About
Elizabeth Lowe is a literary translator of Luso-Afro-Brazilian fiction, as well as works from Latin American and peninsular Spanish. The Brazilian Academy of Letters recognized her translation of the canonical work Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha (Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, 2010). She is the author of The City in Brazilian Literature (1982) and Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature (with Earl E. Fitz, 2007), along with many articles in journals and book chapters on translation criticism and theory. Elizabeth is a recipient of the NEA Literary Translation grant, Fulbright grants to Colombia and Brazil, and an NEH Humanities grant. She was the founding director of the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has taught and lectured on translation at universities throughout the United States, South America, China and Europe. In Spring 2022, she was the Endowed Chair of Portuguese Studies at UMass Dartmouth. She has several translations under contract with Tagus Press.
Featured Work
The Last Twist of the Knife
After a quarrel, an ageing lawyer leaves his wife and travels from Brasília to the dry, lawless backlands of Brazil’s northeastern plateau, where he grew up. He has vague plans to start a new life, to buy a ranch and farm cotton, but unresolved childhood obsessions, fantasies, traumas resurface, threatening to overwhelm his very sense of identity. Consumed with thoughts of revenge against the man who murdered his father when he was only two, he discovers that he may in fact have been the lovechild of his rich godfather―the man who ordered the hit―and may therefore be the half-brother of the girl for whom he harbored an adolescent sexual fixation. In this forceful novel rich in local color, Elizabeth Lowe masterfully renders this work by João Almino from the Portuguese into English in a way that echoes the nuances of the language and culture of the Brazilian northeast.
