Katrina Dodson Names the Next Big Brazilian Translation Event

Translator Katrina Dodson has declared Alison Entrekin's forthcoming translation of João Guimarães Rosa's Vastlands: The Crossing "the translation event of 2027." The book arrives in January. Entrekin has spent over ten years on the new English version of Rosa's 1956 Grande sertão: veredas, previously translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands.

Dodson made the claim in the hundredth installment of "The Annotated Nightstand," an interview column conducted by Diana Arterian. Dodson is best known for translating Clarice Lispector's The Complete Stories, and also rendered Mário de Andrade's 1928 modernist classic Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character into English. The two books, she notes, are the pair known as "the Brazilian Ulysses" for their linguistic ambition and epic journeys.

Her verdict on the galley was blunt: "It made my head explode." She added: "It's so gorgeous and hypnotic; I can't believe what she's done with it. Get ready!"

What's on the nightstand itself?

Dodson described a domestic archaeology rather than a reading list. The nightstand grew so crowded she installed a floating shelf. Current inventory includes a clock radio tuned to WFMU 91.1, glasses, a coaster from a trip to her mother's village in Vietnam, a doily doubling as a coaster, and toddler detritus including a tiny troll from a film-set makeup artist.

The shelf also holds the new issue of Molasses Quarterly, picked up at Molasses Books in Bushwick, which she calls the translators' clubhouse. She interviewed the shop's owner, Matt "Hen" Winn, for the issue.

How did she fix her reading brain?

Dodson feared her reading brain was broken after compulsory work reading and what she calls "three tender and harrowing years" of motherhood. The cure was W.G. Sebald. She finally finished The Rings of Saturn after a decade of abandoned attempts, then moved directly into The Emigrants. Her greatest triumph, though, was a first-time read of George Eliot's Middlemarch, which she says "becomes a page-turner somewhere past the 400-page mark." She credits her friend Sarah Chihaya, whose book Incomplete Works is still in copy edits. So Sarah and George Eliot healed her reading brain.

Her current stack leans heavily on lives of artists:

• Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story — a "labor of love" tracing James Baldwin through Harlem, Paris, Switzerland and the West Village. Filmmaker Barry Jenkins devoured it in a week; Dodson is savoring it slowly, "checking in with Jimmy at regular intervals."
• Tom Overton, John Berger: From Life — a biography of Berger, whom Dodson loves to think and look alongside, particularly in his 1972 BBC series Ways of Seeing. Filmmaker Brett Story is making a documentary about Berger.
• Jen Calleja, Fair: The Life-Art of Translation — a kaleidoscopic account of a translator's inner and outer worlds, compared by Dodson to Kate Briggs's This Little Art, "but with a punk-clown vibe." Calleja visited Dodson's MFA seminar at Columbia University.

What does she teach?

Her Columbia course this semester is called "Impossible Translations." The class read Mónica de la Torre's Repetition Nineteen, a collection of poetry and essays powered by mistranslation and missed connections between languages. De la Torre visited and described leaving her Mexican poet self behind when she moved to New York in the 1990s. One section of the book retranslates a single Spanish poem multiple times, including a homophonic version by someone who barely speaks Spanish and a poem generated by her phone's autocorrect.

For Lispector readers, Dodson's portable Covert Joy: Selected Stories just arrived in paperback, with twenty pieces plus new essays by Rachel Kushner and Lispector's son Paulo Gurgel Valente. He recalls waking to find his mother at work: "There she sat, with the typewriter on her lap, creating all those stories, right from the moment that I started to understand who I was."

January, in other words, is already spoken for.