Found in Translation: On Bruna Dantas Lobato’s “Blue Light Hours”
Bruna Dantas Lobato | Blue Light Hours | Grove Atlantic | October 2024 | 192 Pages
Last March, I was at my airport gate in San Diego when I noticed a man staring at an upside-down boarding pass. He smoothed it, then stood up, disoriented, paced around in brown work boots, and sat down again next to me, the letters still rotated the other way. He was anxious, or he was lost—but I couldn’t tell which, and didn’t know why. And then I saw him message someone on WhatsApp, in Portuguese. O senhor é brasileiro? I asked. Sir, are you Brazilian? It turned out he was from the same state where my mom was raised, and flying to the one where I grew up. While we waited to board, I told him what his ticket said, read the departure screens, and repeated the loudspeaker announcements. For a brief moment, I was a translator—and I couldn’t remember ever feeling more useful.
That same spring, I began reading about translation. I pored over books, essays, and articles, traced the webs connecting translators to their various authors, and read Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut novel, Blue Light Hours, which imagines, among other scenarios, a Brazilian daughter’s careful translation of an American airport for her mother. Her translation is tender, a form of love. The act can, I learned, be many other things.
For Jhumpa Lahiri, in Translating Myself and Others, to translate is to “alter one’s linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile.” For Octavio Paz, a child learning to speak is a translator, as is the poet who searches for the right words; there are, therefore, as many translators as there are people. For Dantas Lobato, there may be even more than that. “Translation,” she says, is “an exercise in being in touch with the other people I’ve been.” By these measures, Dantas Lobato herself—former child, self-proclaimed foreigner, literary translator, and now novelist—is a translator at least four times over. It should come as no surprise that Blue Light Hours, a book about immigration, digital intimacy, and a long-distance mother-daughter relationship, is also a profoundly illuminating meditation on language.
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Like most immigrant kids of the modern internet, the narrator of Bruna Dantas Lobato’s Blue Light Hours tries to live in two places at once. She Skypes her mom, back home in Northeastern Brazil, when she moves into her dorm room at a rural Vermont college; she calls when she turns in her first paper and when sees her first snow. She blows kisses to her laptop screen, then smears it trying to reach through. In bed, she mulls over her “life on the computer” as though it were distinct, but her offline world, with its campus parties and colonial homes, remains filtered through blue light just the same.
When we meet her, our unnamed narrator is (again, like many immigrant kids) a translator, though she does not know this yet. She’s living abroad, alone, for the first time, and her saudade—a simultaneous desire and pain, warmth of memory and ache of distance—compels her to carefully document each novelty in a notebook so that her new life may be shared. She notes red barns, coffee with straws, blue eggs in birds’ nests, spruce trees, chipmunks (“Why no word for them in Portuguese?”), honey barbecue sauce, wool sweaters, snow. Each marvel is diligently recorded, a world translated—until the devastating moment, anticlimactic and arbitrary, when she understands that to fully convey a life would take a lifetime, and she cannot live for two people at once. Of her abandoned project, she laments: “I stashed [the notebook] in one of my desk drawers and never opened it again…I’d never be able to finish telling my mother what I saw.”
Before long, the daughter is writing diary entries in English, analyzing Henry James, speaking the language “as if [she] had always spoken it,” and searching her dorm room in vain for books, flyers, magazines—anything—in Portuguese. When no one is looking, while she treks home at night, she speaks to herself in Portuguese, too—an attempt to craft language as incantation, to return, at least in phrase, to Natal, a past self, and the mother who was warm and vibrant before she was a lonely, grainy image. In her room, the daughter hums Brazilian songs and longs for her mom’s soft words: minha filha, minha menina. She strives to condense her experiences into stories, if not written records, for her.
But though the women continue to regularly call, and yearn for, each other, they slowly lose the sameness—reinforced by shared words conjuring shared atmospheres and feelings—that they had in common. “There isn’t much to tell,” the daughter responds, shaking her head, when her mom asks for news one night. Later, when the mother overhears her speaking in English to a friend, she asks, bewildered, whose voice it was. “You sounded different,” she says. “You see, that’s something. That’s news to me.” But for the daughter, what was once novelty is stamped into the wax of routine, then hardened. It seems life becomes more difficult to translate now than when wonder was abundant. And how frustrating that her mom cannot see her “outside…the screen,” that even everyday words (rain, water, sky) do not animate the same scenes anymore, that every phrase carries the suffocating context of the language in which it comes packaged. Hers are any translator’s perpetual frustrations: frustrations Dantas Lobato, and a growing body of peers who write about their art, know well.
The literary translator Daniel Hahn, for instance, asserts in a 200-page diaristic account of an 150-page novel translation that no word maps perfectly onto another, for even the image conjured by the English ‘tree’ is certainly not the same as the image associated with the Brazilian Portuguese ‘árvore.’ And, he reminds us, that is just image—the first of many building blocks of meaning. Translators must also consider how a word tastes on the tongue, the histories it’s connected to, its power. “It’s easier to [translate],” he writes, “once you’ve understood that in theory it cannot be done.” Edith Grossman, who translated the greats Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, acknowledged in her own book that translation was viewed by critics as “impossible at best” and “a betrayal at worst.” For both, thankfully, the conclusion is nonetheless one of optimistic faith: there is nothing to do but translate. Our narrator, in spite of her teenage angst, decides the same.
Her linguistic trials act as the pendulum of the novel. There’s an attempt to translate, then disappointment; an attempt to translate, then longing for home; failure to translate, then guilt; an attempt to translate, then a reminder of shared love, and finally, understanding. For most of the book, despite her best efforts, the daughter’s landscape, for the mother, remains a mystery, a movie, a region of the imagination. When it snows, she asks: “Does walking outside feel like being buried alive?” In her mind, the daughter’s dormitory is “a palace,” her peers are “milky,” and squirrels gather to greet her each morning, an immigrant Cinderella. Phrase by phrase, the mother constructs a fantasy. But like any good trick mirror or literary parallel, the daughter, too, begins to fictionalize her mother’s speech, layering it with new meanings and imposing on each sentence her own emerging linguistic context. In conversation, words are distorted and relationships are redefined. Mother and daughter speak, one night, about grief:
She said, softly, Do you think I’ll get used to it? To my mother being dead? My only mother.
Though she didn’t speak those words at all, not exactly, another layer of removal between us. She said something else, in Portuguese, minha única mãe. I was the one hearing her in English, this language that was taking over everything, her words turning into a fiction in my head.
It’s here that Blue Light Hours, already an autofictional text, reaches its self-referential peak. Dantas Lobato is, in fact, also from Natal. She attended Bennington College in southern Vermont, where she studied Literature. Her head sports the same graying curls as her character. She also spoke in Portuguese to her mother, to whom the book is dedicated, over Skype from her dorm room. She writes in English. We can imagine her narrator’s career trajectory being similar to that of Dantas Lobato herself: established and acclaimed translator of contemporary Brazilian literature, known for her National Book Award winning translation of Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain and Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries. We can imagine her sitting down to write this book. But this one phrase—I was the one hearing her in English…her words turning into a fiction in my head—forces the reader to question the veracity of all they have just read and all that remains. Paradoxically, the seed of doubt it sows further binds the narrator and her author: the former, after all, purports to be writing a form of fiction; the latter is a novelist. And the seed finds itself in a vast field of distrust in English itself—the very language the reader is, presumably, reading the phrase in. When they learn that Blue Light Hours was self-translated by Dantas Lobato from English into Portuguese, that field blooms. The parallel version of the text, published near-simultaneously in Brazil as Horas Azuis, raises a litany of questions.
How is the English, which recounts conversations in Portuguese, distorted? Are we to believe it is more ‘fictional’ than even the narrator suggests? Is the Portuguese more raw or more convoluted, the translation of a translation? How do these mirrored novels differ? How do they transform the narrator, and the writer herself?
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For the most part, the slight variations between Blue Light Hours and Horas Azuis are expected. The Portuguese both loses specificity (“Goodwill” becomes a generic bazaar, “Fireball” becomes whiskey, gone are the labels of uptown or upstate New York) and gains it (“chocolate icing” becomes brigadeiro, delivery people are in fact deliverers of water and gas, “longing” becomes saudade). Measurements are adjusted (miles to kilometers, and Farenheit to Celsius); and additional context, when needed, is added (salt melts ice in winter!).
Every once in a while, for the close reader, a small swap results in a larger change in meaning. “I’m becoming my own person,” a phrase spoken by the daughter to her mother, becomes “Estou me tornando uma pessoa melhor”—I’m becoming a better person; frogs, for some unknown reason, become crickets; a gut-punch of a phrase about the mother’s “low standards” in coffee is missing from the translation. And when, in Blue Light Hours, people are introduced as white (“a group of white boys smok[ing] weed by the door;” “a white boy with hipster glasses;” “the white kids from the lit department”) their race is either omitted or they are introduced as “muito branco(s)”—very white—in Horas Azuis, a subtle nod to how the narrator herself might be racialized differently in the United States as a Latina immigrant than how she might be categorized in a skin-tone obsessed Brazil.
Other times, as Hahn alludes, words carry a weight in Portuguese that is absent from the English. The mother’s bed, in the translation, is a “cama de casal” (a bed for two, a couple’s bed), emphasizing her solitude. Horas Azuis, the title, literally translates to “Blue Hours,” and though it’s missing the concept of “light,” it carries its own unique connotations of sorrow. In a 1998 ballad of the same name, the Brazilian singer Fagner croons: “Não vejo a cidade sem nós dois/Momentos depois/ Nem sei quem tu és/ A chuva cai…Volta meu amor/ Eu quero te ver…/ Não sei te esquecer” (“I don’t see the city without us two/ Moments later/ I don’t even know who you are/ The rain falls…Come back my love/ I want to see you…/ I don’t know how to forget you”). For those who recognize it, it is a beautiful parallel: an homage by Dantas Lobato to a fellow northeastern artist, and one of many truths found in translation rather than lost to it.
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In 2000, just after she won a Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies and over a decade before she authored her first published translation, Jhumpa Lahiri wrote an essay grappling with her creation of “Indian landscape[s]” and Indian characters in English. The dialogues imagined in her head in Bengali, she noted, were translated, fictionalized, English imposed on mouths that did not speak it, words replaced. It was “disorienting…something of a betrayal.” But that feeling is what marked her writing as a work of translation—even if the prose was only ever written in one language—of place, speech, emotion, culture, worlds. In Blue Light Hours, Dantas Lobato—by way of the narrator—mourns this same fabrication, though the novel would not exist without it. And in Horas Azuis, she mourns it in other words, in an even more nuanced spiral.
Take, for instance, the passage cited earlier, but in the Portuguese version:
Ela disse, baixinho, Você acha que vou me acostumar com isso um dia? Com minha mãe estar morta? Minha única mãe.
Apesar de ela não ter dito nenhuma dessas palavras, não exatamente, outra camada de distância entre nós. Ela disse alguma outra coisa, em um português só dela, my only mother. Eu que a ouvia em inglês às vezes, essa língua que tomava conta de tudo, e a traduzia de volta para o português, suas palavras virando uma ficção na minha mente.
Here is how I would translate—with the phrases not included in the original English novel in bold:
She said, softly, Do you think I’ll get used to it one day? To my mother being dead? My only mother.
Though she didn’t speak any of those words, not exactly, another layer of distance between us. She said something else, in a Portuguese that is hers alone, minha única mãe. I was the one hearing her in English sometimes, this language that was taking over everything, and translating her back into Portuguese, her words becoming a fiction in my head.
Horas Azuis, a self-translation of an English manuscript that is based on real and imagined conversations in Portuguese, exposes an additional cycle in the fictionalization of dialogue—and thus the limits of rewriting it, regardless of language. First, our Portuguese-speaking narrator recognizes that even within the same dialect, there are different languages (her mother’s Portuguese, for instance, is different from her own; it is “hers alone”), making wholly faithful reproduction impossible. And second, she reveals that in conversation, she not only hears her mother’s Portuguese phrases in English, but re-processes them as her own Portuguese self-translations. It’s a game of telephone, but with herself, in her mind.
The result of that game is that dialogue, emotion, and characters remain—even in the language they are pictured in—a fiction. It is left unclear, intentionally, where the translation of imagination ends and the translation of language begins. Instead, from the Portuguese novel, we learn that the English narrator is unreliable only in the sense that she is a writer, tasked with the impossible undertaking that is replicating experience. Her döppleganger is unreliable for the same reason. For Dantas Lobato, there is no authentic original anymore because the mother tongue itself is rewritten.
Like most developments in Blue Light Hours, this rewriting cuts both ways. The daughter’s endless translations reshape her Portuguese, but the mother’s fantastic notions, at first denied, come true in English, too. Not long after dismissing her mom’s question about feeling “buried alive,” the daughter describes walking in snow as being “buried up to [her] shins” and as sinking into the “plain landscape [that] tried to bury [her].” She denies that she is the “child alone in a palace” that her mother deems her to be in autumn, but recounts her next summer as that of “a kid playing grown-up in an oversized house…unsupervised play.” Mother and daughter—and their speech—redefine each other. Reading both novels reveals just how much the author, her narrator, and their relationships to language have evolved.
I return here to Lahiri, who after writing four books in English went on to not only study but write novels in Italian and then self-translate one of them into English, because she may be the best living point of comparison for Dantas Lobato’s craft. She is certainly the most well-known, celebrated contemporary self-translator: Dantas Lobato herself tweeted “call me Jhumpa Lahiri from now on” in a thread about her mirrored novels. And Lahiri articulates—in a book chapter written in English, but based on diary entries in Italian—precisely the tumult we witness in Dantas Lobato’s Brazilian-American narrator. Just swap out Italian for English, and English for Portuguese:
When an author migrates into another language, the subsequent crossing into the former language might be regarded, by some, as a crossing back, an act of return, a coming home. This idea is false…[For me] the idea of ‘coming home’ was no longer an option. I had gone too deep into Italian, and so English no longer represented the reassuring, essential act of coming up for air. My center of gravity had shifted; or at least, it had begun to shift back and forth.
Halfway through Blue Light Hours, a card the daughter mailed home for Christmas arrives, two months too late, to Brazil. Her mother begins, proudly, to read it out loud on a call—“Querida mãe, Feliz Natal” (Dear mom, Merry Christmas)—but then cannot make out a single word that follows, even though the note is in Portuguese. She holds the letter up to the camera for the daughter to read, only she does not understand anything either. The language pools. Portuguese—even her own words, written in her own penmanship, fail to transport her home. You are not the person who wrote this, the new shapes seem to say. Still, she keeps trying to read. “I tried to make sense of what I’d written, but all I saw was a blur,” the daughter narrates. “Neat lines of blur.”
It’s an obvious metaphor, but an intentional one—for transformation, for the ways English has restructured her relationship to Portuguese, for the way translation, as Walter Benjamin says, is “charged with…watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.” For Dantas Lobato, and for her narrator, there is no English text without its Portuguese counterpart, no story without an origin, no daughter without mother, no immigrant without birthplace—but there is also no immigrant without a new home, no daughter without an identity of her own, no story without a middle, and an end, and no Portuguese, anymore, without English layered atop it, redefining, translating, forcing a fictionalizing cycle. There is no “life on the computer” and life off it, no English-speaking narrator separate from her mother, no reality separate from fantasy, no literature without translation, no—as the narrator claims—“two lives” within herself. There is just the one. It is messy, and it is beautiful.
“I am…living in two languages at once,” Dantas Lobato tweeted last spring, while translating Blue Light Hours. “The way god (aka my characters) intended.”