Jorge Luis Borges was lamenting a variety of Orientalism that was used to measure the alleged authenticity of Argentine and Latin American writers in the midcentury. The Argentine literary tradition was believed by many, including many Argentines, to be concerned with a national imaginary in which the gauchos and the pampas and the tango were fundamental tropes. Borges, in part to legitimize his own Europhilia, correctly pointed out that expecting writers to engage with these romantic nationalist tropes was arbitrary and limiting, a genre that was demonstrative of its own artificiality.

This neglect of a very important Brazilian writer is, in my view, the result of Brazil's relative isolation from what metropolitan tastemakers. If João Gilberto Noll were writing in French or German or even Russian, it's likely he'd be more broadly translated.

English can be tricky because there are so many false cognates, but sometimes, as long the idea conveyed is not wrong, these false cognates can themselves offer synonyms or lead to a better alternative word or phrase in translation.

I am surprised by the word psychedelic. João Gilberto Noll does not accept realism in a straightforward way, but I am more inclined to call Quiet Creature a realist text than I am to call it a psychedelic one. The transcendent aspect of the psychedelic experience is totally absent.

I only translate authors whose work already interests me as a reader, and that's a decision I make based on multiple encounters with an author's work.

Dreamlike sequencing is perhaps one of João Gilberto Noll's most remarkable triumphs in Quiet Creature on the Corner. I translated the novel and still it remains a mystery as to how exactly how this works. Noll thinks more like an experimental filmmaker than a novelist.

Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers, I don't think there's anything that I would call essentially Brazilian in João Gilberto Noll work. In that regard, it translates very well to a cosmopolitan audience.