All the Voices Living Inside Us: An Interview with Cris Judar and Lara Norgaard

In an interview with Asymptote magazine, Brazilian writer Cris Judar and their translator, Lara Norgaard, discuss the novel They Marched Under the Sun and its polyphonic world. The novel follows the lives of two young women, Ana and Joan, but the story reaches far beyond them. A range of voices, letters, political memories, bodies, non-human creatures, and scattered everyday experiences come together to build a world that is broken and alive at once. Judar says this fragmentation reflects life today, a world in which the human mind is constantly met by competing voices, images, and anxieties. Part of the novel returns to the memory of Brazil's military dictatorship and the letters of women political prisoners in the 1960s and 1970s. The writer does not see this past as distant. Instead, they tie it to present-day violence, the pressure placed on women's bodies, the repression of minorities, and the lived experience of the Bolsonaro years and the pandemic. Lara Norgaard speaks to the difficulty of translating such a text. A novel that works with gender, language, many voices, and invented words cannot be carried across by meaning alone. The translator has to find a separate place for each voice, and at times build a fresh layer of strangeness and meaning within English itself.

Read the full story at Asymptote Journal →