Bruna Dantas Lobato is the author of BLUE LIGHT HOURS (Grove Atlantic, 2024). Essay Editor Steffan Triplett conducted the Q&A.

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Steffan Triplett: I wanted to give you a belated congratulations on the National Book Award win. I read that this is the first time that a translation in Brazilian Portuguese has received an award like this. It was exciting to see you win, and I found the speeches that both you and Stênio Gardel gave to be really moving. I’m particularly happy to catch you in this moment just before you have multiple full-length projects to your name—coming off The Words That Remain translation winning the National Book Award and ahead of [Blue Light Hours] in the fall. I’m interested in what might feel distinctive about these two periods and perhaps what feels the same or different, if anything?

Bruna Dantas Lobato: I guess the main difference is that before I was working and no one was paying attention. I was working in complete privacy. It was really lovely and also horrible; like very scary to be writing and translating and feel like no one cares. I was pushing all this Brazilian literature, trying to bring it into English and sometimes hearing a lot of Nos or getting the message that the audience, “the readers,” wouldn’t be interested in the books that I loved. And then writing my own thing at the same time, completely different writing, in English. At the same time I think I had this feeling that no one really wanted to hear about Brazilian stories. Now, after the National Book Award, I think I was proven right and they were proven wrong, which is always a nice thing.  

I feel more secure in my position in the world. I can have a much more stable life, not so precarious. Before, I was a full-time translator making little to no money just out of dedication to these books. Now, I get to have a nicer job, get higher rates for my work.  That’s the main part of recognition like this—now I can get properly compensated. My work is taken seriously and I don’t take that for granted. Having security as an artist is the luckiest thing that can happen to someone like me. 

 

ST: Can you talk about what drew you to translating The Words That Remain in particular, and what was maybe the trickiest or stickiest part of that translation process for you? 

BDL: I was first drawn to the language. I thought the voice was beautiful, and the lyricism. Also the sense of orality was really impressive. There’s this momentum to the book that feels like it’s really spoken. It uses such lyrical, literary language all the time without it feeling overly written. I thought that was impressive, and I loved it right away. I was immediately in tears. I loved the book. 

I’ll backtrack a little bit. All the books I choose tend to have an interest in style and an interest in language. That is what I enjoy doing, what I think I do best. No one wants me to do a brainy novel of ideas. I wouldn’t like it. No one would. But with this book I got to bring all this energy and excitement into the project because I wanted to play with the language. 

For years I’ve been looking for books from the part of Brazil where I’m from in the northeast, which is very different from the south and southeast, which tends to be whiter, wealthier, arguably more segregated for those reasons. Whereas where I’m from, we’re poor and more mixed. We speak a particular kind of Portuguese, so I have that accent and that dialect. It’s the Portuguese that I grew up speaking. The Portuguese I studied in school or that I saw on television is something that I aspire to sound like, but I’m nothing like that, and my family doesn’t talk like that. 

And I’ve been pushing some books from the northeast before. All publishers told me it was niche. And to their credit, it’s not just U.S. publishing’s fault. It’s a Brazilian publishing [fault] too. Books from the northeast are rarely published. And when they are, they’re packaged in a certain way, full of prejudice already and full of cosmopolitan condescension around our kind of regional art. Then this [book] came around, and I got messages from lots of random people who know how much I care about speaking that kind of Portuguese. They’re like, There’s a beautiful book and it sounds like you. It talks like you, and I got really excited. 

It all fell into place. It was kind of random. I got an e-mail from the editor of New Vessel Press. There was a lot of synchronicity; things just kind of happened. Suddenly, I signed the contract. Though I had read the book and I loved the book, I didn’t actually bring it to the publisher. The publisher ended up bringing it to me even though I was aware. I wanted the book, but I thought maybe somebody else was already kind of lined up to do it. I knew it had been acquired by a U.S. publisher. That kind of thing. 

There’s lots to love in Stênio’s writing. I love the tenderness. I write tenderness a lot in my own work. I am an earnest kind of writer. I write out of sincerity and emotion. I don’t have one sarcastic bone in my body. I’m not blasé at all. I’m incredibly uncool [Bruna giggles], and it was perfect for me. I was just crying and trying to figure out how to write all this pain. 

The difficult part—there were many. It was difficult for me to keep that cascading momentum of the book, to keep it casual at the same time. It was very precise. The language had very precise metaphors, very precise imagery. But they had to be delivered quite casually without those images standing out too much. There are a few scenes that take place in a river or around a river, and I think a lot of the book is structured around those scenes, both in terms of their placement but also of the book’s style. It is like the flow of a river, the way that the story is told. 

There’s one scene in particular that was a scene of violence. And it was a scene of the river that I kept having to redo. Translation, much like writing, is a relational art. So, when I get to this climax and I hit that emotional note, now this scene falls flat. As I made progress on the book, I had to keep going back and redoing that one scene. So much hinges upon this one scene, and I am constantly rethinking it or having another insight about it as I get to know the characters. I have another reason for doing this thing or that thing or making this choice on the page. I did a lot of those multiple times and I think mostly it had to do with landing the emotion right. It was the greatest pleasure, though, of the book as well. I cared a lot about doing that part well, but it was the most difficult challenge. It’s difficult to carry emotions around queer stories as well in the same way. They don’t always travel well because queer identity—much like racial identity, other kinds of identity—changes from place to place. And I didn’t want to impose a U.S. framework onto the book. I had to let the characters live, and stand [on] their own terms, and not have to explain who they are, and at the same time convey who they are so that the emotions of each character would work just right. 

 

ST: I love that so much, and I think you’re already speaking to this. In addition to this idea of orality and the voice of the book already sounding like you, I’m thinking a lot about what you just described in terms of sentiment and emotion and this idea of translating moments that you feel are ineffable or difficult to articulate—specifically in a text about longing across time, about the legibility and readability of feelings. Is that a more difficult type of translation, or do you find yourself more comfortable there? 

BDL: I find myself more comfortable there. I’ve thought a lot about this question because I don’t think I’m as strong a thinker as I am a feeler. 

As a writer, I feel my way around texts a lot, and I care a lot about affect—how is this felt in my body? Though I’ve never acted in my life, and probably no one wants me to act, I’ve often felt [so] like an actor in that I internalize it—how would it feel for me, for my body? I don’t have to explain it or articulate it sometimes. I have to express it. I do a lot of that with my own writing, though in my own novel, I did try to push myself to be a thinker precisely because that’s not my forte, that I’m like OK, I want to do it. I want to know. Learn. But then I still couldn’t help it. I would do a combination of feeling a lot and then using the feels as a way to access the thinking or the logic or the theorizing in a way to make sense of the emotions that way. So in my book, or in other books I’ve translated, as I talk about class or I talk about queerness, I use in many ways my own experiences in my own body, all feeling out of place for maybe sometimes different reasons. 

Sometimes I use being a foreigner in the United States as an entry point into someone’s queerness, because I am not queer and I am just trying out what it feels like to be a kid in this playground, feeling left out or feeling alone at a party. I have to use this empathy lens instead of a more intellectual exercise, and it works for me. It’s the only way I know how to approach the text. And sometimes it gets me there—it gets me to the intellectual—but I don’t start in the intellectual. It’s not harder for me in that sense. I feel like it’s a natural fit. I am just feeling for the characters and hope I understand. 

I think sometimes the readability of things with the feeling can be difficult to convey because the environments might be really different, and people might not be familiar with the setting or surrounding context. I know what it feels like to be in this particular room. So, I can imagine it. But if there is maybe an empathy barrier for the reader that they can’t imagine that room, they can’t imagine that life, then in many ways the book doesn’t work. I have to do maybe a little bit of bridging there on occasion. 

 

ST: That makes sense to me, and it makes me think of a line in the novel, in The Words That Remain, that comes near the end. The sentence is, “I could feel the ridges from Cícero’s handwriting on the back of the letter, the way I’d felt, the veins on his arm.” And I really loved that sentence. I mean one, it’s a beautiful sentence. But two, I think so much is articulated in this single sentence. It has me thinking about translation and reading as making something real and tangible. There’s an actual embodiment happening. Everything that you just said sort of made me think about that. 

BDL: I do try to embody it, and I’m often gesticulating at my desk. As she tucked her hair behind her ear, how is that motion? Then I can explain the motion. I’m constantly doing this, trying out the sounds of things. And I’m teaching a class now on reading and writing the body, and my course description for that is also what I tell my students: the best writing is said to be visceral, fleshed out, sensual. Sometimes we don’t want it because it sucks and it’s painful, but you have to live it and feel it in the body and then express it. I’m glad you caught that because I do notice texture [and] warmth a lot. To me, I think that particular scene, there’s so much intimacy in it. If it was not deeply felt, it doesn’t do the scene justice. 

 

ST: And that sounds like a great class that would be really successful! I would love to take that. Switching gears a little, can you tell the reader a bit about Blue Light Hours and what the novel is about and how it came to be? 

BDL: It’s about a young woman living in America: her first year at a liberal arts college and the relationship she develops with her mother, who’s back in Brazil, over video calls. 

I feel like long before everyone was celebrating the holidays over Zoom, there were people like me already doing it. And we’ve been doing it forever. I know before my time it was even harder; people were sending letters back and forth or tape recordings. And I’ve always felt that there was no immigrant novel that gestured toward home in any significant way. It’s always about making a life in this new place. I wanted a novel that dealt with that tension of I want my life here, but there’s something I can’t let go of, and this holding on to it as hard as you can was really important to me. Connection issues are explored in the book. There’s a storm, or a power outage, or the call is glitchy, and it’s just so fragile, so tenuous. Suddenly, you lost your mother. Or what the camera doesn’t show—what’s outside the frame of the webcam, what about that? Finding a way to live that way but also understand its limitations is a lifelong project of mine. It’s also what I explore in the book. The Blue Light Hours, the title, comes from the light of their screens. It’s always glowing on their faces. 

 

ST: I love that. What is something that you want all your work to do or be speaking toward, and that you want readers to notice or take away from it? So not just what you want it to be doing, but what you hope people notice it’s doing? (Whether that’s the work you’re translating or the work that you’re conjuring on your own.)

BDL: I’ve often wondered about that. Is there a “Bruna-body-of-work” that goes across genre, but they all [still] come together.

I think yes there is, and there are overarching themes. One for me is—it’s how I select the books I do select to translate—that I want to show that there’s no one way of being Brazilian. That there is no [we]. I honestly don’t believe in unifying national labels anyway. 

I think they’re not always useful, and there’s alterity, right? Everyone is so different. It’s so complicated. I want to show these many different ways of being Brazilian; of reacting to life in this particular place; of dealing with the hand you’ve been dealt. I just finished translating a sex worker’s memoir, and I’ve also done a book about a nanny—someone who does a lot of childcare and who is not white. I’ve done books about police brutality and the range of experiences for me is really important. And considering what was already available from Brazil in English, I’m kind of filling in a lot of gaps that would, I guess, fit into “diverse categories.” 

But it’s just out of a desire to add to what’s already available. There are stories from Brazil that have already been told a million times. I don’t need to tell them. These are the ones that haven’t been told and that really need my attention. I care about telling queer stories from Brazil [for] many reasons. I think it’s because the West has a way of looking down on women, on people of color in general, on your people from other places as not being as evolved or as liberated. I’m excited to talk about the fact that there is so much going on, maybe people don’t know here, and their solidarity in that. See what your siblings, your peers are doing on the other side of the world, which is how I ended up working on a book about the AIDS crisis. I’m like, look, whatever was happening in New York—all the artists dying—it was also happening in Sao Paulo. Trying to draw these parallels is important to me. 

The other one is that I want people to feel with me too. I think I am drawn to tenderness and softness and slow, quiet moments of love all the time. I live for a line like the one you read where you feel the vein on somebody’s hand. I live for that. And every time I hear a line like that, I just wanna cry. It might be because I live really far from my family. I feel like I’m constantly on the road all by my lonesome in the world. But to me, stories of community, of families, of lovers and the intimacy that comes with that, especially in the digital age, want everyone to invite into their lives. 

Yeah. So a little bit of softness, I guess. 

 

ST: Well, it’s all about connection, right? I think that is helping me understand ways that all the translation work that you do and have done is going to embed itself in the thematics of all the other work that you do, right? This idea of not just connection and not just articulation either but sharing space with other people and other voices. And it’s really grand and moving and exciting. 

BDL: Thank you. I mean, it’s one of those things, right? Because if I want to share a range of reasoning voices and the capaciousness of the experience, it means I’ll never be done telling stories because there’s so many. It’s an interesting lifelong commitment. People have asked me Now that you’re gonna have a novel out, are you going to stop translating? I honestly was so offended by that. How dare you think that I was translating just as a stepping stone for doing my own work. I do this because I care. I could just as easily have kept writing my own thing. But I’m deeply devoted to the Portuguese language, to Brazil, to Latin American literature, it’s not just a little phase. 

 

ST: Thinking about process and the writer’s life, you and I were both Outpost fellows, which allowed us time in residency to stay in a tiny home. And Ricardo [Wilson] told me that we stayed in the same tiny home, which is kind of funny, but I’m curious what that experience brought out for you.

What all do you hold together when you’re deep in writing and thinking? I don’t know at what point in your various projects you were there. But, what did that process bring out with you? Also, what do you take inspiration from in general? 

BDL: Yeah, I loved that place. Being in that place. Outpost is a phenomenal community. And I guess it’s worth highlighting that it’s a residency for writers of color only. I have a lot of love for that. And of course, I came of age in Vermont. I went to college in Vermont. My novel is set in Vermont, like 10 minutes from the Outpost residency. So, it was very strange to be back here. I had just sold the book a couple of months ago, I was having a lot of discussions and meetings about the title. It felt like I was stepping back into the setting of the book and reassessing my own life and my own journey because it was this big, full circle moment that I was back exactly to the place where I started. Where I was an immigrant for the first time. 

On top of that and the residency, living in the tiny home, staring at the mountains every day… There was no internet in the tiny homes. No electricity. We use those battery-powered lights. It gave me such a phenomenal, calming sense of solitude. I think I’ve been stressed, anxious out there, and everyone is—modern life, right—in the world and trying to meet deadlines and writing emails. And when I was in there, there was just this total silence. I’m fully offline. Smells like wood all the time and I’m just in there, staring at this pond in these gorgeous mountains. I saw a bear once. I loved it. I got a huge kick out of it. There was a beaver that sometimes would show up under my tiny home. I think I really needed to—especially moments of excitement, not just in hard moments—to take a breath, feel grounded, remember who you are. I think it’s hard for me. It might be hard for maybe all women, maybe for all people of color. And I’m at the intersection of that. It’s hard for me to give myself something really nice. At Outpost, they’re like, We’re going to have pancakes for breakfast and then a massage. A massage! 

I was emotional the whole time I was there. I felt taken care of. I felt like I’d done work that was worthwhile because I was doing it for me and for my people, and I felt like it was the right place and right time to land for a little bit and have someone just take care of me. Though the insane thing about translation and writing and embodying all these people [is] sometimes I’m in a lot of pain. I spent two years thinking about the AIDS crisis. I don’t like it. You know what I mean? There are a lot of tears. And it was wonderful to come out of all of that and just not be in a fictional world for once. Be in this world. I’m like, Oh, I remember. I like it here. I had forgotten. That’s what that meant to me. I left Outpost excited and energized to write and translate more. 

 

ST: I really feel that. I had never done anything like it before. I have learned, perhaps negatively, to associate solitude with more negative feelings. I spent three years of the MFA only working in memoir and thinking about the interior. I think I lost portions of that that once gave me joy. The change of scenery and this feeling of being taken care of eliminated all the negative aspects. I didn’t have the geographical first full circle experience that you had, but it did allow me to step back with all that I have written in the past eight years. And I wanted to walk away from that experience with new pieces but also something a bit more tangible or an object. I thought, I’m going to put together this chapbook of pieces that I have written in the past. But I also wanted to write something completely from scratch when I was there. 

The final piece in my chapbook I made through a series of journal entries that I wrote when I was there. There’s something special about being in that tiny home and at the whims of the weather. I remember one day there was a thunderstorm. And being inside of the tiny home and watching the storm slowly come in, pass over, hearing it, feeling it, and then watching it leave was this truly wild, amazing experience. 

BDL: I loved when there was a storm and leaving my window open. Living in a city, I don’t have the experience of letting the outside come in like that. It really gives you perspective as well. When I’m all by myself in front of a computer, I take myself so seriously. But here it’s just all part of one thing. I’m one tiny cog. 

I didn’t know that you had written a part of your chapbook there. That’s lovely. That’s really special. Yeah, this place is pretty magical. I’m in Vermont right now, and I’m staring at the exact same mountains. It’s special that you wrote so much there. I guess it goes back to connecting. 

To me, having community[is to] have a place where I’m seen and appreciated for who I am. It’s just very special, and us artists don’t have a lot of understanding in our day-to-day life. We’re trying to make a living. I hustle. [At Outpost], I didn’t have to do that. I could just sit. 

 

ST: I loved your speech that you gave at the National Book Awards, and I love your adamancy of proving people wrong. The boldness—the emotional boldness—of both what you and Stênio talked about in your speeches. I was hoping you could speak a little bit more about #NameTheTranslator for those of our readers who might not know about it. 

BDL: The Name The Translator campaign that some translators have started—Jenny Croft was championing that as well, who’s also a writer—but long before that campaign existed with the hashtag, tons of translators were already talking about this and we’ve been advocating for it, asking for editorship in our contract because translation is an interpretive art. And I am channeling in my own words what I am feeling, and what I’m hearing, and how I’ve developed a relationship with this text. So, I read Stênio’s book as very style-oriented, and I was paying attention to the lyrical. Maybe someone else will be paying attention to the humor, and that wasn’t anything that I paid particular attention to, or that my sensibilities are honed for, so understanding that translation is an authority. Well, as authorial work, much like any other kind of writing, it feels really important to me. It’s also disingenuous to sell a book to the writer like it’s the authoritative only version of this book when it isn’t, when it is as written by this person (as told to this person).

It’s a way for me, advocating for my name on the cover is a way for me to have my work be recognized, get my dues, get what I earned for all the work I put into the book. I deserve the credit, and all translators deserve that credit. And it’s easy enough to erase a name like mine, which sounds foreign. Then the reader isn’t scared that somebody wrote this. And are they like me? Do they speak English? They don’t want to handle that. I have all kinds of political reasons to do it and reasons related to equal pay and translator visibility. But then on the other side of it, from a reader’s perspective, I also think it’s important for the books not to be sanitized out of what makes them different and what makes them from where they are. And when publishers say All translations don’t sell as much. If we don’t say it’s a translation, it’s going to sell. I don’t wanna sell the book on those terms. I don’t want to sell the book only if people buy it because they think it’s not Brazilian. That’s not my reader. Along those lines, if I translate because I want to reach and connect with a certain kind of people, those are not the people I’m connecting with and it’s plain and simple.

I said it.

ST: I’m really excited for Blue Light Hours to come out. I’m excited to keep engaging with all the lovely work you do.

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