Category Brazil

Quitanda

Late in May, Chris Bertram posted this photograph on Crooked Timber under the title Brazil, shop at night. The shop is in Pirenópolis, a city in the state of Goiás. The sign in the center of the photograph reads: “Temos…

Fera d’alma

Almost six years ago, I wrote about Herztier — the title of Herta Müller’s famous novel — morphing into The Land of Green Plums in English. While some Romance language translators strove to stick to the meaning the author had…

Bikes and scooters in São Paulo and Moscow

To add some color to my previous post, it looks like office dwellers on Avenue Faria Lima move around on kick scooters and bikes: To avoid the jams, office workers venture out on rented bikes and scooters. Making up around…

Faria Limers and their musos

Another tweet related to Brazil and Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Faria Limers Bolsonaristas vão ficar bravos com você Taleb. It took me a few minutes to figure out those Limers: Bolsonarists from Faria Lima Avenue are going to get mad at…

A pelegada bolsonarista

From N. N. Taleb’s Twitter feed, a retweet: Imagina quando o Taleb descobrir que a pelegada bolsonarista que prega o não uso da máscara se diz antifrágil? Which, I think, translates approximately into this: Imagine when Taleb discovers that the…

Sooner than you think

Brazil lived under a military dictatorship for more than twenty years: some say from 1964 to 1985, others to 1988-89. For about five years after the coup of 1964, the generals retained some outward vestiges of democracy. In December 1968,…

Shipwrecked in his own bed

In 2013, Brazilian writer and translator Ronaldo Bressane reviewed a translation of Oblomov by Rubens Figueiredo. Caution: this book is extremely dangerous. A genuine affront to society. Reading it can poison you with a diabolical languor… a sweet apathy… a…

Bands in translation

Speaking of translations — after Sandie Shaw won the Eurovision contest in 1967 with Puppet on a String, she went on to record it in God knows how many languages. Actually, French, Italian, German and Spanish, if Wikipedia is to…

La vie martienne

Everyone knows that, in 1968, David Bowie – or rather David Jones as he was known then – wrote English lyrics to the French melody that would later become a global hit with Paul Anka’s English text. My Way. Anthony…

“Assonance is innate”

A riposte to Mandelshtam from the early 1970s: Like other Latin languages, Portuguese has a high number of perfect rhymes and frequent, inescapable assonances. The ease of rhyming in these languages has been envied, sometimes eyed with suspicion, by poets…

Roland Dyens on Brazilian music

Roland Dyens (1955-2016) was a “great and incomparable French guitarist, composer, and arranger,” one of the most important guitarists around the world, due to his interpretations, his compositions, and especially his vision of the instrument and of music overall. He…

Mangueira 2020

The Guardian reports from Rio de Janeiro and Maranhão: From raperos to roqueiros, a growing chorus of musicians are denouncing the extremist politician [Bolsonaro] and his assault on their trade. Roqueiros broadly means rock musicians. Raperos refers to rappers, obviously,…