“I am terribly, essentially mortal,” Clarice Lispector said in a 1977 interview. She was explaining why she would never join the Brazilian Academy of Letters if she were invited. The authors who become ABL members are called “immortals” although the works by some of them have been forgotten. Before her, in 1949, Groucho Marx had said the same thing in a different way: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.”
Clarice continued: “I wouldn’t like it if, at the slightest sneeze, people started ogling my seat.” In a way, she was as prescient as Madame Carlota, a pivotal character from her novel The Hour of the Star, published that year. The writer would die shortly after that interview. Rachel de Queiroz would become the first woman to wear the uniform at the ABL’s Petit Trianon — also in 1977. Being terribly mortal, Clarice placed herself above the club’s immortal affairs.
Jimmy Carter was determined to do the opposite. He died a centenarian, long after being admitted and leaving the Club of US Presidents. Jimmy arrived there in the same 1977 that saw Clarice bid farewell. He lost to Ronald Reagan and became enshrined as an anomaly, a one-term president. But he managed to spend more time as an ex-president, an occupation that allowed him to build houses around the world, advocate for the creation of a Palestinian state, climb the Kilimanjaro, and take snorkeling lessons. He came face to face with the guinea worm and beat it. When his Carter Center began their efforts against the parasite in 1989, it was infecting one million people around the world. In 2024, there were just seven reported infections (2024).
At the age of 100, Jimmy also buried at least two journalists who wrote his obituaries. Articles about the deaths of famous people, especially those about the very old or seriously ill ones, are usually locked and loaded in the drawers of newsrooms, waiting for the slightest sneeze from their subjects to be published. Sometimes editors get carried away and kill the guy off in advance, as they did with Mark Twain and Steve Jobs. Jimmy, however, got the last sigh and the last laugh. Roy Reed, who co-wrote the obituary for the New York Times, passed away in 2017. Edward Walsh, who co-wrote the Washington Post piece, died in 2014.
Jimmy was one of a few US presidents who died in late December, which is usually a burden for journalists worldwide at the end-of-year newsroom shifts. In Brazil, only one president has become a member of the end-of-year grim reaping so far. The last general-president of the military dictatorship, João Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo, died on Christmas Eve in 1999, much to his possible annoyance.
In that long 1977, he had already sent a cordial message to reporters: “Do you want to do me a favor? Forget me!” He was a presidential candidate then, waiting to be picked by a council of fellow generals. In January 1985, in a farewell message to Brazilians and to the military regime, he dispensed with pleasantries but remained consistent: “Forget me. By the way, I asked for this from the beginning, remember?” So, a December 24 death was a huge mistake. The other one was letting himself be recorded bad-mouthing everything and everyone during a barbecue in 1987. The video ended up on a major TV news show as soon as the coffin was closed.
Mistakes are made. The hard part is admitting one’s own fallibility. For Figueiredo, hell was everybody else. Carter acknowledged his errors. Looking back at her life, Lispector did not pull the self-inflicted punches: “I spent my life trying to correct the mistakes I made in my eagerness to get them right. In trying to correct one mistake, I made another. I am an innocent culprit.”
Other mortals have had this sort of epiphany. Sometimes, they need to see to stop believing. Jeran Campanella, 165 thousand followers on YouTube, led other flat-earthers on a tour to Antarctica to see if the Midnight Sun, the one that never sets, was true. If it was, the Earth could not be flat. Jeran came, saw it, and announced: “Sometimes you are wrong in life.” It was a dignified way to leave the stage, terribly mortal, Clarice would say, but essentially human.
Special Agent Darius Michaud (Terry O’Quinn) examines the vending machine closely. When he sees the explosive device, his face turns somber. Another agent asks if he can defuse it. He nods and tells everyone to leave the building. Alone in the room, he sits in front of the vending machine, buries the head in his hands, and waits. His hunched torso is framed on both sides by carefully stacked packs of processed food resembling the sins of good men. There is no way all that neatness can be disturbed. But the bomb goes off.
Later in The X-Files: Fight the Future (Rob Bowman, 1998), the audience learns that Michaud was there to guarantee the outcome as part of a cover-up in a sprawling conspiracy involving extraterrestrials and a cabal of powerful men — they are all men. Heavy RFK Jr. stuff. But the image of a man just waiting for disaster to happen is powerful enough on its own.
You might think contemporary political leaders would do anything to avoid explosions, especially in the face of scorched-earth opponents and neverending scrutiny in social media. This is also the age of polycrisis, a tentacled beast shaped by climate emergency, economic instability, and geopolitical conflict. You might think a politician would avoid another item on this list. Apparently, that is not what Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva thought.
In June, the Brazilian president became aware of allegations that one of his ministers, Silvio Almeida, had sexually harassed another member of his cabinet, Anielle Franco. The incident had apparently taken place at the end of 2023. Franco confided it to some colleagues, then to higher-up government officials. Almeida denied any wrongdoing whatsoever. The personal details of all involved made it even more of a mess. Almeida, a distinguished black professor, held the human rights ministry. Franco, also black and a rising political star herself, was the racial equality minister. She is also the sister of Marielle Franco, the Rio de Janeiro councilwoman who was murdered in 2018 for getting in the way of local organized crime.
There is more. According to off-the-record accounts, Almeida and Franco were the only black ministers in this administration and not exactly allies. Franco was the first lady’s favorite. Almeida was sort of detached from his peers despite a discreet but powerful public performance.
Since being elected, Lula has fought tooth and nail against a conservative Congress that managed to snatch most of the federal budget mainly for obscure transfers that benefit municipal allies, the so-called secret budget. This environment gives him little wiggle room for his desired policies.
Despite some good news (formal employment growth, heating economy), June presented many challenges for the president. Reports showed a record-breaking semester of wildfires, the speaker of the House of Representatives blocked or made difficult the voting of many economic bills, inflation projection rose in the aftermath of massive floods in Southern Brazil, the communications minister — a political appointment from an allied right-wing party — was the target of (another) investigation on corruption, Congress almost voted a bill that would charge aborting rape victims with homicide, Congress insisted on maintaining damaging tax breaks that benefited selected lobbying industries, and neighboring Venezuela was gearing up for yet another shady election. It was against this background that Lula learned about the Almeida affair, sat it out, and moved on.
Sitting things out is a staple of Brazilian politics. Just look at the response to the floods, landslides, and droughts that plague parts of the country with increased intensity each year. ‘We didn’t know it would be so damaging this time’ is the standard reaction, as if environmentalists and scientists have not been making models and warning that these things would happen exactly like that for years. Organized crime terrorizes another state? Does crime continue to be one of Brazilians’ top concerns? This is political poison. Leave it to the states to deal with it, even if the issue requires concerted national effort. Too much trouble! It is the governors’ responsibility, anyway. If it spills on the federal government’s approval ratings, send in the military for the umpteenth fruitless time — bread and, you know, circus. The problem only gets worse, but one hopes it will drip onto the next hapless chap. Or it might settle down on its own; somebody somewhere might do something. Thus, Michaud waits.
Then came September. Reporters knocked on Franco’s door again, but she decided to remain silent; that is, she did not confirm the rumor, and she did not deny it either. Meanwhile, the news site UOL published an investigation about moral harassment in the human rights ministry. Dozens of former staff accused the minister and two senior officials of fostering a toxic workplace. Me Too Brasil, an NGO, disclosed other women’s accounts of sexual harassment involving Almeida. Another female politician also posted a video revealing she had been a victim. Finally, Franco came forward and confirmed the rumors about her.
Almeida reacted in the worst possible way. He used official channels to refute the accusations. His defense in a nutshell: all those claims were false, and he was being persecuted. Worst of all, he threatened to throw the federal controller at Me Too Brasil and used the race card even in the face of black victims. This is even more baffling because Almeida is himself a lawyer. If anything, he was reinforcing the moral harassment accusations against him.
Federal police disclosed that they had been aware of the incident since January but did not open an investigation because they were not prompted to do so. Apparently, a journalistic exposé convinced them otherwise.
The outcry was loud, clear, and immediate. Rumor has it Janja, the first lady, tilted the balance decisively. By the end of the week, amid pressure from all sides of the political spectrum, Lula fired Almeida. “The president considers the situation untenable considering the nature of the sexual harassment accusations,” read his official statement.
Ironically, Lula was spared a bigger embarrassment because all the other issues beyond his control converged in the same pivotal week. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes had just shut down XTwitter. This was the latest round after Elon Musk repeatedly refused to comply with judicial orders and suspend far-right users who had been doxxing and threatening public officials. Jair Bolsonaro had called his supporters to march for the impeachment of Justice Moraes in Sao Paulo on the following Sunday, Brazilian Independence Day. Those very literal fires from June? Now, they were breaking new records. Almost two-thirds of the country was engulfed in smoke, a historical drought stoked the flames of criminal fires and dried up Amazon rivers — another severe climactic emergency was born. The National Congress, as usual, ignored all of this to prop up a bill that would pardon Bolsonaro and the January 8 rioters that had attempted a coup d’etat — the police investigation is still ongoing. Only a handful of opposition lawmakers bothered to shout ‘Hypocrisy’ and boost their personal brand when the Almeida scandal flared up. Still, the whole affair left a bruise. Lula is a seventy-something leader who has already been through two corruption scandals, ended up in jail once, and is seriously considering running for office again. He cannot afford additional bruises.
Obviously, Lula could have avoided the risk by dealing with the issue immediately. There is even a precedent for this in recent Brazilian history.
The Itamar Maneuver
In October 1993, Itamar Franco (no relation to Anielle) was in a tough spot. The former vice-president became president when his predecessor, Fernando Collor de Mello, was impeached the previous year. His cabinet, which included soon-to-be Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, had been busy trying to tame soaring inflation, a legacy from the military regime. The inflation rate was much lower than its peak (6800%) in 1990, but 2000% is still not a comfortable scenario. Congress was hostile and dealt Franco several legislative defeats. A Special Investigation Committee in Congress were probing their peers for siphoning money from the federal budget. (Yes, reader, yes.) Henrique Hargreaves, Franco’s Chief of Staff, was mentioned during the proceedings. The press was on it.
Franco was on it, too. Hargreaves, a close friend, vehemently denied any wrongdoing. Still, the president asked him to step down to prove his innocence. If he succeeded, Franco told Hargreaves, he would get his job back. Four months later, Hargreaves was cleared of the accusations and got his job back despite being a fairly ineffective chief of staff.
His frankness made Franco immune to this kind of blackmail. In 1992, he appointed Jutahy Magalhaes Junior his social works minister. Antonio Carlos Magalhaes (no relation to Jutahy), the all-powerful governor of Bahia and Magalhaes Junior’s political enemy, did not like it the least. ACM claimed the minister was dirty, and he had proof. Franco asked the governor to bring him the evidence. So, ACM made a show of crossing the Three Powers Square towards the presidential palace with a political entourage in tow to deliver a pink folder full of alleged evidence to the president. The stunt backfired when the governor stormed into the president’s office only to find him surrounded by dozens of journalists and photographers. Could the governor present the damning evidence to the media? ACM stuttered and deflated and left after coming up with some feeble excuse.
No heavy scandal tainted Franco during his brief mandate. Yet his successors would scarcely borrow from his book. The sit-out remains the political template, a symptom of esprit de corps prone to deviancy in all levels of the public — and private — sphere. Franco did not throw his friend under the bus. Still, he made his minister understand the power of appearances for political leaders, even if he refused to condemn Hargreaves personally. Rather, the president encouraged him to submit to due process, as it should be. If there are any sins, let them be purged.
Today, sins cannot be so easily concealed behind the facade of goodmen. They pile up wobbly in dark rooms, waiting for seismic rumors to bring them down. In this day and age, tremors register everywhere. Unless you are covering up for an extraterrestrial conspiracy, your worst line of action is waiting for the room to crumble to pieces.
Palimpsests were manuscripts written on reused material, where traces of erased texts could be identified underneath others. This recycling exploded in the Middle Ages when obtaining Egyptian papyrus got increasingly difficult. So people re-used it, complicating the idea of "original" — a concept that was only developed from the 14th century onwards.
The word palimpsest comes from the Greek for "scraped or scraped again," which is also a nice illustration of the translation craft. Each bit of a language, be it words or numbers, carries with it the weight of its culture: the contexts for its emergence, the reasons for one meaning to be adopted instead of another by a considerable number of people, its relationship with other words in phrasing, what was before and what ceased to be afterward. When someone translates a text into another language, they need to make room for another world with its contexts, cultural differences, etc.
One letter stands between the Arabic words حب (hob) and حرب (harb). It carries a multitude of meanings lost in their translation to "love" and "war." The acronym of the Palestinian organization Hamas coincides with حماس, "enthusiasm" or "zeal" in Arabic, which is how they would like to be seen. But Israeli Jews pronounce their name as חָמָֽס (khamas), "violence" in Hebrew. The Spanish word jamás (never) has nothing to do with either of them.
Every translation error could lead to a battle in a minefield, especially in the Middle East. After an explosion at a hospital in Gaza in October 2023, the international press reported 500 casualties, citing the Hamas Ministry of Health as their source. Soon, an avalanche of articles condemned journalists for reproducing these numbers so quickly. Critics overlooked the fact that the UN, the US State Department, and Israeli intelligence themselves also use data from the Palestinian agency, as well as from any other territory involved in a conflict. In the end, the Ministry of Health had nothing to do with the debacle. The numbers came from a poor English translation of a video posted by Al-Jazeera on XTwitter. The ministry spokesman had mentioned ضحية (victims), which means all those who suffered the consequences of the attack, both dead and wounded. No one had bothered to attempt their own translation from the primary source.
False cognates never started a war, but they have provided the missing spark for those searching for an excuse.
In the second half of the 19th century, the territorial expansion of the Prussian Empire was a major concern for the French. They had already managed to get Prince Leopold, from the family of King William I of Prussia, not to step onto the throne in Spain, but they were not satisfied. On July 13, 1870, the French ambassador cornered the king during his royal stroll, asking for guarantees that no one from the Prussian dynasty would ever claim the Spanish throne again. The king said he couldn't accept those terms and asked Chancellor Bismarck to inform the public about the event. Bismarck provided an abridged version of the incident with some surgical flourishings, giving the impression that the king had "refused to receive the ambassador”. Furthermore, William, still according to Bismarck, "let him know through an adjutant that His Majesty had nothing further to communicate to the ambassador." The wording was deliberate: an adjutant is a high-ranking officer in German but a mere orderly in French. Hungry for a pretext and drunk with jingoism, France declared mobilization the next day, July 14, the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille. As for Bismarck, he got exactly what he wanted: a war in a word.
New buildings
Ferdinand de Saussure split the linguistic sign, the element at the base of language, into two: words or signifiers and the images they evoke or signifieds. It is a two-story building; one level lodges form and the other one is for content. Now, try building a replica at another place with its own rules, terrain constraints, and bureaucratic restrictions.
Poets and lyricists work hard in this complex branch of engineering –– and their translators work harder. Chico Buarque played with the Portuguese homonyms Cálice (chalice) and cale-se (shut up!) in his song to fool censors from the military regime in the 1970s. How do you sing this in Mandarin in Hong Kong? Paula Fernandes gave up on any meaning when turning Lady Gaga's "We're far from the shallow now" into "Juntos e shallow now" (Together and shallow now). In Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll made sense of non-existent words by placing them into logically structured verses. A translator of such texts needs to pay attention both to the original meaning and the sound of the words to find a similar flavor in their language. Is it pleasant? Is it uncomfortable? Is it alliteration? Is it difficult to pronounce when you read it?
(You can read translations of Jabberwocky in several languages here, including Brazilian Portuguese by poet Augusto de Campos.)
"Tone is fundamental," explains Regina Przybycien, translator of Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska's poetry into Portuguese. "Every translation is an attempt to recreate the meaning of the original in another language, with other sounds and poetic resources."
Every translation is an attempt.
"Keeping the references of the original culture and using explanatory notes seems like a very unpoetic option," Przybycien continues. "On the other hand, using references from one's own culture, which the reader can identify, displaces the meaning and inevitably creates other connotations."
It is a tightrope act, whether in poetry or prose. Some translators have the help of the authors themselves, which does not eliminate the risk of controversy. Deborah Smith was criticized for adding words to the sparse Korean writing of Han Kang in books such as The Vegetarian. However, the two of them worked on the process together and continue to do so in a relationship that brings the co-authorship of a translator to an unusual spotlight. Others have had a more peaceful marriage. Lia Wyler kept in touch with J.K. Rowling to reinvent the persnickety-slippery neologisms, wordplays, and spell phrases from the Harry Potter universe in Brazilian Portuguese. French translator Alice Raillard became such a long-time friend of Brazilian author Jorge Amado that they co-authored a book: Conversations avec Alice Raillard, in which he’s credited as the author even though she interviewed him.
All these people succeeded in making choices as they negotiated with their fellow authors: you give me an image, and I’ll pick the most telling piece of it on my side of the divide. All the rest must remain latent in the shadows. Others might have to do without the author’s input, but in any case, something in the original’s gotta give.
It’s a lot of metaphors. Here. Let’s try a hands-on practice with a single sentence:
Deu-lhe Quincas uma cabeçada, a inana começou.
Deceptively simple but aren’t they all? It’s a quote from The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray, a 1959 novella by Amado and one of the finest picaresque works you’ll read. Some context is necessary before we sink our teeth into the sentence. We already have a clever title here. Its first English-language translator, Barbara Shelby, opted for The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell, which has a nice ring to it. In his 2012 translation, Gregory Rabassa chose to emphasize the main character’s stubbornness — he was served water by accident and he had vowed to forsake non-alcoholic beverages for the remnant of his life — with the image of a protesting donkey hence Water-Bray.
“The Death of Quincas Wateryell” art by Carybé
The novella tells the story of a man who might have died or just played a prank on friends and family. His lowlife friends decide to sneak him out of his wake for a night out in the rough, decayed city center of Salvador, the capital of Bahia. If this sounds like Weekend at Bernie’s meets Cannery Row, the writing on the pages screams otherwise. First, there is the unreliable narrator from the harbor area who claims he is just stating the facts. As he spins his yarn, he begs the reader to reach their own conclusion. Then there is the enigma of the main character, a retired civil servant who decides to leave his middle-class family seemingly out of the blue to live as a prankster hobo at the city center. Finally, Amado alternates active and passive voice and employs indirect speech to keep Quincas’s fate ambiguous.
And we’re back to the quote above. Quincas and his friends have just arrived at a seedy bar on their way to the seafront. A group of drunken sailors is looking for trouble. One of them trips over Quincas’s stretched leg and threatens him. Per the sentence, Quincas replies with a head-butt and the show starts — that’s the gist of it but the sentence doesn’t stand in a vacuum. It poses three immediate challenges to its translator: (a) oral language, which inevitably comes with local flavor and its own musical flow; (b) the lack of connectors (when, after…) enhances the sense of movement — the whole scene, which is to say the entire paragraph, is very kinetic; and (c) there’s the word inana, which means ‘trouble, disorder, chaos’ and evokes the nasal comicality of ‘banana’ in Portuguese as well. It’s a lot to unpack from seven words. Then there is the imagined reader, who hails from different backgrounds and comes with their own expectations, all identified, sorted, and catalogued by the publisher and the editor in a neat market package — a process that writer Percival Everett and filmmaker Cord Jefferson mocked in literature (Erasure) and film (American Fiction).
When he translated Amado’s novel for the Penguin Classics series, Rabassa, who died in 2016, was hardly a dilettante. He’d been the first receiver of the National Book Award for Translated Literature (for Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch)and he had works by Clarice Lispector, Osman Lins, García Márquez, Machado de Assis, Eça de Queirós, and Amado himself under his belt. So he offered this English version of our quote:
Quincas bumped him with his head, and the fun began.
‘Bump’ is an interesting choice. It suggests both a deliberate strike and an accidental hit, the kind of ambiguity that is absent in the very intentional original sentence. It also slights the unreliable narrator in the language level: this is too wordy for someone who’s telling a tale (tall or not, it’s up to you) in the middle of a bustling city street. A well-behaved ‘and’ connects the first and the second clauses, which softens the rough edges of the more explosive Brazilian Portuguese version. ‘And the fun began’ is certainly not ‘all hell broke loose’. Through Rabassa’s words, the English-version reader sees a different kind of action. It’s Nick Carraway describing Tom Buchanan’s shenanigans.
Betrayals
“Translator, traitor,” the saying goes (much smoother as the original Traduttore, traditore), and it's not news. In 1539, Niccolò Franco wrote: "My dear traitors, if you don't know how to do anything other than betray a book, go shit in the dark!" He ended up dead not for inaccurate translations but for defaming a pope.
On the other hand, Antoine Galland betrayed and lived to tell the tales of The Thousand and One Nights. When he introduced the set of traditional Arabic narratives to the Western world in the 17th century, he added stories, omitted poems and obscenities, cut passages considered long, and so on; in short, he pulled a makeover of his host's home without consent. C.K. Scott Moncrieff did no differently with Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Cathay (1915), Ezra Pound's collection of poems from classical Chinese tradition, was based on notes by sinologist Ernest Fenollosa since Pound didn't understand an atom of the originals. You can't get much more palimpsest than this.
Others are more diligent, detectives looking for clues. When translating Machado De Assis's The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas into English, Flora Thomson-Deveaux came across the word calabouço. She could have settled for the medieval and generic 'dungeon.' However, she suspected there was more to it. She was right. After some research, she found out that Calabouço (with capital c) was a state-run prison where enslaved Blacks were taken to be punished. Although Machado had written it in lowercase, Thomson-Deveaux settled on "the Dungeon."
And what is an original after all? If we go back further, we realize that the word at the beginning of the process is an imperfect instrument itself. Think of something like malandragem. Depending on each person's experience, background, and moral standards they have developed, it becomes a positive or negative concept: petty crime, idleness and deception, or improvised strategies to fight oppression. Even if someone writes a treatise on the evils of malandragem, the path from their head to the reader's head through the words on blank paper is long enough for the opposite interpretation to seep in. "As I have loved you, so you must love one another," but how many deadly crusades have been fought over these words?
Fabrications
Saint Jerome became the patron saint of translators after taking on the tricky task of translating the Bible into Latin in the fourth century. His approach to tackling the four Gospels, the Old Testament, and some apocryphal texts can be best summed up in his translating principle: Magis sensum e sense quam ex verbum verbum (more sense for sense than word for word).1 He was a remarkably learned man who would confront previous Greek and Latin versions with Hebrew texts to shape his biblical effort, the Vulgata. Caravaggio's Saint Jerome Writing shows the old man in action under the hollow gaze of a skull on his desk, a symbol of his mortality but also the remains of earlier translations.
Eventually, all those layers and layers of translation, interpretation, and adaptation pile up to create senses of their own. As it survived through the ages, the Vulgata is not entirely Jerome’s work. Parts of the New Testament were attributed to some of his contemporaries. Even Caravaggio’s view of Jerome has been disputed. The painting ‘in the style of Caravaggio’ could be the work of a later-age artist, Jusepe de Ribera.
An entire church emerged from a translated verse in the King James Bible. In Mark 16:18, Jesus says that those who spread the gospel "shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them." In twentieth-century Appalachia, this led to the founding of snake-handling cults such as the Church of God with Signs Following, in which the faithful remove snakes and cobras from their cages and raise them into the air because the Bible told them so. Or maybe not.
In other versions of the text, translators chose to handle the Greek word αρούσίν differently. They followed other passages bearing its root: "kill," "take," "remove," instead of "take up." In addition, verse 18 is apocryphal. The Gospel of Mark ends at chapter 16 verse 8, and everything that comes after it is a supplement to make it fit neatly with the other gospels in the New Testament. One might say that people have died because of a fuzzy translation of a forgery.
Amid all these risks, artificial intelligence comes in as a panacea for translation headaches. Large language models could arrive at more accurate interpretations from training with billions of texts and countless comparisons. Artificial neural network technologies promise to refine contexts. Generative AI would be able to surpass predictive AI in reaching the utopian perfect translation. However, languages are not an exact science, much less with collaborative crowds. An error within a corpus can multiply simply because several people followed the choice of one interpreter, contaminating the AI's database. And these models perform poorly around all that space between the signifier, the signified, and all the context that lies in the middle. Since they cannot extrapolate from uncertainty, they hallucinate strings that amount to no more than fantasies of meaning. People can extrapolate from experience and then some—literary creations are a case in point. There is a reason human translators hallucinate, and from the perspective of a large language model, it is utterly unreasonable.
When we use engines like Linguee and Reverso Context to search for compilations of translations, the results are collections of examples classified as relevant, thanks to a series of rigidly outlined parameters. But the final pick is ours based on subjective parameters that continue to evolve in unpredictable ways, from Finnegans Wake to the next generation’s relationship with words. The amount of nuance involved in a "truth," the connective tissues required to reach it transcend the machine's capacity. A poem, as Roland Barthes wrote, is a vast metaphor. The more original the poetic text, the more it will play with words in a manner that is alien to current machine learning.
"Instead of asking for the truth, [the machine] asks for the opinion of the entire planet, in fact of anyone who has ever written anything online," wrote language scientist Guillaume Deneufbourg in 2021. This observation persists after the arrival of ChatGPT and the most advanced machine learning techniques. Their truth is statistics, not meanings. So we're left once again by ourselves in our attempts at replicating word castles.
The imperfect science is hard but we press ahead. You have probably said or heard someone say that so-and-so words or phrases in one language don't have translations in any other language. This is a half-truth. Digging deep enough, you can say anything in any language, including the infamous saudade. ('Longing' actually works well.) It may take several words instead of one, but it can be done with some ingenuity.
On the other hand, we will continue to be victims of the old curse: one language is a lot, let alone two. 'Sorry' implies a penitent pain absent from the prouder desculpe, 'unguilt me.'There will always be something that eludes us. And that will betray us—or be used to betray us. It is also how the best translators do their job.
Balaio (noun) Masc. A wide-mouthed basket made of wicker, bamboo, or rope.
Crumbling memories
Brazilian streaming powerhouse Globoplay has recently made available a string of incomplete telenovelas from Globo Network in a collection called Fragments. Some of them comprise only a couple of episodes out of 100-plus-chapter long series. There are many reasons for that.
First, the elements. Globo studios were hit by two major fires that severely damaged its archive. A 1969 fire in Sao Paulo city center destroyed the local studio and another one in 1976 devastated its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. There is very little left of its 1960s lineup of shows. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of its Sunday variety-and-news show, Fantastico, Globo reconstructed its premiere with the help of AI. The network’s earliest surviving complete telenovela is from 1970.
Expensive storage and materials also played a role. Videotape was not cheap so people would recycle a lot. Unless someone comes up with some advanced technology that can dig through the layers of re-recorded magnetic tapes the way it became possible to do with palimpsests, a lot of cultural artifacts are lost forever. This is a global issue. To this day, BBC and independent sleuths go hunting for documentaries, Doctor Who episodes, entire shows that might help tell twentieth-century British and world history.
Finally, there is the whole idea of what deserves to be saved. Before the rise of Prestige TV, the television set was the “idiot box”, a vapid purveyor of mass entertainment — and mass entertainment rarely deserved Marxist analysis in those days. The Museum of Brazilian Television was founded in 1995. But television drama had long attracted writers and playwrights who wanted to experiment with the medium — and earn a steady salary. The Fragments project brings one of those experiments.
Braulio Pedroso’s O Rebu (1974-1975) is a 112-episode murder mystery that took place in a single day. It was both a whodunnit and a whowasdunawaywith: a corpse is floating in the pool in the first chapter (the only remaining episode along with chapter 92) but their identity is only revealed in chapter 50. It is such a juicy high concept that Globo remade it in 2014.
Stay mum
The federal police is investigating the illegal use of Israeli firm Cognyte’s spyware FirstMile by the Brazilian intelligence agency (Abin) to snoop on perceived enemies of the state like journalists, opposition politicians, the usual suspects in any democratic society, during the Bolsonaro years. Guess what, the three major telecoms in the country — Tim, Claro, and Vivo — were aware of the spying but failed to alert the telecommunications regulatory agency (Anatel), which started investigating the matter only in 2023. So far, the companies have not explained why they omitted this even though they worked to patch up the vulnerabilities in their systems. It is the kind of self-censorship you would see in the military regime days.
FirstMile is also the favored spyware of the Myanmar dictatorial regime.
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A short anthology of race quotes by Brazilian presidents
1994: “Another candidate told me I’ve got white hands. Not me! I’ve got mixed-color hands… I’ve always said this, I’ve always joked with myself. I have a foot in the kitchen [something like “some of my blood comes from the service quarters”]. I don’t have any prejudice.” (Soon-to-be President Fernando Henrique Cardoso)
2003: "Those who arrive at [apartheid-era Afrikaner-built] Windhoek don't seem to be in an African country. Few cities in the world are so clean, so architectonically beautiful as this or have such extraordinary people like this city." (President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, during an official visit to Namibia)
2017: “I visited a quilombo and the least heavy afro-descendant weighed seven arrobas [rougly 231 pounds in a weight unit used for cattle]. They do nothing! They are not even good for procreation.” (Soon-to-be President Jair Messias Bolsonaro)
2024: “This pretty lady here, I was wondering: What is she doing sitting there since I haven’t heard anyone saying her name? I said, Is she a singer? Is she gonna sing? No, there will be no music. So is she gonna bang the drums? Because an afro-descendant loves some drumbeat…” (President Lula, during a visit to a Volkswagen plant when he was introducing an award-winning trainee to the audience.)
Portuguese-language lessons through dubious headlines
Probably because they were dead?
“Study identifies brain and blood changes in individuals who committed suicide.”
They who? Some people shot police officers and died of spontaneous combustion, maybe. The editor and the writer were so shocked with the events that they killed the semicolon with their bare hands.
“Special police unit operation ends with two dead and one officer shot in Baixada Santista. Deaths occurred in Santos and São Vincente, areas under the new phase of Operation Shield; [sic] According to the Secretary of Public Security, they shot the police officers.”
Numerophilia
Dying species: in 1995, 3.3 billion checks were cleared in Brazil. In 2023, there were just 168.7 million of those.
Cleared in the playoffs: a Butantan Institute single-dose vaccine showed 79.6% efficacy against dengue in a phase 3 clinical trial. Single-dose vaccines usually work out better in vaccination programs.
Let them eat cake
Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, was wrongly cursed with a quote originated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau but there is nothing equivocal about these late adopters of the historical slight.
To celebrate Sao Paulo’s 470th anniversary, the city’s first lady, Regina Carnovale Nunes, listed a series of milestones on Instagram, all of them involved the consumption of luxury goods by the city’s elite. She edited her post after the backlash.
In January, when Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande Sul state, faced excess rainfall, the local daily decided to cover some entrepreneurship rather than citywide challenges: “Facing power outtage, hair salon takes to the street” was its headline story and the only one about the floods — a major issue — that merited a front-page treatment.
National politics, global wars, health care… you would be excused to think nothing serious was happening to most of the population in Porto Alegre those days.
“I learned what the Amazon rains are, what flying rivers are. I learned how it is important to integrate humans to biodiversity, I found out we are biodiversity.”
Sebastiao Salgado used these words to describe a series of photos that he snapped between 1998 and 2000 in the rainforest in his signature high-contrast black and white. Those flying rivers are water vapor that travels from the Amazon Basin to the south of the continent. They’ve been the secret weapon of Brazilian agriculture and its record harvests but you wouldn’t know this from the way the agriculture lobby sees the area.
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Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944)
History is written by the victors, the saying goes. Nowadays, victory tends to be a murky prospect—at least in functional democratic societies. The internet and 24/7 press coverage have complicated matters. Now, history is written by anyone who knows how to use these widespread tools. Gatekeeping turned into a swear word. Anyone can disturb the concept of victor anytime with the help of unwilling institutions themselves, which often refuse to believe—as a matter of principle—that they have been played like fine-tuned fiddles. So, there are no victors except for the bankers. After all, as everybody knows, the bank always wins.
When reality depends on whose political faith you swear by, history becomes a sport. People can deny the existence of facts on screens and printed paper with the certainty that there will be no retort. If there is one, they only need to stick to their guns with the most serene of faces. Do not blink. Madness becomes your challenger. Denial wins.
The word gaslighting, the act of convincing someone that what they believe is real is not, came from the British film Gaslight (A.R. Rawlinson, 1940) and its homonymous Hollywood remake (George Cukor, 1944). In Victorian London, a man marries an unaware woman because of her deceased aunt’s jewels, which were left somewhere in the house where they are living. Every time he goes treasure-hunting in the attic in the middle of the night, the lights in the house dim. To quash his wife’s suspicion, he gets creative: he convinces her no such thing is happening; it must be her nerves. In the American version, Charles Boyer plays the man, Gregory Anton, with such obvious intent that the audience would know he is up to no good even if they didn’t know he is up to no good. It doesn’t matter. He just needs to convince his target audience: Paula Alquist, the increasingly confused wife played by Ingrid Bergman, and those around her.
Gaslighting moved into mainstream politics along with fringe politicians. You know what they are doing, but it doesn’t seem to matter much because they are not playing it for you.
On the week leading to the first anniversary of the January 8 coup attempt in Brasilia, CNN Brasil aired an exclusive interview with the person who, to say the very least, inspired the insurrection, former president Jair Bolsonaro, recorded at his upper-scale beach house in Angra dos Reis, Rio de Janeiro. When the interviewer asked him to comment on those events, he first stressed that he was in the United States in case no one had followed the drama surrounding American authorities’ renewal of his visa. Then he smirked and replied:
“I regretted it on social media because this has never been the behavior of people from our side, people from the Right. In spite of the CPMI [the Senate Committee Investigation on the Jan 8 events], which didn’t investigate anything, we are sure that was a trap set by the Left.”
“For a coup to be attempted, there should be a leader,” he continued. “All the investigations found no name. It’s just assumptions. Who will try a coup with the elderly, old people holding a Bible in one hand and the [Brazilian] flag in the other one, with ordinary people, cotton candy vendors, Uber drivers, minors, kids?”
He was reproducing the same conspiracy theory that his followers were testing on social media in the immediate aftermath of the storming of the National Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace in Brasilia. Now there are hours of footage and photos and statements to prove him wrong.
The interviewer never pushed back. He never reminded Bolsonaro that most of those arrested after the insurrection were men between 36 and 55 years old. Or that the rioters had grenades, homemade bombs, and other weapons, and several of them were wearing gas masks and helmets. Or that they knew precisely where guns and ammunition were kept in the presidential palace. Or that Leo Indio, Bolsonaro’s nephew, was among the protesters that Sunday. Or that Fernando Honorato, the former president of the Federal District Military Police Union, helped trash the government buildings. Or that several plotters, including former members of the Bolsonaro administration, had been in the presidential palace more than once between 2019 and 2021. Or that some of these suspects were also involved in the attempt to invade the Federal Police Headquarters in Brasilia on December 12 to stop Lula from being certified as president days later. Or that one of these suspects failed to detonate a bomb in an oil truck next to the Brasilia International Airport on Christmas Eve. Or that, according to a Federal Police report, Bolsonaro’s aide, Lt. Colonel Mauro Cid, had “gathered documents with the objective of obtaining ‘legal and juridical’ support for the execution of a coup d’état.” Or that the police raided the home of Anderson Torres, Bolsonaro’s minister of justice, and found a draft decree proposing a state of emergency. Or that Torres, secretary of public security of the Federal District since January 1, was not in Brasilia on January 8 but in Orlando, where Bolsonaro had been since December 31. Or that, according to a never-discredited scoop by Revista Piauí, Bolsonaro himself had asked his top military staff to send troops and shut down the Supreme Court in 2020—due to the possibility that his phone might be confiscated in the course of an investigation requested by three political parties. (One of his generals was cozy to the idea.) Or that he had spent the entire election cycle claiming that the electronic ballots were not to be trusted, a thesis that helped flame his supporters. Or that the Supreme Court called his bluff and requested him to show the evidence, but he went online to say he had none. Or that he summoned ambassadors from several nations to hear him voice such a claim again—the reason why the Electoral Court banned him from office for eight years in June 2023. Or that he participated in a 2021 Independence Day rally in Sao Paulo during which he called Alexandre de Moraes, the justice in charge of several far-right investigations, a “canalha” (bastard) to a cheering crowd of supporters. Or that the head of the Federal Highway Police ordered irregular road blockades across the country on Election Day, delaying turnout in areas with mostly Lula voters. Or that Bolsonaro shared a video with fake news about electoral fraud on Facebook on January 10, two days after the insurrection. Or that Bolsonaro’s allies proposed the CPMI to embarrass the new administration, which seized the opportunity to prove in the final report that everything was connected to the actions of Bolsonaro and his staff.
So what was left were the words of Jair, a perfect snippet of inaccurate news and efficient propaganda ready for consumption by millions on YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook closed groups, Kwai, X, TikTok, Gettr… From there, they start seeping into the wider population. They don’t need to believe what Bolsonaro is saying; they only need to feel unsure about what to believe. As Agencia Publica’s Natalia Vianna observed, 94% of Brazilians disapproved of the coup attempt in February 2023. According to the same pollster, the disapproval rate was down to 89% a year later.
On January 6, Folha de Sao Paulopublished an interview with Lula’s Minister of Defense as part of its coverage of the Jan 8 anniversary. Lula had chosen seasoned politician José Múcio because of his highly regarded conciliatory skills. The relationship between Lula, a center-left president, and the Armed Forces, whose generals had primarily supported Bolsonaro, was up to a rocky start. Múcio’s strategy was to become more than friends with the generals. He understood his mission not as serving a country but as working as the Armed Forces’ attorney, as the interview suggests. When asked why the president became suspicious of the Chief of the Army, Múcio said:
“I think it was because of January 8. The president lost all [confidence in him], and so did his allies. Then, I ended up with the Army by myself. The Left was angry with them and thought they were attempting a coup, and the Right was angry with them because they didn’t try a coup.”
He never elaborated on the behavior of the Army during the events on January 8. Later, he summarized their role in generic terms: “They abode to the law.” He is absolutely sure that “the Armed Forces behaved exemplarily.” If they actually wanted to take down the government, the situation was “very convenient because civilians had arrived there first.”
Múcio was also recently interviewed for a documentary, 8/1: Democracy Resists (Julia Duailibi & Rafael Norton, 2024), in which he gives a different version of the Army’s model behavior.
Duailibi: In this meeting [with Army generals after the invasion of the federal buildings], didn’t any general argue that street protests are expected or that there were protests in other administrations…?
Múcio: No, no. And I didn’t dare ask. I was afraid of the answers.
After the election, Bolsonaro supporters gathered in camps before Army bases in cities nationwide. They asked for the military to do something and change the results they couldn’t accept: Lula’s victory must have resulted from fraud. There were many relatives of active-duty and retired officers among these protesters. The wife of Gen. Eduardo Villas Bôas, a former head of the Brazilian Army and Bolsonaro’s mentor, could be seen offering support around the Brasilia camp in front of the Army headquarters. When Ricardo Cappelli, the federal interventor, rushed with the police to the camp in the evening to arrest those who had participated in the riot, Army officials were far from supportive. A military commander warned that any attempt to clear the camp that night would lead to a “bloodbath.” As images from TV helicopters showed, the Army placed a barrier with soldiers and tanks turned toward the police cars in the road. When Cappelli met with Gen. Julio Cesar de Arruda, the chief of the Brazilian Army, he recounts that he heard a not even veiled threat:
“He asked, ‘Are you going to get in here with armed men without my authorization, sir?’ Then he turns to Col. Fabio Augusto Vieira [a former commander of the Federal District military police who was backing Capelli] and says: ‘I have a bit more armed men than you, right, colonel?’”
Aerial view of the entrance to the Army Headquarters in Brasilia in the evening of January 8 . Still from the documentary 8/1: Democracy Resists (2024).
A few minutes later, Flavio Dino, Lula’s minister of justice, arrived with Múcio. According to eyewitnesses, Arruda told them, “You are not going to arrest people here.” They finally agreed to let the police in early next morning, more than enough time for the main suspects to flee if they were hiding in the camp. Anyway, the Army had stopped authorities from clearing the camps before that Sunday, according to police officers. After the riot, Arruda refused to sack Mauro Cid, who had been put in charge of a strategic battalion. Lula finally dismissed Arruda.
The road to January 8 was also peppered with military officials. The Armed Forces often entertained Bolsonaro’s conspiracy theories about fraud and unreliable ballots throughout 2022. In June, they announced they would examine the voting system despite lacking the expertise. Ironically, the Electoral Court had already added the Armed Forces to the list of observers who help to analyze and certify the electronic voting system in 2019. There have been yearly critical tests since then. None have found evidence of fraud, not even the 2022 independent military investigation. Still, per official statements that thrilled the protesters after the elections, they did not rule out the possibility of fraud. According to the same statements, those protests were “legitimate” popular manifestations. Bolsonaro’s chiefs of the Armed Forces were planning to leave office ahead of time not to be present in the transition ceremony with Lula and the newly appointed joint chiefs of staff. In November 2022, that is, after the elections, Gen. Walter Braga Netto, the vice president in Bolsonaro’s ticket and his former minister of defense, was in Bolsonaro’s campaign HQ in Brasilia around the same time a protester arrived there. Bolsonaro’s aide accused Braga Netto of liaising between the president and the camp protesters. Active-duty officers protected the camps. Despite intelligence reports with alerts about the attacks, there was a vacuum in the line of command of the security forces immediately before and during the attacks. The battalion supposed to guard the presidential palace was not there. Live videos on the internet showed passive police officers escorting protesters and even chatting to the rioters who broke into the Brazilian Capitol. A breakdown of command was only restored when Dino named Cappelli federal interventor.
Faced with all these facts and evidence of collusion, Múcio would say in true Charles Boyer form, “I understand that there was no direct Armed Forces involvement, but if any element participated, they will have to answer as citizens.” Nobody asked him what he meant with “direct” involvement.
Múcio was correct about one thing: most of the Armed Forces and the police did not embrace the coup. However, several were involved in the events that led to January 8. The Brazilian Armed Forces have tried to seize power since the dawn of the Republic — the end of the Brazilian Monarchy was a military coup. There were other attempts in 1954, 1955, and 1961. They were successful in 1937 and 1964. Old habits die hard. And they need support. Four years entangled with Bolsonaro have done them no favors in the public opinion arena. They also need money and strategic backup. In 1964, influential businesspeople, bankers, and important names from the Brazilian elite, along with the US government, provided that. In 2022, these players worked to avoid a coup.
Even so, it was far from certain that the bulk of the Armed Forces would march behind the plotters in 1964. Everything was set in motion only when General Olympio Mourao Filho, a veteran of the 1937 coup, got tired of waiting and decided on his own to march with his troops from Minas Gerais to Brasilia. Maybe the military insurrectionists were waiting for a signal like that on January 8. Maybe they expected Lula to hand the command of the operations against the rioters to secretly sympathetic military officers. Maybe it was an opportunity to get rid of the Bolsonaro project once and for all after it became clear it wasn’t working. Maybe they only meant the riot as a show of force for the newly installed civilian authorities. Maybe it dawned on them that they are not the most effective Armed Forces since they spend 85% of their budget on personnel, including pensions, and only 5% on development and new equipment. The role of military officers and Bolsonaro’s allies, though, is not in doubt.
It is yet to be seen if the current Federal Police investigation will lead to indictments and convictions higher in the chain of command of January 8. Whatever Bolsonaro and Múcio say, it is always worth remembering that evidence abounds. At the end of Gaslight, it becomes clear that Paula Alquist is not crazy and that Gregory Anton is, in fact, a thief.
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