Lara Norgaard, 2021 Virtual Travel Fellow (Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish)

Lara Norgaard first developed an interest in literary translation during her undergraduate studies at Princeton University, where she studied the memory of US-backed military dictatorships in Latin American detective fiction. She participated in a translation workshop instructed by Natasha Wimmer, whose translations of works by authors including Roberto Bolaño served as formative examples for how to artfully translate fiction with attention to social and historical context. Lara gained critical appreciation for how and why certain narratives circulate between languages, a concern that continues to inform her work today.

A speaker of Spanish, Portuguese, and Indonesian, Lara has worked in Brazil and Indonesia as a journalist, editor, and literary translator. She served as an Editor-at-Large in Brazil for Asymptote, participating in the translation process from an editorial perspective. She was attentive to what kinds of Brazilian literature had already been translated into English and sought out underrepresented voices, such as Bahian author Luciany Aparecida, who writes about the intimate lives of Afro-Brazilian women in the Brazilian Northeast. She also published her first translations of short prose by authors including Selva Almada, Ricardo Lísias, and Silviano Santiago. As a Henry Luce Foundation fellow in Jakarta, she intensively studied Indonesian and carried out several interview series, one with contemporary Indonesian authors whose work approaches the memory of the Suharto dictatorship, and another with Indonesian writers, translators, and publishers interested in Latin American literature.

It was over coffee on a hot day in South Jakarta that Lara interviewed Sabda Armandio, a fiction writer and avid reader of Latin American detective fiction, with attention to authors ranging from Julio Cortázar to Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Compelled by these eclectic influences and Armandio’s playful approach to narrating Jakarta, Lara began working on her current translation project, Armandio’s award-winning crime novel 24 Hours with Gaspar.

24 Hours with Gaspar is a futuristic portrait of Indonesia’s hard-boiled capital–itself underrepresented in the English language. In his cyber-punk style, Armandio braids three narrative perspectives into the text: a series of interview transcripts between the police and an uncooperative witness, printed in the text in interview form; the protagonist Gaspar, both mastermind of the crime and a private eye; and finally, a writer by the name of Artur Harahap, who supposedly authors the novel’s foreword. The result, both experimental and fun, challenges genre conventions while engaging in social critique. Lara’s in-progress translation was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Grant.

Lara is also translating the Brazilian novel The Women who Marched Under the Sun by Cristina Judar. A literary exploration of gender and the body, The Women who Marched Under the Sun weaves together Brazil’s authoritarian history with contemporary concerns. Lara’s translations of Cristina Judar’s short fiction have been published in Cuíer (Two Lines Press), an anthology of LGBTQ+ Brazilian literature.

Currently, Lara is a PhD student in comparative literature at Harvard University. Her centers on literary and cultural circulation between Latin America and Indonesia, cultural violence, and post-dictatorship literatures.