With Parents Like These…

For our latest installment in the category of “Familia é uma merda,” documenting how families and especially parents can abort or indirectly encourage a literary career, we turn again to Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes.
Spanish journalist, María Luis Blanco, asked the writer about his relationship with his parents. Lobo Antunes answered [translation from the French mine]* –
Mon père m’a demandé quelles études je voulais faire, ce que je voulais faire dans la vie. Je lui ai répondu que je voulais être écrivain et qu’il fallait donc m’inscrire à la faculté de Lettres. Il m’a dit: “Très bien, d’accord.” Et le lendemain il m’a faire savoir que j’étais inscrit en médecine.
* * *
My father asked me what I wanted to study, what I wanted to be. I told him that I wanted to be a writer and that I should therefore register in the Literature faculty. He told me, “Very well. OK.” And the next day he let me know that I was registered in medical school.
Blanco also interviewed the writers’ parents –
[Le père] Il y a des gens quis disent qu’António est plus intelligent que João. Mais João est plus brilliant et plus ambitieux, alors qu’António n’a pas beaucoup d’ambition.
[La mère] João est très intelligent, et il s’intéresse à beaucoup de choses. Alors qu’António est très centré sur la littérature.
[Le père] Je n’arrive pas à lire les livres d’António, je n’en ai pas la patience. … La vie est trop courte pour lire António. Je ne suis plus assez patient.
[La mère] Je lis ses livres, mais je ne les apprécie pas parce que tout y est très triste … Ces personnages n’appartiennent pas à notre milieu.
* * *
[The father] There are people who say that António is more intelligent than [his brother] João. But João is more brilliant and more ambitious, since António doesn’t have much ambition.
[The mother] João is very intelligent. And he is interested in many things. While António is too centered on literature.
[The father] I have not gotten to read António’s books. It don’t have the patience. … Life is too short to read António. I am not that patient anymore.
[The mother] I read his books, but I don’t like them because everything is very sad. The characters are not or our [social] circle.
Lobo Antunes on his parents –
Mon père est un homme profondémont égoïste. Je ne me souviens pas d’avoir reçu la moindre marque d’affection de sa part. Pas plus que de la part de ma mère.
* * *
My father is a profoundly selfish man. I do not remember ever having received the smallest sign of affection on his part, no more than on my mother’s part.
*A note on the translations: I assume but I do not know whether the interviews with Lobo Antunes were conducted in his native Portuguese or in Blanco’s native Spanish. Her book, when it was first published in Spain seven years ago, came out in Spanish. Unfortunately for me, by the time I wanted to buy it, I could not find it in Spanish and had to buy the recently-published French translation. In essence, what we have here is an interview that most likely took place in Portuguese and was translated into Spanish for publication in one country, then re-translated from Spanish into French for publication in another. What I did was take the French translation of the Spanish translation of the Portuguese interview and translated that into English for publication in this blog. Simple, non?
Photo: António Lobo Antunes, El país; Source: María Luis Blanco, Conversations avec António Lobo Antunes (2004)








