Bernardo Kucinski: K. oder Die verschwundene Tochter
Translated from the Portuguese by Sarita Brandt
Transit Buchverlag 2013
(K.; Expressão Popular, São Paulo 2012)
About the book
São Paulo during the military dictatorship during the 1970s. A tragedy takes its course: for many days now, K. has been waiting for a sign of life from his daughter, a university lecturer who has not shown up for work over the past two weeks. He asks her friends, acquaintances, and the police, until he finally learns about her double life and her hidden political work in a roundabout way. How could somebody like him, marked by the political circumstances in Poland of the 1930s, close his eyes to the revolutionary urges of the new time, the striking evidence in the behavior of his daughter, whom he thought he knew so well? His life turns into a search that evokes memories his own youth and other periods of his life, in which Kucinski surprising and earnestly combines individual, Brazilian, and European history.
About the author
Bernardo Kucinski, born in São Paulo in 1937 as the son of a Polish-Jewish immigrant family, is a journalist and professor emeritus, and after the end of the dictatorship was also politically active, for many years serving as an advisor for the now former president Lula da Silva. The author of numerous political and scholarly works, K. is his first novel, and has received numerous awards in Brazil.
Recent publications:
Cartas a Lula
Ediҫões de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro 2014
Alice: Não mais que de repente
Rocco, Rio de Janeiro 2014
About the translator
Sarita Brandt, born in 1945 in Montenegro, RS, studied philosophy, pedagogy, and Portuguese in Porto Alegre, São Paulo, and Berlin. A conference interpreter and literary translator, her translations (prose, poetry, essays) include work by renowned writers such as Clarice Lispector, José Saramago, João de Jesus Paes Loureiro, Sebastião Uchoa Leite, Maria Isabel Barreno, Ana Luísa Amaral, Vasco Graça Moura, and Hannah Höch.
Recent publications:
Tierra, Pedro: Zeit der Widrigkeiten, Gedichte
Geração, São Paulo 2013, trans. by Curt Meyer-Clason and Sarita Brandt
Maria Isabel Barreno: Der Tugendkreis. Erzählungen.
Fischer 1999, trans. by Sarita Brandt
(O circulo virtuoso, Caminho, Lisbon 1996)
José Saramago: Der Stuhl und andere Dinge. Erzählung.
Rowohlt 1995, trans. by Sarita Brandt and Andreas Klotsch
(Objecto quase, Moraes Editores, Lisbon 1978)
Clarice Lispector: Von Traum zu Traum
Rowohlt 1992, trans. by Sarita Brandt
(A cidade sitiada, Editora A Noite, Rio de Janeiro 1948)
The jury on the short list nomination
“Bernardo Kucinski has written a touching novel about pain, the transformation of a father who is unable to cope with the loss of his daughter. The daughter was abducted in the early 1970s by the henchmen of the Brazilian military dictatorship, and the father tries, without success, to find her. Over the years, the searching changes him, only allowing for the pain of loss. Sarita Brandt has translated this haunting novel into a no less haunting German.”
