Richard Zimler will debut first in Portuguese

“ O i'm going to surprise you, but I'm going to reveal for the first time that I'm writing a novel in Portuguese first. I am writing a Portuguese version and an English version and making a comparison, and then I am changing the two versions according to what I find”, he explained, in an interview with Lusa, Foz, Porto.

Zimler, for decades rooted in Portugal and Porto, had already done so in children's books but it is the first time he wrote in Portuguese first (and not as a translation process) for adults, considering that this reveals the way the two languages intertwined in his literary thought.

“It takes longer, but it is very useful, because possibly my brain works differently in both languages. I'm not the same person in English as I am. For example, my English sense of humor is more developed, complex, because I can play with words more easily”, he revealed.

Even without having a “perfect Portuguese”, he feels that the language has already changed the English he writes.

“ Several critics in the United States have said, for example, that I write an Englishman not clumsy, but ‘sui generis’, which has unusual or usual aspects of the English language, and I think that, in fact, is the influence of the Portuguese language”, completed.

This new book, which will come out after the trilogy “The Flight of Fallen Angels”, which this month launched the first take, “The Beauty of Imperfect Things”, will be “very different from historical novels, or from this trilogy”.

“Perhaps it has to do with my physical difficulties and health problems over the past two years. I was thinking more about death. I did not catch any fatal illness, I will not die soon, I hope, but I got many pains, problems, suffering, and thought more about death ", said.

The new work of the 70-year-old author will therefore be “very curious”, with “deposits of people already dead” in a village he invented located in Portugal.

Asked whether, after so many years of living in the country, he thinks of death first in the Portuguese language, considered the theory “possible”.

“ Because I had these diseases and difficulties in Portugal and my [doctors] specialists are all Portuguese, so I am more used to talking about my problems in Portuguese, I never spoke in English with anyone”, including a French therapist with whom there are consultations in that other language, commented.

This way of looking at writing, when he feels that the style “of building phrases, characters, a plot has not changed much”, but “the concerns” that differ from when he was 35, also changes with the reflection “of real life and traumas”.

“ I'm always interested in building our identity. How do we build an identity and how does that identity change over time? (...) It reflects real life and reflects, above all, our traumas. I have a theory – I am not a psychologist –, a theory that we can change”, he shot.

Today, he feels that he is not the same person after facing physical problems or the death of his brother, and so “the idea of not evolving would be unthinkable”.

“ I am not the same person who wrote ‘The Last Cabalist of Lisbon’ in the 1990s. Richard Zimler who wrote that book no longer exists. Writing, at least in my case, has evolved and will continue to evolve over time, according to my condition as a human being,” he said.

Richard Zimler was born in 1956 in Roslyn Heights, a suburb of New York.

He was a Bachelor of Comparative Religion at Duke University and a Master of Journalism at Stanford University.

He worked as a journalist for eight years, mainly in the region of São Francisco and in 1990 he moved to Porto, where he taught Journalism, first at the School of Journalism and then at the University of Porto.

Since 1996, he has published twelve novels, a collection of short stories and six books for children.

His work is translated into 23 languages, having been distinguished with important literary awards such as the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction (USA), the Herodotus Prize (USA), the book “The Last Cabalist of Lisbon”, the Alberto Benveniste Prize, by the book “Goa or the Guardian of Aurora”, and the Bissaya Barreto Prize for Literature for Childhood, by the book “The Dog That Eated Rain”.