Contributions by Jonathan Blitzer
Jonathan Blitzer says: I am a journalist, critic, and translator currently based in New York. My writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Atlantic, among other places. I am also an editor of Words Without Borders, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Madrid, from 2010-2011. My work there was inspired by authors I began reading while living in Buenos Aires: Juan Carlos Onetti, Juan José Saer, and Antonio di Benedetto, above all. Borges, too, obviously. And Felisberto… (Hernández). At the moment, I'm reading Suzanne Jill Levine's and Jessica Ernst Powell's excellent translation of a Bioy/Ocampos collaboration, called Where There's Love There's Hate. I'm in close contact with a group of writers living in Madrid, where I lived for a few years. Among them are Jorge Eduardo Benavides, Doménico Chiappe, Juan Carlos Chirinos, Carlos Franz (now back in Chile), Blanca Riestra, and Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga.
The Skies of Brasilia: an interview with João Almino
Jonathan Blitzer
Jonathan Blitzer: You’re originally from northern Brazil—Mossoró—but your novels bring you to the geographic heart of the country: Brasilia. How did you wind up there, exactly?
João Almino: I did not want to revisit the Northeastern regionalist literature that I so admired, and I wanted to depart from the prevailing Brazilian literature of the time. Brasilia represented the new, was somehow an empty space with no literary tradition, and it therefore gave me more freedom to create. I knew the city, since I had lived there for a few months in 1970 and then again later, on three different occasions. I should also add that I could easily bring the Northeast to Brasilia, a city of immigrants.
JB: What interests you most about Brasilia?
JA: First of all, the city as a symbol or a myth that, as … Read More »
sending...