Richard Zimler, Porto's American-Born Novelist, Is Writing His Next Adult Novel in Portuguese First

Richard Zimler, the American-born novelist who moved to Porto in 1990 and has written in English ever since, is writing his next adult novel in Portuguese first. He revealed it in an interview with the Lusa news agency in Foz, Porto, published on Saturday 26 September.

"What I am going to do is a surprise, but I will reveal, for the first time, that I am writing a novel in Portuguese first," he said. "I am writing a Portuguese version and an English version and comparing them, and then I keep changing both versions according to what I find."

He has done it before in his children's books. It is the first time he has written adult fiction in Portuguese from the start, rather than having it translated afterwards.

"I am not the same person in Portuguese"

The method is slower, he said, but useful, "because possibly my brain works in a different way in the two languages. I am not the same person in Portuguese as I am in English. For example, my English sense of humour is more developed, more complex, because I can play with words more easily."

His Portuguese is not "perfect", he says, but it has already changed his English, which American critics have called "sui generis". "I think that is, in fact, the influence of Portuguese."

Many immigrants who have lived in Portugal for years will recognise a detail he offered. The health problems he has faced over the past two years were treated in Portugal, by Portuguese specialists, so "I am more used to talking about my problems in Portuguese. I have never talked about them in English with anyone." Asked whether he now thinks about death first in Portuguese, he called the idea "possible".

A village of the dead

The new book, which will follow his current trilogy, will be "very different" from his historical novels, he said. It is built from the testimonies of people who have already died, in a village he has invented somewhere in Portugal. He linked its subject to the pain and illness of the past two years: "I was thinking more about death. I did not catch any fatal illness, I am not going to die soon, I hope, but I was left with a lot of pain, problems, suffering."

Zimler, who is 70, said his style of building sentences, characters and plots has changed little, but his preoccupations have. "I am not the same person who wrote The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon in the 1990s. The Richard Zimler who wrote that book no longer exists."

The trilogy out now

The first volume of that trilogy, A Beleza das Coisas Imperfeitas (The Beauty of Imperfect Things), is already out from Porto Editora under the series title O Voo dos Anjos Caídos (The Flight of the Fallen Angels). A second volume is due in October and the third in November. Set 300 years after a series of wars known as the Last Judgement, it follows Falcão, the hero of a small village, who ends up fighting the religious fundamentalism of a movement called the Alliance.

From San Francisco to Porto

Zimler studied comparative religion at Duke University and journalism at Stanford, and worked as a journalist for eight years, mainly around San Francisco. In Porto he taught journalism, latterly at the University of Porto. Since 1996 he has published twelve novels, a short-story collection and six children's books, translated into 23 languages. The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, set during the 1506 massacre of Lisbon's Jews, won the Herodotus Award in the United States.

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