, although I’m not sure why. 

Do you have a favourite International Booker Prize-winning or shortlisted novel and, if so, why?

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a book I’ve taught in my literature class at Montclair State University. As in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, a child appears in this story, a boy who doesn’t seem quite right, a boy who frightens us. I love the way the book operates as a horror story; later we come to understand that the true horror of the story is something else entirely.

What role do you think translated fiction plays in promoting a more inclusive and diverse literary canon, and how can we encourage more people to read it?

My university students here in the U.S. often admit that they have never read, for example, a novel from Latin America, or any novel in translation, really. To promote fiction in translation (especially in our school systems) is urgently necessary – not only because this literature might offer a powerful aesthetic experience, but because it complicates the facile dichotomy of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ One of the reasons why I teach a book like Signs Preceding the End of the World (written by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman) is precisely because this novel undermines the suffocating narrative of certain media outlets that immigrants (especially immigrants from Latin America) are ‘problems.’ Herrera’s novel introduces us to a young woman who crosses the border, and it gives us a chance to recognize how brave that woman is.