Eric M B Becker National Endowment for the Arts
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'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 annual consequence bringing together celebrated writers from Portugal, Brazil, and the United states in conversations about their work.
In many means, 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 hostage in 2013. Lygia Fagundes Telles was one of the very first writers who I read. (If retention serves, a drove of her stories was the 2nd book I e'er received in Portuguese, back during my first visit to Brazil in 2005.) Lygia—as she's known in Brazil—is Brazil's greatest living writer, a principal of the short story oft mentioned in the same breath as Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, and Hilda Hilst, and she counts amongst her legion of devotees the tardily Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago and the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
Lygia'south work plumbs the tension between real memory and imagination to render cogent, biting critiques of power and of the savage social relations of everyday life. Her telescopic ranges from tales nearly real people grappling with sexual liberation and social upheaval to satirical allegories and romances—in other words, the very stuff of life, and very nearly all of it, from every angle. Her precise language and the way she elicits the myriad paradoxes independent in a single moment are what drew me to her work, and these are just some of the qualities that brand her literature timeless. Because 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 it e'er feels equally if I'g only offset over again), this fellowship provides me with the resources to dedicate myself to a project that I've been developing throughout the years while coming together more pressing deadlines. Thanks to the support of the NEA, Lygia Fagundes Telles will now find the English-language audience she deserves.
from "Information technology's Chilly in Here, Don't You Think?" by Lygia Fagundes Telles
[Translated from the Portuguese]
Yet how I ignored the nigh important thing, she thought, and let her hand driblet back downward over the bed sail. Total oblivion, at least until the moment he answered the door and said, Kori, so skillful to see you. Followed by an embrace with null good about it, he could have at least pretended. Merely he didn't. Come up on in, sweetheart. If only she'd invented some pretext as presently as she'd felt something in the air sending her signals, warnings fifty-fifty. Say that Otávio showed upwardly all of the sudden, the force of the unexpected, and for that reason you can't stay. Or say that your son is burning up with fever, or that there was a gas leak, that's serious, a gas leak! The cook inhaled too much gas and now she's in the hospital, quick, say whatever but get out of there! She took off her jacket and stayed. Stayed, every bit if she needed to exist sure, as though she had to watch Armando make the gesture he did now, picking upward the anthology, a motion simply similar Male parent Severino raising the sacred host. In such ecstasy, revelation. And then this is how it is, she repeated to herself as Armando thumbed through the pile of albums request what she'd like to hear now, how about an opera? She barely recognized her ain voice as 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, right on pitch, said, There you go, sweetheart, Maria Callas, kissing her gently on the neck and ears but avoiding her mouth. She started to experience lightheaded, what am I doing here? Likewise late to run out of the room, Something came upward! She felt as though she were on phase when he began caressing her on the burrow without the least fleck of passion, but could there really be any passion? The pillows he'd arranged advisedly to make her more comfortable, the half-lite softening the embarrassment of the situation. What a pathetic, pathetic, pathetic part to play. She asked for more whiskey. Witting of the ridiculous grinning etched across her face, however she attempted to help him every bit he tried to remove her bra, but, tripped upward by the clasp and his own impatience, irritation fifty-fifty, he exclaimed, "Jesus, Kori, what's wrong with this hook!" She made a signal of holding the straps in her fingertips for a few extra moments, delaying before 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 well-nigh without touching them. He seemed more interested in staring at her breasts than kissing them. She thought about the motion picture she'd seen the night before, Indiana Jones, then many snares to avoid. She'd fallen into a still bigger snare, a well-set trap to satisfy the curiosity of her lover—her lover?—who wanted merely to see every terminal freckle and bony limb. She recoiled. Hold on, sweetie, my earring vicious, concur on! she managed and bent over to look for the earring between the throw pillows.
(© Lygia Fagundes Telles. Translation © Eric K. B. Becker)
Original in Portuguese
About Lygia Fagundes Telles
Lygia Fagundes Telles is a giant of 20th- and 21st-century Brazilian literature and widely considered Brazil'southward greatest living author. In the words of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, neck-and neck with Fernando Pessoa for the stardom of greatest Portuguese-language poet of the 20th century, Lygia's stories "capture the underground truth to people, that hidden behind social norms." The lack of an English translation of Lygia'southward short stories not only deprives Anglophone readers of a key voice on par with Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, and João Guimarães Rosa but of one of the most of import women writers of the 20th century in any tradition.
Source: https://www.arts.gov/impact/literary-arts/translation-fellows/eric-m-b-becker