Translating off-track: Interview with Luciano Dutra

Abstract

The History of the world is written in imperial languages, such as Portuguese, Spanish, English and French. Those prestigious languages are also colonizers and that implies a strong relation with dissemination, production, translation and power: it is the so-called geopolitics of language. The area of translation, as well as the one of language studies, is an important research field and production inside the internationalist diegesis, due to the international republic of Letters. The translation effort is, in fact, circumscribed both in the amplification of the Anglophone world and in the resistance as well as it intends the constant approximation of less hegemonic languages. The aforementioned situation is definitely the case of Luciano Dutra, who has moved to Iceland inspired by the Nordic references in the books of Borges. In the cold lands where the Icelandic sagas were created, Luciano Dutra has become fluent in Icelandic, a language that is very rare to find courses or material in book stores about. He has also become a translator in Icelandic-Portuguese. Luciano Dutra has given us an interview in which he shares a little about living in Iceland and also about his experience as an off-track translator.