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02/26/2009
Writing (out of) Place lecture

Writing (out of) Place
A Talk by Adriana Lisboa
Award-Winning Brazilian Novelist, Translator, and Blogger

Thurs., Feb. 26, 5:00 p.m.
Seelye Hall 201
Smith College

Adriana Lisboa is among the most distinctive new voices of Brazilian literature. She has published 8 books, including the novels, Sinfonia em Branco (Symphony in White) and Rakushisha, both forthcoming in English translations. She won the prestigious Jose Saramago Prize in 2003, has been a multiple finalist for the Jabuti Prize in the categories of novel and young adult fiction, and was selected in 2007 by the Hay Festival/Bogota 39 Project as among the most important young Latin American writers. She has translated into Portuguese writers including Cormac McCarthy, Anne Tyler, Amos Oz, and Emile Faguet. Her own work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Adriana has lived in and written of Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Paris, and Kyoto, and much of her work intimately explores experiences and meanings of dislocation and foreignness, and the unexpected intersections of place, memory, and the senses. She is currently Visiting Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, and she lives in Colorado, where she is completing a novel, Azul Corvo (Crow Blue), and, with the Paris-based Argentine photographer, Daniel Mordzinski, a book of images and text about the human and natural landscapes of the U.S. Desert Southwest.

The talk will be in English, is free and open to the public, and sponsored by the Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature, Latin American and Latino/a Studies, the Five-Colleges Afro-Luso-Brazilian Faculty Seminar, and the Smith College Lecture Fund.

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In the chapada everything is big. The sky ends only when your gaze gives up, or when myopia bests you. Walk all day and check the map: you've covered only space enough for your fatigue. The chapada challenges muscle, canteen, camera. The air is excessive and hurts, drying up your breath in this brownish June. But the water of the Black River is black and transparent, and your feet find no reason to be fearful of diving. Your voice finds no resonance for its cry. To the sky's sublime inquietude your thought is superfluous. Even your life is superfluous. The savannah sky dismisses witnesses and the sun sets, metamorphosis, blue and yellow catharsis in the caninde macaws. Someone said that the mountains here grow inward. You've fallen into the belly of the earth, where you're undone as quickly as any bit of food. Skin burns, the night is cold and the stars pulsate the entire insomniac galaxy as you die once again.

In the chapada everything is small. In a half-meter of river the fish nibble your feet and the bubbles in the water last just a second. The current mirrors three-hundred tiny suns. Three-hundred million. Pink in the morning, at noon the mimosas are already white. The dust has wings and claws at your hair, and no white of your clothing lasts more than five minutes. Minimal lunar valleys made of rock and sand fit within two strides. In the chapada you are the size of your eyes and your laughable ability to startle. In the chapada whatever startles you is also the miraculous place of a flower. Of an insect. Of the animal that is only tracks and traces. In the sore muscle of your thigh you find your soul, which pulses, which inverts the circle, which is born again.

-- Adriana Lisboa, from Caligrafias (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2004)

Translated by Malcolm K. McNee (forthcoming in Brazil: A Traveler's Literary Companion, ed. by Alexis Levitin, Whereabouts Press)