Bruna Dantas Lobato is best known as a translator, winning the 2023 National Book Award for Translation for bringing Brazilian author Stênio Gardel’s novel The Words That Remain (New Vessel) to English-speaking readers. But she’s also an accomplished fiction writer. Dantas Lobato’s debut novel Blue Light Hours (Black Cat), out this week, captures the shifting relationship between a young woman at a rural Vermont college and her mother back home in Brazil. Set in the early years of Skype, the daughter adapts to her new surroundings while trying to maintain the close connection with her mom.
For more than a year I’ve lived in Brazil and couldn’t help but identify with grasping for the familiar through technology. I talked with Dantas Lobato over email about writing the immigrant experience, translating her own fiction, the origins of Blue Light Hours.
When did you start conceiving Blue Light Hours and what inspired you?
I wrote my very first mother-daughter video call scene when I was still in college, 10 years ago, though I’d only be able to turn that into a full-fledged story some three years later, when I was already in my Fiction MFA. I went to college in Vermont as an international student on a full ride, the first in my family to pursue higher education and the only English speaker to boot, and I could never afford to go back home to Brazil for the breaks. I had a few friends who always stayed behind with me and who often made me feel like I wasn’t the only one going through this kind of coming of age. And yet, literature would have me believe I kind of was. I couldn’t find a single book that showed the international student experience, or even the immigrant experience, the way I knew it. I dreamed of being a writer and somehow doing this for us. It just took me a long time to figure out how.
The title Blue Light Hours refers to the light given off by the computer and phone, yet it’s also the color of many items, including the mother’s pill. What were you trying to evoke with the color blue?
The title only came to me after the book was already sold and I already had a wonderful editor who was patient enough to look over several terrible options before this one suddenly popped into my head. I knew there were tons of blue things in the book, but somehow naming it so explicitly in the title had never occurred to me as an option, because I just couldn’t help but paint every detail blue. It was simply how I saw the characters’ world, that snowy depressive season of their lives, where even the loveliest of summers has a blue night light shining at all times. Once I sat down with the first proof I couldn’t unsee it, though, how steeped in blue everything was, the kind of sadness I’d been writing towards all along. Every line is a little stained.
Much of the book focuses on interior settings and views of the exterior from indoors. How does this fit in with the story you wanted to tell?
My narrator is a curious, observant young woman trying to make sense of this huge place she barely knows. Snowy New England is beautiful to her, but it’s also really cold outside, and overwhelming, and unfamiliar, and maybe even a little dangerous. The windows are the safest way for her to take it all in while still remaining close to the screen she has such a hard time letting go of. It’s an added bonus to me as a writer that the windows mirror the computer screen she uses to communicate with her mother. She sees the world through glass in both directions, both the US and Brazil, as she navigates her shifting relationships to each one. It felt like a metaphor to me I could push further. I wondered, what would it take for her to get out? And is that something she wants? And what’s really on the other side of the glass? I make her smudge the gleaming glass, tap it, feel its coldness and hardness, even try to break it, at different moments in the book. I was so happy when I received the cover design options from the publishers and saw that several of them showed her behind glass.
I read that you were translating the book into Portuguese. What was that process like? Did it lead you to any new revelations for you about the book?
I did and it’s coming out in just a few months from Companhia das Letras/Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial! At first I thought it would be absolutely impossible to do it, given my closeness to the text and attachment to the ways it’s deliberately rooted in the lyricism of the English language. And I was also afraid I’d lost too much of my Portuguese along the way, as I tried to make a life in this language where being non-native or even bilingual isn’t always rewarded. I always had it hammered into me that if I were a good writer in one language I couldn’t be as good in the other, that I had to choose allegiance to only one mother tongue the way you have only one mother, which of course is entirely bogus. My protagonist would kill to have more than one mother and I’m glad many people do. I accepted the challenge out of a desire to finally reconnect with home and fulfill the potential I saw there, to be an adult in my birth language after all these years away.
I read Portuguese translations of some of the English-language books that influenced my writing to get a feel for the tone and that helped me triangulate my own voice and lineage in this new language. Once I started writing in Portuguese in earnest, it just flowed out of me, and I was shocked and thrilled to find out I’m just as smart, tender, lyrical, funny in Portuguese as I am in English, that I don’t have to choose after all. And it helped that I have a lot of experience translating books by other authors and can focus on the book I have in front of me on its own terms, not what it could have been in some other life had I stayed in Brazil. The main revelation to me stemmed from this repositioning, from how I shift when the audience shifts. In English, I’m wary of writing about Brazil and Brazilianness and being misunderstood, of somehow giving the impression my life is representative of anything other than myself, of inviting people into my home and then being judged. In Portuguese, I was a little bit sorry I didn’t share more of my individual experiences of home, now that I didn’t have to be so guarded. I guess I’m saving that for a next book.
You mentioned the surprise and thrill of realizing you could write in Portuguese with the same qualities as writing in English. Could you expand on how being bilingual influences your fiction or might in the future?
Being bilingual has made me acutely aware of the strangeness of language, its joys and tensions, sounds and silences, all the things one language can do that I know others might not. I actively invite all of this into my writing. I'm interested in pushing the limits of the English language, especially, in bending it in unexpected ways, in offering new ways of looking at an idiom or familiar image. Aron Aji, a former professor of mine, always said in class that translators make English "more capacious." I hope that's also something I can do as a writer, expand a bit what the English language can hold.
