Eric M. B. Becker
Photo by Luisa Leme
Bio
Eric M. B. Becker is a literary translator, writer, and editor of Words without Borders. In 2014, he earned a PEN/Heim grant for his translations of Mia Couto’s Rain and Other Stories (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, Foreign Affairs, Freeman’s, Guernica, and elsewhere. He is the co-founder of the Pessoa International Literary Festival, an annual event bringing together celebrated writers from Portugal, Brazil, and the United States in conversations about their work.
In many ways, 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 earnest in 2013. Lygia Fagundes Telles was one of the very first writers who I read. (If memory serves, a collection of her stories was the second book I ever 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 master of the short story often mentioned in the same breath as Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, and Hilda Hilst, and she counts among her legion of devotees the late Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago and the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
Lygia’s work plumbs the tension between real memory and imagination to render cogent, biting critiques of power and of the vicious social relations of everyday life. Her scope ranges from tales about 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 contained in a single moment are what drew me to her work, and these are just some of the qualities that make 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 always feels as if I’m merely beginning again), this fellowship provides me with the resources to dedicate myself to a project that I’ve been developing throughout the years while meeting more pressing deadlines. Thanks to the support of the NEA, Lygia Fagundes Telles will now find the English-language audience she deserves.
from “It’s Chilly in Here, Don’t You Think?” by Lygia Fagundes Telles
[Translated from the Portuguese]
Yet how I ignored the most important thing, she thought, and let her hand drop back down over the bed sheet. Total oblivion, at least until the moment he answered the door and said, Kori, so good to see you. Followed by an embrace with nothing good about it, he could have at least pretended. But he didn’t. Come on in, sweetheart. If only she’d invented some pretext as soon as she’d felt something in the air sending her signals, warnings even. Say that Otávio showed up 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, as if she needed to be sure, as though she had to watch Armando make the gesture he did now, picking up the album, a motion just like Father Severino raising the sacred host. In such ecstasy, revelation. So this is how it is, she repeated to herself as Armando thumbed through the pile of albums asking what she’d like to hear now, how about an opera? She barely recognized her own voice as she responded in falsetto, she had a habit of speaking in falsetto when she was being phony, Great, Armando, Carmen. He walked slowly back toward her in his elastic 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 feel lightheaded, what am I doing here? Too late to run out of the room, Something came up! She felt as though she were on stage when he began caressing her on the couch without the least bit of passion, but could there really be any passion? The pillows he’d arranged carefully to make her more comfortable, the half-light softening the embarrassment of the situation. What a pathetic, pathetic, pathetic role to play. She asked for more whiskey. Conscious of the ridiculous smile etched across her face, still she attempted to help him as he tried to remove her bra, but, tripped up by the clasp and his own impatience, irritation even, he exclaimed, “Jesus, Kori, what’s wrong with this hook!” She made a point 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. Then she released the straps. Good god! She turned her head when he kissed her nipples almost without touching them. He seemed more interested in staring at her breasts than kissing them. She thought about the film she’d seen the night before, Indiana Jones, so 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 only to see every last freckle and bony limb. She recoiled. Hold on, sweetie, my earring fell, hold on! she managed and bent over to look for the earring between the throw pillows.
(© Lygia Fagundes Telles. Translation © Eric M. B. Becker)
About Lygia Fagundes Telles
Lygia Fagundes Telles is a giant of 20th- and 21st-century Brazilian literature and widely considered Brazil’s greatest living writer. In the words of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, neck-and neck with Fernando Pessoa for the distinction 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’s 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 important women writers of the 20th century in any tradition.