This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, whose collection of discrete yet overlapping tales, Three Stories of Forgetting, translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Each of the book’s three novella-length character studies probes the consciousness of a dying man, stirring up memories entangled with Portugal’s colonial heritage. In “A Vision of Plants,” elderly Captain Celestino cultivates carnations while the ghosts of his violent career on the African coast—“guts, blood, spittle, tears, first cries, last whimpers”—rise around him. In “Seaquake,” a former soldier believes he earned his painful hernia in fighting for Portugal during the Colonial War, telling himself, “A Black man who kills another Black man ought to suffer terribly.” And in “Bruma,” imagination relieves an elderly enslaved man of physical suffering and gives him the complicated power of storytelling: “He had become a magician of chance, a pernicious gas, a vulture circling a flock, a plague.” Kirkus Reviews called Three Stories of Forgetting “an accomplished work that considers fraught histories at the most personal level,” while Publisher’s Weekly praised its “well-crafted depiction of the hidden bonds between individuals and empire.” Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida is the author of several prizewinning novels, including That Hair (Tin House Books, 2020), translated by Eric M. B. Becker, a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She holds a PhD in literary theory from the University of Lisbon. Pereira de Almeida was born in Luanda, Angola, and raised in Portugal. Alison Entrekin’s translations from the Portuguese include Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart and Paulo Lins’s City of God. Her work has received the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN Medallion and the Australasian Association of Writing Programs and Ubud Writers and Readers Festival Translator’s Prize.
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and Alison Entrekin, the author and the translator of Three Stories of Forgetting. (Credit: Pereira de Almeida: Humberto Brito; Entrekin: Sam de Souza)
1. How long did it take you to complete work on Three Stories of Forgetting?
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: It took me three and a half years to write the book.
Alison Entrekin: I spent about three months on my own translation process and another month on edits.
2. What was the most challenging thing about the project?
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: When I finished the first story, I had not the vision of a trilogy in my mind. It was only after finishing the second that I started noticing patterns and textures and a continuity of tone that made me realize I was writing a sequence of tales. So I guess the most challenging thing was to harmonize the tone and musicality of the three stories.
Alison Entrekin: Djaimilia’s language is dense and doesn’t always follow a Cartesian logic. I think that was my biggest challenge, to be faithful to her vision and make it read well in the translation without being overly domesticating. I wanted to recreate the sensory experience of Djaimilia’s writing in English and make it sing as it does in Portuguese.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write or translate?
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: I write on my sofa, mostly in the afternoons, from 5 to 7 and then a little bit in the evening, between 9 and 11.
Alison Entrekin: I work in my home office, on a massive computer screen, which I split, so that I can have the original on one side and my translation on the other. I translate every day, Monday to Friday, and often on the weekends too, though I tend to leave those for side projects, a poem here or there, an interview like this one.
4. What are you reading right now?
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: Lisboa Mesma Outra Cidade, a collection of photographs and essays about the destruction of Lisbon by gentrification, and This Other Eden by Paul Harding.
Alison Entrekin: Adrenalin by Ghayath Almadhoun, translated by Catherine Cobham, The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. Poetry, a novel, and a work of nonfiction.
5. Which author writing outside of English, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: Agustina Bessa-Luís, the greatest Portuguese novelist of the 20th century.
Alison Entrekin: Does it have to be just one?
I recently came across the work of Palestinian-Syrian-Swedish poet Ghayath Almadhoun at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali, and I am obsessed! (I am obsessive about poetry.) I also am a huge fan of the Brazilian poets Adriana Lisboa and Ana Martins Marques, both of whom have yet to be extensively translated into English.
And, well, I’m a bit biased, but the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa. Disclaimer: I just spent the last eleven years retranslating his masterwork Grande Sertão: Veredas into English. It is due to be published in 2027 by Simon & Schuster and Bloomsbury under the new title, Vastlands: The Crossing. And then there’s the rest of his formidable oeuvre to be translated, which will probably take me the rest of my life.
Another author who, like Djaimilia, is making waves in the Lusophone world is Mariana Salomão Carrara, whose novel The Loneliest Tree in the World I have just translated with Julia Sanches. I hope it is the first of many.
6. What is one thing that surprised you during the work on Three Stories of Forgetting?
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: At some point I started to feel very close to characters very different from me. I consider this book my most autobiographical work although nothing in the stories relates to my own life: I think the book operates in a parallel level of reading where it dramatizes the condition of any writer. I think that to understand this while I was writing was a significant surprise.
Alison Entrekin: The stories themselves and the way Djaimilia manages to create these utterly engrossing lives of people who have been largely ignored by history, or who are rendered invisible by age.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: They both advised me to be patient.
Alison Entrekin: I enjoyed the discussions with Djaimilia and our editor about how to frame the narrative around slavery in today’s world. Like using “enslaved person” rather than “slave” to more accurately portray the forced nature of their labor. This was, of course, very difficult in a historical text with characters who wouldn’t have given a damn about political correctness (after all, they thought slavery was okay). Nevertheless, we found ways to make it work without it sounding artificial in English. This will no doubt be useful to me in the future, as slavery played a huge role in the Portuguese Empire and it comes up frequently in the books I translate.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life?
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: Although writing is a solitary work, I think that sometimes too much solitude is my biggest impediment.
Alison Entrekin: Grown-up life.
9. What forms of work, other than writing, did you have to do to complete this book?
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: I worked for an extensive period in a Botanical Garden in Lisbon, which helped me with the parts of the story that have to do with plants and flowers. I also read extensively the work of Raul Brandão, who inspires Vision of Plants, because I wanted to mimic in part the phantasmagoric atmosphere of his books.
Alison Entrekin: All translation requires a lot of research, as every new story takes us into a new world of uniqueness and specificity. For A Vision of Plants, I researched piracy (the old-fashioned kind) and plants, lots of them, and not just the names in English of the ones I didn’t know. I looked at photographs and diagrams of stamen, to make sure my understanding of what they look like matched the descriptions I was reading in the original.
For the story of Boa Morte, in Seaquake, I found myself wandering the streets of Lisbon in Google Maps, using Street View to look at the facades of buildings and to see where the different locations are in relation to one another.
For Bruma, the research was more historical. I read about slavery, Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France, the language of manor houses in centuries past.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida: “Write it exactly like that”: from my first editor, Maria do Rosário Pedreira. I tend to complicate my sentences and she advised me to write as I speak, not to overdone it.
Alison Entrekin: “Bird by bird” (from Anne Lamott’s collection of the same title) is wonderful advice for when something feels daunting. I am very methodical and like to deal with one problem at a time, to the exclusion of all else. And I deliberately leave the hardest decisions until last, because once I’ve solved the easier parts of the puzzle the harder bits aren’t as overwhelming. (Translation is a puzzle, in case that isn’t clear.)
