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Tag: Angola

  • Why We Choose not to See the Old

    Why We Choose not to See the Old

    Dulce Maria Cardoso on ageing. Translated by Ángel Gurría-Quintana.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    6 April

    I moved into my mother’s house three days ago. I’m afraid of the virus, she said in despair over the phone. She added, It’s not only the virus, I don’t feel well, I don’t want to live alone any more, your father died so long ago, I’m tired. I packed a small suitcase with clothes, put my laptop in my rucksack, locked the doors of my home, and went back to the place I left almost thirty years ago.

    The only thing I remember my mother ever asking of me and my sister was that we did not put her in a care home – I wouldn’t want my life to end in one of those places, she said. Other than that, she gave us everything she could and asked for nothing in return.

    At the age of 80, my mother’s heart – twice-operated already – seems to be failing again. I keep telling her to eat; Food gets stuck in my throat, she replies. She has lost a lot of weight recently. She weighs 45kg – She is depressed, many old people have the same complaints, the psychiatrist explained to my sister. In the division of labour regarding my mother’s care, my sister is in charge of doctors’ appointments. Until February this year, my mother attended fitness sessions twice a week at the day centre, looked after the house and the garden, travelled by public transport from Cascais to Benfica to look after her great grandchildren, Tomás and Vicente. Despite the loss of appetite, the tiredness, the sadness, the indifference towards life in general, I don’t believe my mother is depressed.

    7 April

    This morning, I called Luís to confess that I am afraid. Of not being able to look after the person who always looked after me, of the work that lies ahead and that I cannot yet fathom, of not feeling I belong in this house, of having to stop doing what I want, of discovering that I am too selfish, of being a bad daughter. You mustn’t think like that, he said, but you do have a Herculean task ahead and you need to find someone to help you do it. Over the past three years, a large part of Luís’ worries have focused on ensuring his mother’s wellbeing. Almost all my friends who still have parents and are roughly the same age as I am face the same problem – what to do when the ones we love are unable to look after themselves?

    Good Friday. It was never Easter without my mother’s home-baked folares. At her request, I ordered some yeast from the baker and bought eggs and dry-cured sausages. We were both in the kitchen, my mother was kneading the dough in the huge blue-glazed bowl, everything seemed to be as it had always been. I suddenly noticed the sugar mixed into the savoury dough with the cured meats, the eggs forgotten in some container, the liquor spilt over the kitchen workbench. In an unfamiliar voice, eyes suddenly extinguished, my mother said, I don’t know what I’m doing, help me. She sat on a dining room chair with flour-covered hands, an old doll tossed into the corner. And I stood there unable to help, fixed in place by the certainty that something inside her head had broken down.

    I cannot sleep at night, and in my mind I write, I am losing my mother, pages and pages where there is space for nothing more.

    10 April

    Pope Francis prayed alone in front of the vast emptiness of Saint Peter’s Square. It’s like the end of the world, my mother said as she watched him on television, May God have mercy on our souls.

    She is right: it feels like the world has been turned off. I record the passing days as if they were not passing. To avoid forgetting them? To exhaust them? We all record them, humanity once again in its adolescence, writing diaries, no longer child-like enough to ignore the fact that days are passing us by, not yet grown up enough to acknowledge that days mostly repeat themselves.

    17 April

    I need you to learn these three words by heart, madam, and repeat them when I ask you to, says the neurologist. My mother fails the test. She does not fail completely, but she fails enough. At the end of the appointment, the doctor says to my sister, Your mother has Alzheimer’s. I read so much about the disease to create the character of Eliete’s grandmother and I never imagined I would go through this myself. Irony does not sit well with me.

    22 April

    Yesterday my mother asked me to turn off the television when the number of Covid deaths was being announced on the news, All the old people are going to die, they put us into homes to kills us, she said to herself.

    At night I dreamt of Jean-Louis Trintignant choking Emmanuelle Riva in the film Amour, and all day today I felt queasy.

    Besides writing these scattered and clumsy notes, I have made sound- and video-recordings of my mother telling the stories she always told, the trip to Brazil aged eleven, her escape from my grandparents’ house with my father, the journey to Luanda, the struggles and the happiness of rural life. After lunch, I asked her to tell me some of the proverbs she knew. She refused. When I insisted, she laughed mischievously, Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.

    We picked loquats in the garden. I held the ladder while Pedro climbed it. My mother arranged fig leaves in a wicker tray on which I placed the loquats. Thank you, darling, my mother said unexpectedly.

    28 April

    It is my mother’s birthday. I never thought I’d make it to this age, she said, my parents died in their sixties, old people were younger in the past, even if they seemed older. Because of the pandemic we set up a table in the garden, beneath the fig tree, and kept our distance from one another. It was a perfect spring day. Tomas and Vicente ran around on the lawn before we sang happy birthday for my mother. Judas hanged himself from a fig tree after betraying Christ, my mother remembered, since then the shade of a fig tree has been the shadow of death. And she added quietly, I don’t want to die.

    When everyone left, I looked over the photographs I had taken on my phone. It looked like a birthday lunch from earlier years. Images lie. Or is it our bodies that do? They repeat the same grammar of gestures, indifferent to what happens, and I am as equally surprised by how bodies appear to deteriorate so visibly when nothing has changed inside as I am by their determination to remain the same even when they are now other. Even so, of all the differences I tried to spot, the ones inflicted on us by the pandemic were the least conspicuous. We carry out the tasks that were once my mother’s, we do it with some difficulties, some arguments, some scolding. We carry them out poorly. My mother’s sickness is making our idea of the family sick.

    1 May

    My mother asked me to let her spend more time in the bathroom and started singing a song from her youth; We used to sing this at the grape harvests, she explained. I had never seen her take her time in the bathroom. Much less sing. She does not realise today is a holiday. Days are hardly distinguishable to her.

    Over 1,000 dead from Covid in Portugal. The Directorate-General of Health announced that close to 90% are elderly. I don’t like the word elderly. It sounds like a euphemism for old and there is nothing wrong with being old.

    27 May

    My mother’s new neurologist believes my mother does not have Alzheimer’s – It’s a type of dementia, but it isn’t Alzheimer’s. He cannot find a reason for my mother losing so much weight. He proposes that we seek advice from a cardiologist and an internist. In any case, she says, your mother has a very serious illness; to be 81 is a serious illness in itself.

    I ask myself why we are so much better at looking after bodies than we are at looking after minds. Minds and happiness. We cannot easily treat what we cannot see. Or what we choose not to see. The old were shoved off the stages on which modern life happens. Like the stray cats we no longer see on the streets because they are discreetly and secretly sick in some back alley. Nobody wants to know about them.

    We only manage to get appointments with private consultants.

    8 June

    Bárbara calls to ask if I know when the new novel will be finished, I have no idea when I’ll be able to get back to it, I reply, I don’t have the time or the energy to dive into such a big project. Barbara, who is also caring for her grandmother, understands. To the inglorious domestic tasks that always took up so much of my time I now add my mother’s, looking after her nutrition, paying attention to signs of her illness, registering the changes in her memory, the walks around the neighbourhood, the gameshows we watch together, and so on. It is as if I am collecting many jobs. And I feel I cannot do any one of them properly.

    20 June

    When I entered the living room, my mother, seated on the sofa, was gazing attentively at the television, Are you watching the adverts, mother? I asked. Yes, she replied calmly. Rather than on the television screen, her gaze seemed to be fixed somewhere beyond, on an undefined point that her thoughts flowed towards. There were ads for a mobile phone network, a face cream, an electric goods store, a summer festival, a bank, a detergent, a travel agency. It was only when the reality show theme-tune started that I heard her mutter, I’m only good for dying.

    Tomorrow is the beginning of summer.

    14 July

    In light of my mother’s overall weakness, the National Health Service Contact Centre referred her to the emergency services at the Cascais hospital. Even so, when we arrived the staff asked, discomfited, why we were bringing her in. They told us we should not have done it. After many hours, and various tests, they sent her home. Apparently there is nothing seriously wrong with her. But she is withering. Can the confused mind of someone who is so keen to live make her body so fragile?

    17 August

    My mother is quieter and less mobile every day. Lately, when I wake up, I go to her bed and lie down by her side until she calls for me. Today she embraced me, So lovely and warm, she said, it’s so sad to always sleep alone.

    The ECG she had in a private hospital showed a clot on the surface of her prosthetic heart valve.

    27 August

    After we got the results from the raft of exams prescribed by the internist and cardiologist, they both advised that my mother would need a treatment that required her to be admitted to hospital. It was a long and expensive treatment, many thousands of euros, in the private clinic. We curse the health system, the pandemic, the unfairness of bodies. Exhausted, I ask my sister to take mother once again to the emergency services in Cascais. I wait for them at home. My sister calls shortly after. This time she was hospitalised, they will finally be treating her, she says, triumphant.

    30 August

    We cannot visit my mother because of Covid-19. We buy a tablet that we leave at the hospital so that we can speak to her and so that she can see us. Except that to make it work she needs the help of a nurse or a nursing assistant. We are allowed one video-call per day.

    My mother’s house without my mother is violently sad. Everything in here hurts, her place at the table, the trees she planted, her immaculately made bed. But at least I have her one hour a day on my computer screen. Safe in our distance, I slowly caress her face, without the embarrassment that physical presence inflicts. She doesn’t feel anything. Words are more difficult. I don’t know what to say to her. Or how to say it.

    28 September

    My mother has been in hospital for a month. In layman’s language, she has a malignancy in her blood and an infection in her heart. Myeloma and endocarditis, in clinical language. In both languages she is seriously ill.

    7 October

    Suddenly, I realise how alone I am. Not because my mother is still in hospital, with death lurking, while Pedro has cycled out to Guincho beach. I understand, without properly understanding, that the neglect of our old is the mirror that disfigures the loneliness to which we are fated. Long before the virus, we were already confined: by our social class, our jobs, by the things we like, by the things in which we believe, by the things we buy. Everything serves to divide, to compartmentalise, to disengage. If we could only find ways to reengage, we would not age like that.

    29 October

    My mother is home again. She spent almost two months in hospital but managed to recover from her endocarditis. It is rare to see a patient with such a will to live, the doctor said. She came back high-spirited, chatty, wanting to do this and that. Once again she was our tireless mother. Until this morning she looked out at the garden and said, You see, darling, I had been so lost in the world for so long and then I ended up moving into the first house that I lived in with your father. When I managed to situate her in time and space, as recommended by the psychiatrist, her grey eyes welled up, Oh, darling, pay no attention, my mind is not good for much.

    13 November

    One of the carers who responded to my ad on OLX confessed, over the phone, that she does not much like the elderly. Until a few months ago she was employed in a hostel. We have to get work wherever we can, she said. The cancer charity Amor e Esperança told me how much it would cost to cover my mother’s basic needs, cleaning the room, bathing her, keeping her company, physiotherapy as optional: 1,800 euros per month including the relevant discounts. They were kind enough to let me know that, as I am an informal carer, I am entitled to a monthly 150-euro allowance.

    30 November

    One of Vicente’s classmates tested positive. All his classmates and their families have had to go into quarantine. As people said during the first wave, everything will be alright. In two weeks’ time the nursery children will all be back as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, old people are still dying in care homes. All children are alike, the old are all old in their own way.

    12 December

    My father died 19 years ago. My mother did not remember the date. Ordering a mass on the anniversary of my father’s death was one of her most cherished tasks. I play down the forgetfulness and try to dispel the question that burns in me like a red hot iron, What if she forgets about us?

    17 December

    It is Pedro’s birthday and his parents come to have lunch with us. They are almost as old as my mother, but they can still look after themselves. I got my mother ready for the lunch, bathed her, dabbed her with perfume, fixed her hair, chose a nice dress, dressed her, and kissed her face, We’re ready.

    18 December

    In the living room, I am once again reviewing these notes. My mother is watching a daytime television show. She interrupts me frequently, forgetting I am working. I’ve been worrying about something, darling, she says, who is going to look after you when you get old? My mother has not given up on looking after me. But she lets me look after her. We are both happy like this.

    By arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin, Inh. Nicole Witt, Frankfurt am Main.

    Dulce Maria Cardoso, born in Trás-os-Montes in 1964, is one of the most important literary voices in Portugal. She spent her childhood in Angola and returned to Portugal in 1975, shortly after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution and Angola’s independence. She studied law, worked as a lawyer and wrote scripts for the cinema. The author has received numerous prizes for her literary work, such as the European Union Prize for Literature 2009 for Os Meus Sentimentos and the Portuguese PEN Prize 2011 for O Chão dos Pardais. The Return was awarded the Special Prize of the Critics 2011 in Portugal, and was selected as Book of the Year 2011. It has also been voted as number 4 of the 10 favourite books 2014 of the French financial newspaper Les Échos. Her most recent novel, Eliete – The Normal Life, was named Book of the Year by various Portuguese newspapers and shortlisted for the 2020 Prix Femina. In 2012 she was made Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters.

    Ángel Gurría-Quintana is a historian, journalist and literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese. He writes regularly for the books pages of the Financial Times. His translations include Other Carnivals: Short Stories from Brazil (Full Circle Editions, 2013) and The Return, by Dulce Maria Cardoso (Maclehose Press, 2016). His translation of Os Meus Sentimentos will be published by Maclehose Press in June 2021 as Violeta among the Stars.

    Photo credit: Tiago Miranda

  • Connecting Worlds, Inventing Worlds

    Connecting Worlds, Inventing Worlds

    The second in our series with Granta on writers and their translators, José Eduardo Agualusa and Daniel Hahn share an embrace.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    I – LIGANDO MUNDOS, INVENTANDO MUNDOS

    José Eduardo Agualusa

    O narrador de um dos meus romances, “A Rainha Ginga”, é um tradutor – um padre brasileiro, com sangue indígena, africano e português, enviado para Angola, no final do século XVI, para trabalhar como intérprete para a Rainha Ginga, ou N’Zinga M’Bandi. 

    Levei a vida inteira para escrever este livro. Passei anos lendo  velhos textos sobre a história de Angola, conversando com especialistas, colecionando documentos que mencionassem aspetos menos conhecidos da extraordinária vida da grande rainha. Queria escrever partindo de um olhar africano, de alguém que se movesse na corte de N’Zinga, mas não sabia como fazer a ponte para o mundo que estava invadindo aquele, e, sobretudo, para o nosso tempo. Uma tarde, sem aviso, emergiu dentro de mim a figura do padre, o tradutor, Francisco José, e então comecei a escrever e só parei nove meses depois. Francisco José não é apenas um tradutor (um língua, como se dizia então) – ele é um mediador entre mundos. Cabe-lhe a ele o esforço de traduzir universos. 

    Eis, afinal, o difícil ofício de todos os tradutores. A parte mais fácil é a de encontrar na língua de chegada a palavra que melhor espelha a da língua de partida. Difícil mesmo é traduzir conceitos. Se um escritor enfrenta o desafio de ser outros, sempre que entra na sua ficção, ao tradutor cabe o desafio duplo de ser esses outros num idioma remoto, e conseguir que, ainda assim, todos os personagens soem coerentes e convincentes, como se aquela língua fosse a deles desde o leite materno. 

    Um escritor raramente escolhe os seus tradutores. Com sorte, é escolhido por eles. Se tiver mesmo muita sorte, encontra um companheiro para a vida, alguém capaz de partilhar com ele a  aventura de inventar e reinventar mundos. Eu tive essa sorte na língua inglesa. Fui o primeiro autor de ficção que o Daniel Hahn traduziu, e ele foi a primeira pessoa a ocupar-se da tradução de um romance meu. Assim, começámos juntos. Daniel é o meu língua no idioma inglês. Devo-lhe, em larga medida, o sucesso internacional dos nossos livros. 

    Um escritor que tenha a desventura de ver os seus livros recriados para um determinado idioma por múltiplos tradutores há-de parecer, nessa língua, um tanto incoerente e despersonalizado – por muito bons que sejam todos esses profissionais. Em contrapartida, um autor medíocre, beneficiando de um único tradutor extraordinário, pode até transformar-se, nessa segunda língua, num escritor sólido e interessante. Há casos assim, de tradutores que aperfeiçoam de tal forma as obras originais que o melhor a fazer em benefício destas seria retraduzi-las de volta. 

    A Rainha Ginga teve, na vida real, secretários e tradutores, portugueses e brasileiros, homens da igreja, como o meu personagem, que traduziam para português a correspondência que esta lhes ditava. Desta forma, o que hoje tomamos por falas da rainha, pela expressão direta do seu pensamento, é, na verdade, uma recriação dos seus tradutores. Assim acontece comigo. Também eu sou, enquanto romancista em língua inglesa, uma invenção de Daniel Hahn. Um abraço ao meu criador.

    ~

    II – CONNECTING WORLDS, INVENTING WORLDS

    José Eduardo Agualusa

    (Translated Created by Daniel Hahn)

    The narrator of one of my novels, Queen Ginga, is a translator – he’s a Brazilian priest, with indigenous, African and Portuguese blood, who is sent to Angola at the end of the sixteenth century to work as an interpreter for Queen Ginga, or N’Zinga M’Bandi.

    It took me my whole life to write that book. I spent years reading old texts about the history of Angola, talking to experts, collecting documents that mentioned lesser-known aspects of this great queen’s remarkable life. I wanted to write from an African gaze, a story as seen by someone who moves about in N’Zinga’s court, but who doesn’t know how to build the bridge connecting it to the world that’s invading his, and, especially, to our own time. One evening, without warning, a character appeared inside me, the figure of the priest, the translator, Francisco José, and then I started writing and only stopped nine months later. Francisco José isn’t only a translator (a língua as they used to say: a tongue) – he is a mediator between worlds. It is his role to strive to translate universes.

    That, ultimately, is the difficult task faced by all translators. The easiest part is finding the word in the target language that provides the best mirror-reflection of the one in the source language. What really is difficult is the translating of concepts. If a writer confronts the challenge of being other people each time he enters into his fiction, the translator is faced with the double challenge of being these others in a distant language, and yet still managing, somehow, to make every character coherent and convincing, as if this language had come to them with their mothers’ milk.

    A writer rarely gets to choose his translators. If he’s lucky, he is chosen by them. If he’s really very lucky indeed, he finds a friend for life, somebody capable of sharing with him the adventure of inventing and reinventing worlds. I had just that very luck in the English language. I was the first writer of fiction Daniel Hahn translated, and he was the first person to take on the translation of a novel of mine. We began together, then. Daniel is my língua in the English language. To a great extent, I owe the international success of our books to him.

    A writer who has the misfortune of seeing his books recreated for a given language by multiple translators must inevitably, in that language, seem somewhat incoherent and depersonalised – however good all those professionals might be. On the other hand, a mediocre writer, benefiting from a single remarkable translator, can even be transformed, in this second language, into a writer who is substantial and interesting. Such cases do exist, of translators who improve the original works to such an extent that the best thing one might do for them would be to translate them back.

    Queen Ginga, in real life, did have secretaries and translators, from Portugal and Brazil, men of the church, like my character, who translated into Portuguese the correspondence she dictated to them. In this way, what we today take as quotations from the queen, as direct expressions of her thinking, are in reality a recreation by her translators. So it is with me. I, too, as a novelist in the English language, am an invention of Daniel Hahn’s. I’m sending my creator a hug.

    ~

    III – CONNECTING WORDS, INVENTING WORDS?

    Daniel Hahn

    (After an original idea by José Eduardo Agualusa)

    Agualusa starts thus: The narrator of one of my novels, Queen Ginga, is a translator – (OK – sorry to interrupt, but Queen Ginga will have to be in italics, otherwise readers will think she’s the narrator referred to. Whereas the narrator is actually…) a Brazilian priest, with indigenous, African and Portuguese blood, who is sent to Angola – taking out a comma here, I think – at the end of the sixteenth century – and another – to work as an interpreter for Queen Ginga, or N’Zinga M’Bandi. (Possibly add a little gloss here – my readers likely won’t have heard of her. Though maybe readers of the original wouldn’t either? OK, leave it for now.)

    And so it begins.

    Second para: this one looks – oh – surprisingly easy! I shouldn’t say that out loud. Agualusa is often very much easier to translate than I’ll admit. (Don’t tell anyone.) He goes on: It took me my whole life to write that book. God, I’m glad I’m not a novelist. (Sorry, that last bit’s me, not him, obviously. Don’t mind me.) I spent years reading old texts, collecting documents, etc. (Etc. etc. This bit’s a doddle.) Ah, now the priest character appears to him: Then, one afternoon, without w–. Oh damn.

    You wouldn’t think ‘one afternoon’ would be the biggest challenge in this paragraph, would you? But Agualusa’s ‘tarde’ covers some of what we’d call the afternoon, and some of what we’d call the evening – *sends JEA e-mail asking ‘What time exactly did imaginary priest materialise?’*. (This afternoon/evening thing is a recurring annoyance in my work, and there are many similar examples – languages are precise or imprecise in entirely different ways. English basically needs a new word coined and all my troubles in the world will be over – eveternoon, perhaps. Or afterning. No?)

    I do like the idea of a writer being possessed by the spirit of a translator, btw – we usually talk about just the opposite happening, of course. Revenge!

    Anyway, on we stumble: Francisco José is not only (isn’t only?) a translator – a língua, as they used to say (oh, shit – OK, I’ll come back to that), he is a mediator between worlds. It falls to him to make an effort to translate universes. Wait – ‘Falls to him to make an effort to’ is horrible, though. To struggle to? But that seems to emphasise the unlikelihood of his managing it. Can I get away with a word like strive, which is such a lovely word? I think I can.

    To strive to translate universes. Yes – nice. I’m quite pleased with the clarity I’ve retained from that line of Agualusa’s. He couldn’t have put it better myself. Or vice versa.

    But back to that ‘língua’. The word means ‘tongue’ (in the same double-sense as English, both language and organ in your mouth), so I might drop in a little gloss for my Anglophones who don’t know this: Francisco José isn’t only a translator (a língua as they used to say, a tongue) – he is a mediator between worlds. But there’s another problem, which is that ‘língua’ meaning ‘tongue’ is a feminine noun (uma língua); here, used as a sort-of-synonym for translator-person, it’s masculine (um língua). Christ, I hate writers. ‘He is a tongue man’? No, that absolutely doesn’t help. I think I just have to live without that little gender-swap, tbqh. Not entirely satisfactory, but this time I’m going to admit defeat. I wouldn’t usually, but I have a deadline, and, well, my work happens in the real world, and circumstances here are sometimes imperfect.

    (Aha – answer just in from author-oracle email: the imaginary priest materialised late in the tarde, which is to say, in the evening. Good – strange things are more interesting when they happen in evenings than in afternoons.)

    OK, looks like para 3 at least I can speed through. That, ultimately, is the difficult task faced by all translators. (All translators, but especially those whose writers use language-play involving changing the gender of nouns that aren’t gendered in English. Just saying.) If a writer confronts the challenge of being other people each time he enters his fiction, the translator is faced with the double challenge of being these others in a distant language, and yet still managing, somehow, to make every character coherent and convincing. Yes! (Oh, sorry – the interjection is me again.) This is well said. I agree, obviously. Naturally I don’t need to agree with the substance of everything I say on behalf of my writers, but it helps! A good sympathetic match between writer and translator can be a blessing.

    Which – oh – is exactly where it looks like paragraph 4 is going.

    A writer, we continue, rarely gets to choose his translators. If he’s lucky, he is chosen by them. If he’s really very lucky indeed, he finds a friend for life. Yeah, I think I’m going with friend, but the Portuguese companheiro can be companion, collaborator, partner, comrade depending on context, and none of them neutral, so I am simply choosing, based on what I presume to claim about my relationship with my author. The word companion would be better, in the sense of a travelling companion, a fellow traveller, except that a companion for life suggests the wrong things. A friend for life, then, capable of sharing with him the adventure of inventing and reinventing worlds. (A lot of vent-ing in that line – advent/invent/reinvent – but it’s the same in Portuguese so I should probably just grit my teeth and go with it.) I was the first writer of fiction Daniel Hahn translated (God it’s weird writing stuff like this in the third person – I know it’s meant to be in his voice, but I’m here, too, you know!). We began together. Daniel is my língua (I know, I know, I’m a failure – don’t @ me) in the English language. To a large extent, I owe to him the international success of our books. No, hang on – sorry! – that sounds unnatural to me – ‘I owe to him the success’? More natural would be to reorder as ‘I owe the success of our books to him’ – though ending the paragraph in this way now shifts more emphasis onto the final ‘him’. (Me!) Yeah, OK, my ego and I can live with that. (Also, what a nice thing to say!)

    Onwards.

    A writer who has the misfortune of seeing his books recreated for a given language by multiple translators must inevitably, in that language (this word is repeated in English, where it isn’t in Portuguese – damn – no matter, ignore it, no one’s going to notice…), seem somewhat incoherent and depersonalised (right word?). On the other hand, a mediocre writer, benefiting from a single remarkable translator, can even be transformed, in this second language, into a writer who is solid (this is the ‘correct’ translation of the Portuguese word, but doesn’t work for me – robust? substantial?) and interesting. Great.

    And so to the conclusion.

    (That was quick! Well, it’s easy when you know how…)

    Queen Ginga did have secretaries and translators who translated into Portuguese the correspondence she dictated to them. What we today take as quotations from the queen are in reality a recreation by her translators. So it is with me. I, too, as a novelist in the English language, am an invention of Daniel Hahn’s. And then comes that lovely final line, in which he sends a hug to ‘my creator’. (So tempted to capitalise that as Creator. Would be nice to make a Shakespearean ‘onlie begetter’ reference, too, but he hasn’t so I mustn’t. He hasn’t so I mustn’t – good translators’ rule of thumb, that.) Actually ‘sending a hug to my creator’ is less natural in English than a ‘sending my creator a hug’, so let’s go with that – also thereby redeeming me for the earlier paragraph where I moved the ‘him’ to the end – here the reversal is opposite, balancing out, with the object in question (still me!) moved slightly away from the focus. That’s it. A lovely simple ending:

    I’m sending my creator a hug.

    And thus, as a humble, invisible translator, I let him get the last word.

    Oh. Oops.

    Well, since I’ve broken cover and am here anyway, companheiro, I’m sending you a hug back.

    José Eduardo Agualusa is a novelist and a reporter, born in Huambo in 1960. He studied in Lisbon and currently lives in Portugal, Angola and Brazil. In 2007, Agualusa was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and in 2013 the Fernando Namora Prize, as well as a translation grant from English PEN in 2014. His novel A General Theory of Oblivion was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 and was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award 2017.

    Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with sixty-something books to his name. His translations include six novels by José Eduardo Agualusa, with whom he has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. He is on the board of English PEN.