by Leanne Ogasawara

Idray Novey Ways to Disappear
Jennifer Croft The Extinction of Irena Rey
Haruki Murakami on The Great Gatsby

1.

A translator living in Pennsylvania is worried, because her favorite client is missing. And it’s not just any client but the Brazilian cult novelist Beatriz Yagoda whose work the translator has labored on for years. For peanuts too.

And when I say peanuts I mean that the author and the translator each get about $500 per book! As a translator with a manuscript of poetry translations of my own ready-to-go, I know that if I ever do try to shop it around, I’d be lucky to get even that much. Translation does not pay. And neither does poetry… I am on a ten-week fellowship with ten other artists, and one of the more successful writers here, a poet with a fabulous publisher, said she is turning to novels since she learned first-hand how little poetry pays, and I wondered does fiction really pay then? But I digress.

So our American translator immediately books a ticket to Rio. I mean, what’s she supposed to do? She feels without a shadow of a doubt that being the author’s translator, only she “truly understands” the author and is therefore the best person for locating her.

The author’s daughter thinks this is ridiculous. She herself had never read her mother’s books. But who but a daughter knows the mother best?

She had no patience for the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels. What about knowing what a writer had never written down—wasn’t that the real knowledge of who she was?

Ways to Disappear is such a fantastic novel. The author Idra Novey is herself an award-winning translator. Most notably of Clarice Lispector, whose life has some resonance with the translator protagonist in Novey’s story. Both being physically beautiful and having been born outside of Brazil. I didn’t know this about Lispector that she was born in Ukraine but at an early age the family emigrated to Brazil to escape pogroms. Read more »