EMILY EVERETT interviews BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO
Back in 2017, The Common published a debut short story by a young Brazilian-American writer with a beautiful, understated style, and an enormous talent for translating big emotions into quiet gestures, thoughtful moments, and tense, restrained dialogue. Publishing debuts is always meaningful, but the best part comes after: watching those early-career writers go on to greater and greater successes.
Last year, that writer, Bruna Dantas Lobato, was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translation for The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel. And this month, her debut novel is out from Grove Atlantic’s Black Cat imprint. She sat down with TC managing editor Emily Everett via Zoom to talk about that novel, Blue Light Hours. Zoom felt like a fitting medium: Blue Light Hours follows a first-year college student communicating with her mother back in Brazil only via Skype. They also discussed her work translating from Portuguese, and the pleasures and pitfalls of connecting with her home country through writing and translation. Bruna was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and now lives in Iowa.
Emily Everett: Let’s start at the beginning, with your first story. When did you start writing fiction?
Bruna Dantas Lobato: I’ve been writing fiction seriously since I was in college, and for fun since I was a kid, and I’ve always been interested in place. When I came to college, I was a young immigrant, alone for the first time, living in New England. I was like, What is this place? Why are the houses like this? Why is the landscape like this? So I went all the way back to the basics—I took nature writing and architecture classes. I really wanted to understand this place I found myself in. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write about Brazil yet, because there’s so much baggage that comes with that, but I tried one story, the first story I managed to finish. With revising, it took me three or maybe four years to get it right. The Common was the first publication that came to mind for it: as a serious magazine, but also one that would be friendly to someone like me who hadn‘t published before. And I was drawn to the magazine’s focus on place.
My nightmare scenario was not that my work would get rejected forever, but that it would get accepted, even though it was horrible. I really wanted help, someone to read line by line and help me hone it. And I definitely got that from The Common. I sent that first story through Submittable, and I got a kind note with some suggested edits. I worked through two rounds of edits with Jennifer Acker and Megan Tucker-Orringer, and I loved it. It was a wonderful experience. Honestly, I felt like a writer for the first time; I felt taken seriously, because someone was reading my work with that level of intensity, that level of detail. That first story was really important to me, as I was trying to understand it all: who am I, as a writer? Do I want to write about Brazil? What does that feel like? Even now, I wouldn‘t trust a story set in Brazil in the hands of every editor. But I felt like I could trust The Common.
EE: It seems like you have some apprehension about writing about Brazil, or publishing work set in Brazil. Can I ask you about that?
BDL: I do, because I live and write in the context of America. When I’m translating authors who are writing about Brazil, sometimes I envy how freely they can write about it. They don’t have a white American sitting on their shoulder, judging and setting expectations. But I have that. I don’t want to, but I do. It doesn’t feel genuine the way I want it to, but like I’m writing for this gaze. It’s been too long, I think, of me being shaped by America. And so I don’t write about Brazil very much. I find it emotionally taxing: it makes me sad, sometimes it makes me homesick. And then on top of that, I keep thinking I’m going to be seriously misunderstood. Even by other Brazilians.
Brazil is so, so big. I’m from a particular region, and there’s a lot of stigma around it—it’s the poorest part of the country, the most uneducated. I have a particular accent in Portuguese that other Brazilians spot, and they know I’m from that area. I have an accent everywhere I go. I translated my book into Portuguese, and I had to keep asking myself, Is this a regional way of saying this? Or is this the dominant Portuguese? I’m very aware of the fact that my experience doesn’t represent all of Brazil. I know that nobody should be expecting that, but it weighs on me a ton. Whereas when I’m translating, I get to show a range of Brazilian experiences that are nothing like mine.
It’s so demanding … to codeswitch to please two audiences, to be there for two different kinds of people.”
I’m very restrained when I talk about my upbringing in Brazil. I grew up really poor, and I feel like that makes it easy for readers to misunderstand. People sometimes say to me, “Wow, I can’t believe you grew up like that.” And I’m like, please stop. Don’t pity me. They just can’t comprehend another way of life, a life that isn’t like theirs, ruled by different expectations or different standards. Maybe that’s why I study homes and architecture so much. I’ll read a book that talks about how notions of comfort have changed. How people in Europe used to sleep on their dining tables and that was perfectly fine. So why couldn’t I sleep the way I slept?
Maybe one day, I’ll be able to go back to writing about Brazil—or at least I’d like to try. But especially in the workshop environment, every time I wrote about Brazil, I got burned really bad. In an early draft of my novel [Blue Light Hours], I had a father character who was more present, for example, and I got a lot of notes that he should be more or less macho, more this or that. It was fascinating, because in real life my father is bisexual and he’s not macho at all, but that’s what they wanted Brazilian men to be in my workshop. They needed it. And they would ask me, “Where are the palm trees?” I got so much of it that I think I’m detoxing now. But I would love to be able to exorcise that, get it out of my system and try again.
EE: I loved your novel. Can you tell us a little bit about the writing process, how it came together? It sounds like you wanted to write about New England.
BDL: I had this idea that I could write about international students and the kind of life I saw around me, the experiences me and my friends had, and what it’s like to live in New England in this kind of body. But I also wanted to write a new kind of campus novel where it wasn’t just all privilege. I wanted to show a kind of outsider experience of a college campus in New England.
But primarily, I wanted to write a contemporary long-distance relationship immigrant novel. I’ve always felt like a lot of immigrant novels didn’t capture my experience; those novels are about leaving something behind and going toward this other future. But I was trying to live two lives at once. And it’s so demanding and complicated, and sometimes painful, to try to do that. To codeswitch to please two audiences, to be there for two different kinds of people, for two languages, two lives, two paths. I wanted to capture that.
EE: When I think about your book, the word that keeps coming up in my brain is impressionistic. It’s like an Impressionist painting—the shape of things, the feelings and the movements, but maybe not every little detail, every little scene. It’s short, too. It’s not trying to cover everything and then tie it up neatly with a bow.
BDL: I wanted it to be short, I wrote toward that shape. Latin America has a very, very strong tradition of the short novel. Longer novels are kind of rare compared to in the U.S. We are not a doorstopper novel kind of culture. We have day jobs, people!
I kid, but it’s also that the short story is a bigger deal there, too. And those are the books that formed me. Maybe because in Latin America, there isn’t much of a publishing industry—not as strong as it is in New York—so you can publish more experimental works, and the people who are reading are open to anything. A lot of the books I read growing up, and the books that I translate, are not considered experimental in Brazil. But in the U.S., they’re received like that, just because they’re a bit unusual, or odd, or short. I love that about all of them. I wanted to be able to write a novel that feels short and strange, and very un-American. I feel like that novelistic ambition, the Great American Novel, is something that I didn’t want to get close to. I wanted something slight, and, honestly, feminine.
EE: One of my favorite moments in the novel is when the narrator reflects on the phases of life: you start out as a child, and then become a mother, and then, eventually, your own mother becomes like a child you take care of. She says, “I had the luxury of only ever being a child in my life. I lived alone and did my own laundry and paid my own phone bill and drank alcohol and somehow still remained a child.” It really reminded me of this feeling I have, at 37, that I think a lot of my friends have too: because we don’t have children, we still feel like children ourselves.
BDL: That’s so beautiful. I hadn’t thought about it that way. I also don’t have children, and I’m 33 and don’t plan on having them.
EE: But you do have a rabbit? Or am I crazy?
BDL: I do have a rabbit. She’s the best, she’s cute as a button. But I joke a lot that my mom is my child. Especially as she gets older, I do feel a lot of responsibility toward her and toward my sister. But I also still feel like a child. I remember seeing pictures of my mom when she was 20 or 25. Already a mother, a full-blown adult. She had left abusive relationships and had 15 jobs and was raising a daughter, such a completely different life. And I feel a lot of guilt around my American comfort. I live in a humongous house. Humongous for me—it’s a two bedroom. But compared to the house where I grew up, you could fit five of it in here. We have two bathrooms, two parking spots, a backyard. There’s a line in the book about this: the mother says that her daughter is a child, playing in a palace. All those feelings in the book are true to how I feel. I don’t think I’ve been able to quite reconcile that—that I don’t feel like an adult. It’s an unresolved feeling.
I think one of the best dynamics in the book is that feeling—not mothering in one direction, but mothering in both directions.”
But we’re sort of forced into this caretaking role as we get older, even if we still feel like a child ourselves. And honestly, I have a lot of fun with it. I pamper my mom a lot. I really enjoy it. I think one of the best dynamics in the book is that feeling—not mothering in one direction, but mothering in both directions. The narrator is checking on her mom, making sure she’s okay, taking her medicine. And then her mother is worried her daughter will get hurt riding a bike and wants her to be safer.
EE: I love that: mothering in both directions. I also really enjoyed the part of the book over summer break, when the narrator is alone on campus, looking after a professor’s house. You expect it to be lonely and sad, but instead it’s really quiet and relaxed and pleasurable for the narrator. She says, “I wasn’t sure when I’d have an uneventful life of comfort like this, again, how long I could sustain it. I savored it. I hoped it would last forever, this boredom.”
BDL: I think, again, this has to do with my experience of America. I just didn’t know life could be this quiet. I grew up on the poor side of a major city—there’s honking, people fighting, somebody selling fish, selling popsicles, and it’s a very, very, very busy place. And in my house, we were all crammed together. I’d never had a moment to myself. We could hear everything. So from a young age, I got used to staying up all night to read. I love the silence of the middle of the night. But here in the US, in the places I found myself in, I was shocked by the sheer silence. That you could take a bus, take the subway, and it’s always quiet, at least by comparison. I think it’s partly because it’s different culturally, but a part of it is also about commerce—where I grew up, people scream at the top of their lungs selling things, and there just isn’t that kind of visible urgency here. And I had never experienced a lack of urgency before I moved here as a student. I still struggle with it, because I feel a lot of urgency inside of me. This panic that I grew up with, where everyone is working five jobs and running around and being loud and screaming. I’m trying to slow down. And I also know that no one’s life is really that quiet, there will always be things that disrupt it: tragedy, the news, death, illness. I kept thinking that my American life was going to be interrupted, that something would happen, or that my immigration status wouldn’t let me stay.
So really, going to college here, it felt like I had this period in my life where I could be with my own thoughts. What a great privilege that is! I wanted to put all of that in the book: being able to stay with your own thoughts, sit with yourself like that. So that section of the book, that comment from the narrator, that was my way of signaling, “I know this book is quiet, it’s deliberate. It’s purposeful. It’s trying to communicate something.”
EE: You mentioned you translated your novel into Portuguese yourself, for the Brazilian edition. What was that process like?
BDL: It was very difficult. It’s the only time I’ve ever translated into Portuguese, and not from Portuguese into English. I think I’m a better writer in English. But I’d always wanted to try writing in Portuguese. I kept hoping that one day I’d be able to spend some time in Brazil, but of course, I have a job and a life and a career here. So doing this, it felt like a homecoming. It was difficult, but it was very joyful, and full of surprises.
But I was also so homesick while I was working on it. As I was writing in Portuguese, I kept getting these cravings for things that I’d forgotten I liked to eat. I ordered a crazy amount of Brazilian food from online stores. I had to have a specific storebought Oreo-type cookie. It wasn’t even anything my grandma made me, just the cookies they used to sell in my school. And then I was craving my mom’s rice and beans. So I soaked some beans, I did the whole thing in the dead of summer, not something I would normally do. I was so homesick, but working on the translation really did feel like a kind of balm. I felt like I was close to Brazil.
I didn’t know this while writing it, but it’s what the book wanted all along—to be mirrored, to be in two places at once. It felt like I got to complete the full circle by translating it. I’m very, very proud of the result. I think it sounds beautiful. It’s coming out with a wonderful publisher, Companhia das Letras. They’re part of the Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, and they publish lots of great writers in Brazil. Honestly, a dream publishing house. When I was seven years old I was already dreaming of publishing with them one day, because I had all their books on my shelf.
EE: Speaking of your incredible translations—last time I saw you, we were all dressed up, and you were winning the National Book Award for Translated Literature—for Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain! I listened to the audiobook earlier this summer, and it was so beautiful, and the story itself is so rare. Can you tell us about working on the book? How do you decide what books you want to translate?
BDL: I loved working on that book. I’m from the same region where the book is set. It’s rare that I find books from the Northeast of Brazil; they’re not often published in the US, of course, but they’re not even published in Brazil very often. I felt like I understood that experience, but I also just thought it was a beautiful book, very much about language and about falling in love with the written word. And what’s not to like about that? It’s not every author that I read the voice, read the style, and think, I can do this. But with his [Stênio’s] voice, I felt right away that we were a good match, that I understood what the book was trying to do.
And I loved working with Stênio. He’s such a wonderful person—kind, smart, genuine. It was like a match made in heaven. I love the audiobook as well, with André Santana narrating it. I’m glad they gave us a Brazilian American voice actor.
You asked how I choose translation projects. If I know a publisher is already interested in a book I’m interested in, I beg them to consider me for the job. But for the most part, I find a book I really love, and then convince someone to publish it in English. The translator is a curator; I see what’s available from Brazil in English translation, and then I think about what should be added to the collection. When I see a book that’s illuminating something I haven’t seen before, or that’s adding to the conversation in a new way, I try to bring it over.
EE: I love that; the translator is a curator.
BDL: There are so many books that I love and want to bring over that are still in my drawer. I haven’t convinced anyone to publish them yet.
EE: But they’ll have to trust you now!
BDL: Yes! I hope that after the award, publishers will listen to me a little better. I persist.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. She was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translation for The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel. Dantas Lobato was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and lives in Iowa. Blue Light Hours is her debut novel.
Emily Everett is managing editor of The Common. Her debut novel All That Life Can Afford is forthcoming from Putnam Books. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.
