Translating Race: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin

I translated and revised most of Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin while staying with a friend in Brooklyn, New York, for an impromptu residency. I drank too much coffee and typed all afternoon, until I could no longer process the emotions in the book and had to stop for the day. After dinner, each night, my friend and I walked her dog to the park, and that was my chance to see the cherry blossoms in bloom, people-watch, get some fresh air, and think about something else. Instead, all I did was think about my translation of this book. Bits of dialogue that sounded too stiff, too formal, too dry. Sounds I had yet to capture. Metaphors I hadn’t figured out how to land. As we walked by the bougie kosher coffee shops in Crown Heights, I talked to my friend about this book she hadn’t read, by an author she didn’t know, in a language she didn’t speak, from a country she’d never visited. From the outside, it might have looked futile, but every time we talked answers came to me. Translation (and writing) has a way of inserting itself into my daily life: phrases will come to me in the shower, while I wash the dishes, while I chop vegetables for dinner, or sip wine with a friend. My body relaxes and my mind tunes to a character’s voice like a radio. On one of those nights, while my friend’s dog ran free in the off-leash area, I talked about struggling to find the right translation of the title. The original title “O avesso da pele” sounds almost anatomical to me, the way Kerry James Marshall’s painting “Beauty Examined” manages to be both an aesthetic and sociological experience, a painting of a nude “female blk subject” posing as scientific illustration. It sounds both academic and artistic, both figurative and literal: it evoked the opposite of skin and racism, made me imagine someone with their skin put on inside out. “The Opposite of Skin” captures one half of the meaning but not the other. Same for […]

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