Good God, it's been over two months since I've posted. Fortunately, I have excuses other than laziness. Two excuses, to be precise, and they're pretty good ones.
The first excuse is that I spent a good part of the autumn translating Orlando da Costa's novel O Signo da Ira from Portuguese to English. Frederick Noronha, the head of the publishing house Goa1556, asked me over the summer if I'd be interested in doing so. I said sure, why not, sounds interesting- about what you'd expect for a request with no deadline attached. Little did I know that Frederick wanted the book in time for António Costa's visit to India in early January. António Costa is Orlando da Costa's son and the Prime Minister of Portugal, and my translation of his father's book was given to him as a gift during an official meeting with Narendra Modi, India's PM.
While it's an unexpected honor to have produced something relatively high profile- not only was the book a diplomatic present, the Portuguese original has quite a reputation in the world of Goan literature- the version given to the Portuguese PM isn't as polished as I'd like, and at some point there should be a better edition coming out. That said, I'm pretty proud of what I managed to pull off, and the response so far has been positive.
My second excuse is Avante, Goeses, Avante!: The Portuguese Poetry of Laxmanrao Sardessai. I've been working on this book for a while, and it was released a couple weeks ago. It's published by Goa1556 (it was while working on this project that Frederick Noronha brought up O Signo da Ira), and I recently went to Goa to launch the book with a talk at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research and give a presentation on Sardessai's poetry at the II Simpósio Internacional: "Goa: Culturas, Línguas, e Literaturas", which was immensely gratifying to attend. At the book launch I even had the honor of meeting one of Laxmanrao's sons, Shashikant, and several of his grandchildren, as well as Sérgio Carvalho, who as a young man ("o tornatto", as Sardessai called him) had a poem dedicated to him.
It was a fantastic trip. Everyone I met was incredibly welcoming and gracious, the Goan landscape was all kinds of enchanting, and I got to speak Portuguese regularly with folks from around the world. I look forward to not only strengthening my ties to Goa and the community built around Goan Lusophone literature, but simply returning and getting to know the place better. Brief as it was, my time there opened all sorts of doors; once I know what's behind some of them, I'll let y'all know.
That's about it for now. If you're interested in getting hold of either book, let me know, or contact Goa1556 directly. I suspect they'll be available on Amazon or via other channels, especially in India, soon, but for now it's old-fashioned word of mouth and individual delivery.
Later, dudes!
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