Correio newspaper | Juan Cárdenas: “I discovered that Machado was a writing genius”

Translator of Machado de Assis, Colombian writer was at the 22nd Paraty International Literary Festival (Flip)

20 years ago, Colombian writer Juan Cárdenas discovered Machado de Assis when translating the work of the Witcher of Cosme Velho into Spanish. “I discovered a genius”, he said during the 22nd Paraty International Literary Festival (Flip). “Thanks to Machado, I began to understand situations in the region where I was born, Popayán, in the interior of Colombia.”

Cárdenas also translated works by Eça de Queiroz, João Gilberto Noll and Guimarães Rosa. It was, therefore, almost impossible for the prose of these classics not to influence his personal writing.

How does the work of a translator influence your text?

The cuisine of my writing has always been translation, with its rhythm, its syntax. And the musicality of other languages ​​infects my own language. It is something similar to the work of a medium, when tuning in to spiritual energies.

Were Portuguese-speaking authors, such as Machado de Assis, Guimarães Rosa, Eça de Queiroz, even more decisive?

Yes, they are a great food. In the case of Guimarães, it is sometimes frustrating. This relationship with a text that is practically untranslatable is incredible. Already at the beginning of the work, you know it won’t work. But this impossibility is also important.

And what about Machado?

Machado’s universe is very close to that of the place where I was born and raised, a region in Colombia marked by the traumas of slavery. In fact, as the political, social and economic organization of the region, for centuries, was linked to the structure of farms, reading Casa Grande & Senzala, by Gilberto Freyre, is like discovering something very familiar to us. And, with Machado I began to understand my local situations. That was the first impression. Years later, I discovered Machado’s incredible sophistication in terms of literary procedure. I always say that Brazil had a Jorge Luis Borges before the emergence of Borges himself. See Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas: it is a text that, beneath the curves, is cervantine in playing with the planes of reality. He simply brought Cervantes up to date in the 19th century. Machado was a writing genius.

In your work, how do you manage to reconcile fantastic events with everyday facts, without one contrasting with the other?

It was a Brazilian writer who gave me the key to understanding the opposition between reality and fantasy. When I translated Hotel Atlântico, by João Gilberto Noll, right at the beginning I came across a completely everyday, normal situation, which turns into something completely strange. And always on the plane of reality, Noll does not make a cut to introduce the fantastic. As a result, the perception of reality becomes much richer.

Can the advancement of technology make the work of writers easier?

I don’t worry about technological advances because AI proves that machines know more and more about everything. And, in literature, it’s better not to know everything. Hence the human advantage. Fantasy is very important today, as is the projection of desire.