The Interview : Padma Viswanathan

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks with Padma Viswanathan, a Canadian-American writer and translator. Her novels have been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and others. She has published short fiction, essays and translations in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK, and elsewhere. Full-length translations include São Bernardo, by Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos and Where We Stand, by Djamila Ribeiro. Her most recent novel, The Charterhouse of Padma, was published in 2024. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, where she is Founding Director of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Program. Her English language translation of On Earth As it is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.

Thank you Padma, for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with The Wise Owl

RS: On Earth As It Is Beneath unfolds in a landscape haunted by the intertwined histories of slavery, incarceration, and violence. What drew you to Ana Paula Maia's novel, and what convinced you that this was a story that urgently needed to reach English-language readers?

PV: Honestly, I came to the project because Charco Press, a visionary publisher of Latin American literature, got in touch and asked me if I would consider translating the novel. They were increasingly committed to Ana Paula’s work, having published one novel of hers already (the wonderful Of Cattle and Men, translated by Zoe Perry) and thought I could be a good fit. I was thrilled that this turned out to be the case. While Ana Paula’s novels do feel extremely timely, both aesthetically and thematically, the more important thing that I think translation into English can do is give a book potential longevity. I hope that these books are not only urgently significant for our generation, but that they will prove timeless.

RS: Ana Paula Maia's prose is often noted for its starkness, precision, and moral intensity. As a translator, how did you approach preserving the rhythm and texture of her Portuguese while ensuring the novel resonated naturally in English?

PV: Ana’s Portuguese is very characteristic of her and I think of it as a signature of the world she has created. Its markers are syntactical and rhythmic in ways that became even more clear to me when I translated a second book of hers. I’m now translating a third and finding that, in a way, I established the English idiom for the books in On Earth As It Is Beneath and am now continuing to use it. Some of that was instinctive, some of it is based on quite evident facets of her prose, such as repetition. For example, in On Earth As It Is Beneath, she not only uses certain words frequently, but the antagonist, the prison warden Melquíades, has a whole speech that he repeats nearly verbatim. When see him give that speech at two crucial moments in the book, we understand he has given it dozens of times. So I knew that I should pay close attention to Ana lexical constriction and the ways it is key in the evocation of this environment.  Apart from that, I instinctively could hear how the dialogue should sound in English, whereas I had to work hard on her landscape descriptions, which can be quite lyrical and abstract. Fortunately, Ana has shown a lot of faith in my renditions of those more poetic bits.

RS: The novel occupies a fascinating space between allegory, political critique, horror, and existential fiction. Did translating a work that moves across these registers present particular challenges, and how did you maintain tonal consistency throughout?

PV: You’re right that the novel sits at the intersection of those genres but because it has an internal tonal consistency, I didn’t have to work too hard to maintain it. It’s a relatively detached and observant voice, and I inhabited it. It seemed especially important to do so in moments of high intensity in the book, of which there are a few. Fortunately, I also believe, as a fiction writer, that a certain amount of flatness or understatement is most effective in moments of great suspense or emotion, so I was fully enlisted in Ana’s choices in such moments in On Earth As It Is Beneath.

RS: The prison in the novel is more than a setting—it becomes a metaphor for historical memory, state power, and human captivity. How did your engagement with the text evolve as you translated it, and did the novel alter your own understanding of these themes?

PV: Yes, the prison is, on an imagistic level, another kind of repetition in the book, as we learn that it is sited in a place where another set of historical atrocities occurred. Having said that, the main way my engagement with the book evolved over the course of translating it was not thematic: while the book does present a fresh and shocking imaginative perspective on historical memory, state power, and human captivity, I’m not sure it “taught” me things I didn’t know about those themes. But I don’t look for literature to teach me in the same way that I look to history, sociology or criticism. Instead, what happened as I translated—which is to say, as I read the book very closely and reimagined it in my native tongue—is that I became very attached to the characters, invested in their actions and in their fates. I’ve had the chance to carry that attachment forward into translating subsequent books by Ana Paula, since these take place in the same world and feature some of the same characters.

RS: As both a novelist and a translator, how do these two practices inform one another? Did your experience as the author of The Charterhouse of Padma influence the way you approached Maia's voice, or do you consciously keep your creative and translational selves separate?

PV: This is tricky to describe. All of my own fictional works have distinct narrators. I write in very different modes and have always prided myself on being able to take on a variety of voices. Having said that, now that I have four books and numerous stories published, I can also see some vocal consistency throughout these. So it’s a similar alchemy that I try to bring to my translations. I very much see translation as writing in another writer’s voice and I draw on all my mimetic abilities to do so. But an actor performing very different characters or scripts is still inhabiting the same body and I, too, can never fully escape my own mind, history, knowledge and aesthetics. So, at a certain point, my choices will be shaped by those, whether in my original writing or my translations.

RS: The International Booker Prize has increasingly highlighted the collaborative nature of literary translation. What has the shortlist recognition meant for you, for Ana Paula Maia, and perhaps more broadly for the visibility of contemporary Brazilian literature in translation?

PV: I think the International Booker Prize has, from its inception, awarded both author and translator, which has been enormously influential in getting the literary world to recognize the contribution of translators to any individual book originating in another language and also raising the profile of translated literature generally. For Ana Paula, the prize has been a game-changer, bringing her much-deserved international attention and many new offers of translation from around the world, a number of which will work from my English-language version. I, too, have enjoyed a lot of attention, but since I’m already part of the anglophone literary world, the difference between before and after has perhaps been less dramatic. As for the attention to Brazilian literature, I guess that remains to be seen! I don’t necessarily think that because a reader loves one book from a given country or language, they will love another. But it’s always good to be reminded that the few well-known and well-translated writers from a given country—in the case of Brazil, this might mean Clarice Lispector and Machado de Assis, for example—are far from being that country’s only literary offerings.

RS: Translation is often described as an act of close reading and deep listening. Looking back on your journey with On Earth As It Is Beneath, what do you hope readers carry away from the novel, and what has translating it taught you about the possibilities—and responsibilities—of literary translation?

PV: I hope readers simply read the book for enjoyment—the first time. If you love any book of translation, I encourage you to read it again with attention to the prose, understanding that the translator wrote every word you are reading. What does it mean to read a translation? How can it affect how we read? Certainly, becoming a translator has made me a more attentive reader, as has teaching reading to writers, as has my own private evolution as a reader and writer. Translation, as you’ve suggested, is one possible, wonderful facet of a life in books but it refracts many others. 

Thank you Padma for taking time out to talk about your work. We wish you the very best in all your creative endeavours.