Writer's Corner Writer's Corner: Marguerite Itamar Harrison: Interview on 97.3 WJFD-FM

Contraponto program series, originally broadcast on 2 July 2023

Marguerite Itamar Harrison is the translator of Unremembering Me by contemporary Brazilian writer Luiz Ruffato, published by Tagus Press in 2018, and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Smith College. Prior to Smith, Harrison taught at Harvard and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown. In 2007, she edited Uma Cidade em Camadas, a volume of transnational essays on Ruffato. Raised in a Brazilian-American household, she is a practitioner of literary translation. She guest-edited a 2016 special issue of the translation journal Metamorphoses devoted to contemporary Brazilian fiction. 

Luiz Ruffato is an acclaimed Brazilian novelist, journalist, and poet. His 2001 novel, There Were Many Horses, was the recipient of the Brazilian National Library’s Machado de Assis Award and the APCA Award for best novel. Unremembering Me, originally published in 2007 in Portuguese as De mim já nem se lembra, captures the vast scope of Brazil’s human registers. It expresses landscapes, thoughts, dialogues, emotions, memories, aspirations, injustices, regrets, and belonging and unbelonging on equal footing. Through a series of letters that the protagonist, Célio, writes to his mother, the novel makes poignant associations between working-class family life and broader sociopolitical and historical perspectives. Célio communicates details about his work, living situation, and concerns for family members back home. The letters also take on a larger dimension, as they convey political unrest during the military dictatorship, and Célio’ s increasing engagement as a union organizer: Unremembering Me concludes on the eve of the mid-1970s historic strikes by industrial workers that were pivotal to Brazil’s return to democracy and the birth of the Workers Party (PT). 

Unremembering Me is volume 3 of the Brazilian Literature in Translation Series, edited by Dário Borim and Cristina Mehrtens (UMass Dartmouth).  

To purchase Unremembering Me, please visit the University of Massachusetts Press website. 

Please join host Irene de Amaral and Marguerite Itamar Harrison for a discussion of the novel on WJFD.