International Booker Prize interview: How Johnny Lorenz translated ‘Crooked Plow’

Johnny Lorenz has been shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize for translating Itamar Vieira Junior’s novel Crooked Plow from the Portuguese.

Set deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.

The jury said the novel is “an aching yet tender story of our origins of violence, of how we spend our lives trying to bloom love and care from them, and of the language and silence we need to fuel our tending.”

Lorenz, the son of Brazilian immigrants to the United States, is a translator, poet and literary critic. He has a doctorate in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is a professor at Montclair State University. His translation of Clarice Lispector’s A Breath of Life was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, and his translation of Lispector’s The Besieged City was listed as one of the Best Books of 2019 by Vanity Fair.

In an interview, he spoke about choosing literature as a profession, the translator's "destiny", and the nuances of the Portuguese language.

When and how did you develop an interest in literature?
So I grew up...

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