THE CITY OF THE LONER

Hello Everybody! A few days ago we have posted a note in this Blog about "The City of The Loner," a book by Luiz Gonzaga Lopes. The author is a very good friend of mine. A good writer and above all an excellent poet. The book tells us the creation of a city. A city of our dreams... You will all have the chance of reading it. The City of The Loner will be posted here a chapter every week. Make good use of it. Hugo Caldas



PREFACE

SIMPLY ACCEPTING
THE FANTASTIC

Martha Luhrs Viegas

In this preface, I must confess a horrible truth.
I have lived in Brazil teaching literature for over thirty years at the American School of Recife, and during that time I have not read Brazilian classics.

During my first years here, I actually plodded through some Jorge Amado, stumbling all the way through untranslatable idiomatic expressions (How could I guess that “street boy’s feet” was the name of a cake?) and running into brick walls of regionalism. “Oxente!” (A Northeastern expletive not found in dictionaries) I know a bit about this or that masterpiece, but only second hand, from accompanying my Brazilian American sons through their high school literature classes.

The truth is that I am lazy and I am a coward. When I have time to read, I want the relaxing ease of my own mother tongue. When I contemplate the time and work needed to truly understand between the lines, I shudder and reach for English.

I have not given up, however, and must thank Luiz Gonzaga Lopes for sharing his works and for asking me to translate The City of the Loner. By rewriting his text in English, I had to face idioms and regionalism and to deal with them. Amazingly, in the process of translation these problems did not daunt me.

What I realized during my voyage into the author’s mind is that what readers of translation need are not only understandable sentences, but an entire mind-set to prepare them for cultural differences.

During my first attempts to read Brazilian literature, I had no concept of magic realism. I could not make the leaps from my scientific reasoning to simple acceptance of the fantastic. I could not understand the concept of “cumplicidade” – the idea that being an accomplice could be a positive aspect of relationships. My cultural baggage was too full of preconceived notions and a dependency on provable facts.

I thank my dear, patient husband for sharing his culture with me, and I thank Luiz Gonzaga Lopes for challenging me to open my eyes to new worlds. I hope that my translation will help English readers to venture into a new world with an open mind, and to enjoy the humor and beauty of proud community life in The City of the Loner.