Bio

Johnny Lorenz, son of Brazilian immigrants, is a poet, translator, and professor of English at Montclair State University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. His book of poems, Education by Windows, was published by Poets & Traitors Press (2018). He has translated two novels by Clarice Lispector: A Breath of Life (2012), finalist for Best Translated Book, and The Besieged City (2019), named one of the best books of 2019 by Vanity Fair; both novels were published by New Directions. He has been awarded a Fulbright grant (2003) to translate the poetry of Mario Quintana as well as a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant (2020) to complete his translation of Notebook of Return by Edimilson de Almeida Pereira. Lorenz is working on a manuscript of new original poems, entitled Incantations.

Project Description

To support the translation from the Brazilian Portuguese of Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior. Born in Salvador, Bahia, in 1979, Vieira Junior is a descendant of African diasporic and Indigenous communities and his 2018 novel Crooked Plow received the Jabuti, Brazil's national literary prize for best novel of the year as well as the prestigious literary prize in Portugal, the Prémio LeYa. In its first two sections, Crooked Plow is told from the perspective of two sisters who are descendants of slaves and daughters of impoverished workers on a plantation in Bahia. These sections depict women characters in their ongoing struggle as land laborers who eventually turn to violence to redefine themselves. The third section shifts in narration to an encantada—a female Afro-Brazilian divinity—who is outraged by the pollution of her river and the misery of her devotees. The novel also offers a portrayal of sacred local rituals informed by the African diaspora and Indigenous belief systems. It has never been translated into English.