Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
"Gonta" is a collection of short stories.
There are 13 stories in total, all situated in Salvador,
the third biggest city in Brazil, in the North East of the country,
a city in which I've been living for almost five years now.
As a writer, as the father of these stories, if you like,
there's a few particular ones that stand out to me.
The first story, for example, "Buzú",
that's a story about two teenagers who go surfing on the city's buses.
And towards the end of the collection then,
there's another story called "Fanann a ndeirtear sa jíp sa jíp" (What's said in the jeep stays in the jeep).
And that's a story about the working relationship between a television reporter and a camera man.
But ... it's the longest story in the collection,
but, it shows .... someone who read the collection called it the heart of the collection.
And, I think, it gives a great insight into all of the themes of the collection.
And then, there's another story,
and it's called, "Is maol gualainn gan brother" (literally, a shoulder without a bother is bald) ...
and, it's not "bráthair" (i.e. in a religious sense) but brother (i.e. sibling) that's in the title ...
and it's a story about a friendship between two men,
two men, who were friends when they were teenagers ...
and they used to work on the building sites together.
Then, there was a bad accident and they went their separate ways and,
they story unfolds as one of them visits the other, who has lost his legs.
There's no character in my stories based on just one real person,
but there are certain personality traits of real people woven into the characters ...
if you like, they're a mixture of people I know.
I'm very pleased with a character called Wanderson.
I was talking about him earlier, he's the camera man from the story "Fanann a ndeirtear sa jíp jíp" (What's said in the jeep stays in the jeep).
Wanderson had a very strong voice in my head.
He didn't stop talking in a way, and he had a very particular voice.
A strange thing happened to him at one point; he's a black man,
a black camera man from Salvador,
but I felt from the way he was talking that he had a strong Conamara accent.
Which is very strange in a way, but that's how he spoke to me in my head.
And, there's more than one character that I really liked.
There's a chance that the collection, or the stories in it,
would concern, worry or scare people about Salvador, the city in which the stories are based.
because I'm focusing on a problem that's there, really,
and that's the question of safety, as the people of Brazil call it.
It's really urban violence, city violence,
where, across the whole of Brazil now, and it's a huge country,
so don't let this figure scare anyone but,
50, 000 people are killed ... are murdered every year in Brazil.
So, basically, the population of Galway every year,
in violence between various drug gangs and between drug gangs and the police.
And for the past few years, this is getting worse, particularly in Salvador.
You can't really open the newspaper or watch the television without seeing slaughter.
Every weekend there would be maybe 25 people killed in this continuous slaughter.
And, this collection was my way of dealing with this stream of blood, as you'd say.
I don't feel unsettled anymore because I'm comfortable with it, with all this violence.
I know that it's there and that there could be something bad around the corner at anytime,
but you learn a trick, a trick which everyone there has, and that's to close your ears to all this talk.
because you'd go completely mad if you were thinking about this question of safety all the time, so I don't do that anymore.
I adopted a different approach when I was writing these stories.
I wrote ... you could say that this collection, or all these stories, came to life in three languages at the same time: Irish, Dutch and English.
It's the way that I wrote each story in one of these languages and in the case of every story, it was different ...
There are certain stories and I remember in which language I wrote the original draft,
but there are other stories, and even if you put a gun to my head, I wouldn't be able to tell you in which language I wrote the original draft.
Then, as part of the editing process, I translated the original draft to the other two languages ...
and then I edited the three versions, word by word, side by side.
And after all that, I went back over all the stories again,
to make sure that the language in each of the stories and each of the versions was natural in that particular language.
So that's the approach I took with these strories.
Now, I was talking about three languages, but there's a fourth language, if you like, behind all this, and that's Bahia Portuguese,
the characters' language, because in my head, that's the language that these people were speaking, the stories' characters.
Writing is a complicated process.
First you have to ... it's like sculpture, in a way.
You have to have a stone, and then, you have to take pieces from the stone to produce a work of art, and stories are the same.
You have to put the original stone down first, that's the original draft and that takes maybe ...
a week at the most, for me to get a basic draft on paper.
But then, I put it aside for a while to let it cool down, as you'd say,
and then I return to the story with my knife ...
and I start cutting bits out of it.
This particular story, that I was talking about, "Fanann a ndeirtear sa jíp sa jíp" (What's said in the jeep stays in the jeep) ...
I do all my writing with a pen and paper, and then, I have to put it into the computer ...
but for this story I had 91 handwritten pages, and when I put it into the computer, there were 14, 000 words.
When I started ... when I finished editing this story, there were only 6, 500 words.
So, I threw out more than half the story, but over a period of months.
But, I think that editing is about 75% of the whole process ...
and in my opinion, the most important part of the process.
And, I think, well, if you throw out all the rubbish in a story, it's twice, three times better.
At the start, I had difficulty writing stories in Irish or any other language while in Brazil.
But, I dealt with the problem and now I'm fine.
The problem at the start was that Brazil is a very hot country, as everyone knows,
and if you don't have air conditioning, and I don't, you have to have the windows open all the time.
So that means that your neighbours' voices come into your workplace all the time.
But now ... so I had to, of course, get used to it, if you like,
but now I'm able to close my ears and keep on writing stories in Irish ...
while the women in the area are shouting at their children.