InQuotes: Portuguese writing from the "periphery" ... (Amit Bhaya)

[fredericknoronha]

For me, one great advantage of becoming fluent in Portuguese was that it opened up the world of "peripheral" literary (and cultural) production from Lusophone Africa. There are wonderful authors from Angola (Agualusa, Pepetela, Ondjaki, Luaty Beirão), Moçambique (Mia Couto, Paulina Chiziane, ...) [just to cite a few examples] who are not known in the Euro/Anglocentric "core", because they don't write in English and there isn't much interest in translating their work. ---Amit Bhaya (Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and working in Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, and incidentally also the grandson of Anthony Xavier Soares, who translated Dalgado's magnum opus  as Portuguese Vocables in Asiatic Languages), via an online post recently.