The Dark Side of Skin - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeferson Tenório was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1977. Based in Porto Alegre, he is a doctoral student in Literary Theory at PUCRS and a lecturer in literature. His literary debut was the nove_l O beijo na parede_ (Kiss on the Wall, 2013), chosen as book of the year by the Rio Grande do Sul Writers’ Association. His writing has been adapted for the theatre and translated into English and Spanish. He’s also the author of Estela sem Deus (Godless Star, 2018). The Dark Side of Skin won the PEN Translates Award in the UK and the 2021 Jabuti Prize for the Best Novel published in Brazil.

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours , is forthcoming in October 2024 from Grove Atlantic in the U.S. and Companhia das Letras/PRH in Brazil in her own translation. Her translations from Portuguese include The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel (winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature), The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório (winner of an English PEN Translates Award), and Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu (longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and winner of a PEN/Heim Translation Grant), among others.Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker , Guernica , A Public Space , and The Common . She holds an MFA in Fiction from New York University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Bruna was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and lives in St. Louis, U.S, with her partner and pet bunny.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Sometimes you’d have a thought and go live inside it. You’d push everyone away. Build a home for yourself that way. Someplace far. Deep inside you. That was how you dealt with things. Now I choose to believe you left so you could come back to me. I didn’t want your absence to be your only legacy. I wanted your presence, some form of it, even if it was painful and sad. And despite everything, here in this house, in this apartment, your body will always be dying, over and over. You’ll always be a father refusing to leave. You were never really that good at leaving. To the end, you believed books could make a difference. You stepped in and out of life, and it stayed bitter. Objects still hold memories of you, but what’s left of them hurts me and comforts me, because they’re just remnants of affection. Silently, these objects tell me about you. It’s through them that I imagine and recover you. Through them that I try to find out how many tragedies a person can take. Maybe I’m reaching for some truth. Not as a starting point. But as some kind of journey that will sweep through these rooms and give me the first piece of a puzzle. A puzzle that begins behind the front door, where I find an orange terracotta bowl, and inside it, a stone, a sacred ocutá, wrapped in red, green, and yellow ribbons. I study it with care. That’s how you enter a life that’s already gone. I take the ocutá out of the bowl. I remember the day you told me your head belonged to Ogun, which was very lucky, because Ogun was the only orisha who could handle an abyss. I remember hearing the word abyss for the first time from your mouth. There are words we hold on to as kids because they bring us comfort. I remember now what aunt Luara told me to do when I met her Ogun. Wrap it in a cloth, hold it in your hands, and carry it to the river , she’d said. But before leaving, I head to you room and look in from the doorway. There are clothes all over the floor, some more tossed in the closet. On the table, inkless pens, unmatched socks under receipts from the grocery store, notebooks and sheets of paper, folders filled with student tests and essays. Your chaos moves me. I look at all this and realize these objects will help me narrate who you were before you left. The same tools that defeated you now speak of you. Your objects will visit me as if they were your ghost.