"Harmada" Virtual Event with translator Edgar Garbelotto & Juan Cárdenas

Join us for a virtual event celebrating João Gilberto Noll’s Harmada, a mythic tale of art and displacement nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto. Edgar will be in conversation with Juan Cárdenas.

About Harmada:

Like an Edenic Adam birthed from the clay, our narrator rises to his feet from the muck—reborn, or something like that. Unbeknownst to him, he’s on a desperate search for Harmada, the capital city of an unnamed nation and the land of his former glory. Told using Noll’s characteristic fragmented logic and spirited prose, Harmada traces the life of this nameless man on a voyage that takes him from aimless outcast to revered director of avant-garde theater, from asylum patient to father to God, conjuring along the way essential questions about the power of art and storytelling, the vanity of glory, and the meaning of freedom.

A mythic tale of art and displacement nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, Harmada serves as yet another reminder of João Gilberto Noll’s sublime literary power: generous in its mystery; earthbound in its essential urges; and entirely unpredictable.

Edgar Garbelotto is a writer and translator born in Brazil and based in the U.S. for the past 20 years. His translation of João Gilberto Noll’s novel Lord was published by Two Lines Press in 2019. His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Asymptote, Ninth Letter, Little Patuxent Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Terra Incognita, written in both Portuguese and English, is his debut novel.

João Gilberto Noll (1946–2017) is the author of nearly twenty books. His work appeared in Brazil’s leading periodicals, and he was a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, King’s College London, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. A five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, and the recipient of more than ten awards in all, he died in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the age of 70.

About Ornamental:

The lives of a doctor, his wife, and his patient collide, laying bare the political and personal narratives they have carefully constructed for themselves.

A doctor recruits volunteers for the trial of a new recreational drug that exclusively affects women. Among them is “number 4,” who becomes emotionally involved with first the scientist, then his wife, a well-known visual artist in the midst of a creative crisis. The scientist is oblivious to the atrocities his new drug will bring to the city; his wife is oblivious to the superfluousness of the objects she has committed her life to exhibiting in galleries and museums. Number 4’s presence pierces the couple’s complacency, gradually undoing the many certainties they’ve accumulated in their lives of ease.

Juan Cárdenas is a Colombian art critic, curator, translator, and author of the novels Zumbido (451 Editores, 2010; Periférica, 2017), Los estratos (Periférica, 2013), Ornamento (Periférica, 2015), Tú y yo, una novelita rusa (Cajón de sastre, 2016) and El diablo de las provincias (Periférica, 2017). He is also the author of the short story collection Carreras delictivas (451 Editores, 2008). He has translated the works of such writers as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Gordon Lish, David Ohle, J. M. Machado de Assis, and Eça de Queirós. In 2014, his novel Los estratos received the Otras Voces Otros Ámbitos Prize. In May 2017, he was named one of the thirty-nine best Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine by the Hay Festival in Bogotá. Cárdenas currently coordinates the masters program in creative writing at the Caro y Cuervo Institute in Bogotá, where he works as a professor and researcher.

 
Harmada By João Gilberto Noll, Edgar Garbelotto (Translator) Cover Image
$14.95
ISBN: 9781949641059
Availability: Available, order here for delivery or pickup.
Published: Two Lines Press - November 10th, 2020

Ornamental By Juan Cárdenas, Lizzie Davis (Translator) Cover Image
By Juan Cárdenas, Lizzie Davis (Translator)
$16.95
Email or call for price.
ISBN: 9781566895804
Published: Coffee House Press - June 2nd, 2020

Event date: 

Thursday, November 12, 2020 - 7:00pm

Event address: 

Unabridged Books, Inc.
Chicago, IL 60657