Actively Pitching

Claudia Nina, author

Ilze Duarte is actively pitching her translations of works by Brazilian authors Marilia Arnaud and Claudia Nina.

Marilia Arnaud is an attorney, novelist, and short story writer living in João Pessoa, the capital of the state of Paraíba, in the northeast of Brazil. Her short stories are featured in collections and anthologies, including Luis Rufatto’s edited volume 30 Women Who Are Making The New Brazilian Literature (2005). She has penned four novels: Suite of Silence, Liturgy of the End, The Secret Bird, winner of the 2021 Kindle Prize in Literature in Brazil, and Sketch in Stone and Dream. Her short story collection The Book of Affects, translated by Ilze Duarte, is a recipient of the 2024 Sundial Literary Translation Award.

Read Ilze Duarte's interview with Marilia Arnaud on the PELTA (Portuguese to English Literary Translators Association) blog.

English-language rights to Arnaud's works are available for purchase. Contact Ilze for additional pitch materials and agent information.

A Rio de Janeiro native, Claudia Nina is a journalist, fiction writer, editor, podcaster, and literary critic. She holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, and is the author of nineteen books, including nonfiction, children’s and young adult books, and novels, including Paisagem de Porcelana (Porcelain Landscape), a 2015 Rio Literary Award finalist, reissued in 2025. Her short stories appear in several Brazilian literary magazines and her columns in the literary magazine Rascunho. Nina has traveled extensively in Brazil and abroad to share her writing with readers and educators. English-language rights to her works are available for purchase. She can be contacted on her website. Scroll down this page for my pitches of my translations of two of her books.

Marilia Arnaud, author

Marilia Arnaud

Suíte de Silêncios (2012), 192 pages

O Pássaro Secreto (2021), 196 pages

Suíte de Silêncios (Suite of Silence) is the story of Duína Torrealba, told in a letter of sorts to her beloved, who has left her. The narration alternates between the present time, when the narrator shares her memories of their love affair and the pain of separation, and the narrator’s childhood, when her mother left the family. In her efforts to cope with the trauma of abandonment, Duína has sought refuge in her music and her silence. Duína describes the aftermath of her mother’s departure and its effects on her psyche: an eroded self-esteem and a profound sense of guilt, which in turn rendered her vulnerable to a predatory adult. This love letter Duína addresses to her beloved is also a testament to her deep desire to live a life that is genuine, albeit steeped in pain, and to be true to herself, even as she tries to understand who that self is. Rendered in refined, evocative, lyrical prose, Suite of Silence reads like a sad yet delightful poem.
As in all of Arnaud’s work, descriptions of place and the protagonist’s relationship to it immerse us in the character’s physical and emotional world. Here is Ilze's translation of a passage where Duína describes her former lover’s hometown, Pedra Santa (Holy Rock):
Pedra Santa sleeps, lulled by the rain that washes the dust off the streets and runs down the drains, soaking the earth with humanity. I hear the quiet chords of its breathing, patient and resigned; I feel the slightly rancid breath of the old town.
What does Pedra Santa dream about, I wonder?
From here, I spot facets of its distracted beauty: sidewalks bathed in a dancing, faded luminosity, which reaches me and sprawls out, wobbly, across the floor and walls of this room; trees with bending boughs, moaning out the notes of a violin in need of tuning; the web of narrow streets and avenues intersecting and stretching out amidst bridges lined with old lamps and iron statues; the river with its slimy belly, its sleepless and capricious waters; the church tower and its belfry, where a bell dies of loneliness.
Where is the heart of Pedra Santa, my love?
Just answer and please do not ask anything. Do not ask why I write to you. I write because words are out there, like the town, the night, the rain, the river, before me, inside me, a torrent of words that do not fulfill me. Words are points of light in the pitch black of lost things, glimmers of hope, the gaze of a mother with flowers tucked behind her ears, a miracle full of faith waiting to be achieved.

What do I have to leave you other than words?
Is it possible that there has been a time when words didn’t exist, when it is words that give order to the world, make love real, take the night out of the day?

Praise for Suite of Silence

The dense and beautiful Suite of Silence is the debut novel of short story writer and Paraíba native Marília Arnaud. Her debut in this genre reaches us with great stamina and a moving narrative, full of lyricism and steeped in a dense atmosphere. The narrative voices explore the possible guises of love, but above all, the unique ways the protagonist tries to balance, from an early age, the equation of love, loss, and mourning. Mariana Lage, author and journalist

Marilia Arnaud’s novel belongs in the tradition of the urban-existentialist narrative, mastered by Clarice Lispector. Duína’s narrative is, in fact, strongly existentialist. The protagonist is all anguish. Duína searches for Eros, for life. Her narrative is one of despair, and yet, the reader is held captive to a narrative voice that flows well and is attractive. Thus, the death that sits upon Duína is offset by the vital energy of the narrative. Rinaldo de Fernandes, author, literature professor, and literary critic

Ilze Duarte has written about her experience of discovering Marilia Arnaud’s work and translating Suite of Silence. Click here for her essay Another Kind of Emergence, published in Hopscotch Translation.

In O Pássaro Secreto (The Secret Bird), forty-year-old Aglaia Negromonte recalls the events that have shaped her and affected her deeply. At age thirteen, Aglaia learns she has a half-sister, Thalie, born of an affair between her father, a well-known actor and playwright, and a French actress. Thalie, also a teenager, is sent to live with the Negromontes. When Thalie wins the affection of everyone in the family, Aglaia is tormented by jealousy and a sharp sense of betrayal. Lost in a feverish desire for revenge, Aglaia is determined to destroy what is causing her pain and comes dangerously close to destroying herself.

The title of the novel refers to a winged creature Aglaia feels inhabits her body and soul and is a manifestation of her pain and anxiety. She calls it the Thing.

In this passage, Aglaia recounts an event that reveals much of her father’s character and the impact of his emotional distance on her:

Cloistered in that room, he spent his days reading, writing, talking on the telephone, practicing lines again and again.

I remember in particular the day Heitor made the book I was reading disappear. I had gone to the bathroom and left it open on my bed. Back in my room, I couldn’t find it. My mother, who usually settled such disputes, had left for work. After scouring every room to no avail, I thought I would turn to my father.

I knocked once, twice, three times. I was about to give up when he opened the door, visibly cross. I dissolved into tears and begged him to go do something about that primitive brother of mine and make him return my book. He shook his head, looked at me in that way that always made me feel like the smallest of all creatures, and told me we were an intolerable hindrance, and sometimes it was only too easy to understand Herod. He slammed the door on me. When I could no longer see him, he let out a curse word. My mother loathed curse words and had expressly forbidden us to use them. But what was ugly and shameful in us was in my father a rhetorical impulse.

I didn’t know what “hindrance” meant, but I soon intuited it couldn’t be anything good. Despite being only ten or eleven, I sensed at that very moment how difficult it was for my father, the only one I had, to exercise his fatherhood. Neither the curse word nor the mention of Herod bothered me. What disturbed me was the vehemence and the truth with which his words reached me, knocked me down, and nailed me to the ground.

I wished to kill and bury that feeling, bury it deeply, but the angry paws of something expanding inside me kicked it about, as if my father’s difficulty, turned into hurt in me, were a ferocious predator. The feeling came to blows with something growing inside me in a tussle of sharp talons and fangs, and I couldn’t gather the strength to break them up.

Praise for The Secret Bird

The masterful character development. The assured and lyrical narrative voice. The perfectly timed progression of events. The richly textured narrative. The suspension of predictability. All these elements contributed to the high-voltage fictional power delivered by The Secret Bird and coalesce as its most expressive, unique quality. João Anzanello Carrascoza, Jabuti winner and judge of the 2021 Kindle Prize in Literature

Aglaia is a pilgrim walking a fine line between tenderness and torment. This is a devastating novel that takes us to the core of the human condition. Itamar Vieira Jr., Jabuti finalist and Ocean and LeYa winner, author of Torto Arado (Crooked Plow, translated by Johnny Lorenz).

Click here for a video of Ilze reading a passage from The Secret Bird for Translators Aloud.

Click here for a video of Ilze reading another passage from The Secret Bird for the Jill! Reading Series.

Sketch in Stone and Dream (2024)

Esboço em Pedra e Sonho (Sketch in Stone and Dream) is the story of visual artist Ramona de Maria. In her return to Nossa Senhora das Pedras, the small town where she grew up, Ramona embarks on a journey through the realm of memory. Sketch is a lyrical narrative in which the tenderness of family life, childhood friendships and adventures, connection with nature, and introduction to the art of painting is pierced through with the inhospitable realities of the dictatorship ushered by the military coup of 1964. This is a story of secrets, lies, and betrayals. A reckoning with the past and the present.

This passage is from one of the first chapters in the book. Marilza is a friend of Ramona's recently deceased mother and is getting her ready to go meet her grandfather.

Marilza takes the paper back. She touches the long nail, red polish half peeled off, to a blank spot: you see this empty space, Ramona? Soon you will see your father’s name written right here, and then your name will be Ramona de Maria Filgueira. It had never occurred to me that the absence of a family name might be such a problem. At school, my classmates are de Pereira, de Formiga, de Oliveira, and so many other last names. Although Ramona de Maria was enough for me, I tried to gather from my mother a history, a name, a face in a photograph. Fathers have names and faces. I see them at their front doors, on the way to work and to church with their families or absorbed in a domino game in the shade of a tree. Even the fathers who don’t have a face carry a name and are trying their luck in faraway places—mining in the north, coffee farms in the south, the construction of the Transamazônica. One day they will certainly come back. The dead, ah! These are visited in their graves. Their wives and children light candles and leave flowers for them. And there are those who, my mother declared, were not real men but rather useless, sorry excuses for human beings. Some of them live so close. When they beat up their wives, I can hear the blows, the insults, the screams. I curl up and cover my ears with my hands. If they are not men, they cannot be fathers. Some leave their families for some skirt, as Marilza says with a scowl that speaks of her contempt. My mother would agree with her and add in the same tone: those animals will fall for any pair of young legs and firm breasts, which of course have never nursed children.

My mother left this world without offering me a single word about my father. If I insisted, she would yell at me and slam the door so hard the crash would keep echoing within me for hours. One day, the neighbor’s daughter told me about a man who had left my mother before he knew about me as a seed inside her. Before I was born, she had been living at the home of a woman who gave her room and board. In return, she would cook and take care of the children. When the woman found out about the pregnancy, she kicked my mother out. She then started to clean rooms in the only hotel in town and slept in a room in the back of the building. Marilza was working there too, and later she brought my mother to live here. When I came into the world, my mother wasn’t quite sixteen years old, but she already had a little room of her own.

Praise for Sketch in Stone and Dream

In Sketch in Stone and Dream, Arnaud weaves a two-hundred-page narrative of many characters and several interconnected stories memorializing a collective past we ought never to forget. Such stamina is the mark of an experienced, clear-eyed author, well versed in the structural elements of the novel. Arnaud is in full control of her narrative, and her masterful use of time frames allows her characters to move between present and past seamlessly. Lucia Maia de Nobrega, translator and literary critic

Sketch in Stone and Dream accomplishes what the contrast in its title suggests. It is a blend of the harshness of life, with its turns of orphanhood, betrayal, and disenchantment, and the liberating fantasy made possible by the creation and enjoyment of art. In one respect, however, it is fair to say the title on the cover contradicts the work within: “sketch” is no fitting label for Arnaud’s firmly established talent. Chico Viana, author and literary critic

“I can’t imagine life without painting,” says Ramona, the protagonist of Sketch in Stone and Dream. And I say, I can’t imagine Brazilian literature without Marilia Arnaud. Sketch is just as cinematic as it is pictorial. The shuffling of past, present, and future that underpins the narrative is so systematic that I read the book as if following along a movie script. But unlike the scripts of the many prosaic and dull movies I see today, Sketch is poetic and enchanting. João Batista de Brito, film and literary critic

Watch a video of Ilze reading another passage from Sketch in Stone and Dream for Sant Jordi NYC 2025.

A Menina de Cipango covers_overlapping.jpg

The Cipango Girl (1994, 2025)

A Menina de Cipango (The Cipango Girl) is a short story collection for all readers, but its stories of childhood and youth will appeal especially to young adults. It has been selected and reissued by the government of Paraíba, where Arnaud lives, for distribution in the public high schools to celebrate and disseminate the work of the state's most talented authors. Written with deep psychological insight, these are stories of discovery and disappointment, tenderness and cruelty, wonder and pain. I am pitching The Cipango Girl as a YA title.

From The Cipango Girl

I skipped away, jumping up and down, the word rolling off my tongue and echoing in my heart: Cipango, Cipango, Cipango. It sounded like the name of a comic book character. Or a compote Grandma would make: doce de Cipango. Or it could be the name of an animal from the time of the Jurassic period: cipango dinosaur.

I asked the adults in my family, then their friends. Lastly, my teacher. And all of them, dummies, thought it was a made-up name. I then resorted to the dictionaries and encyclopedias at the school library, and for the first time I pored over those books with joy and passion.

From Clarice

One day, the Girl mustered the courage to go talk to Mother about Clarice’s loneliness. Sitting up in bed, a book in front of her face, the woman didn’t notice when the Girl pushed the door open and tiptoed in. She knew Mother didn’t like to be interrupted when she was reading. She whispered:

“Mother?”

The woman moved the book sideways and showed one hard, impatient eye. The Girl stepped in closer, sat on the edge of the bed, crossed her fingers for luck, and asked:

“Mother, will you let Esmeralda buy a rooster to be Clarice’s husband? She’s been so sad. I think it’s because she doesn’t have company. Will you, Mother?”

From The Dress

When night fell and she started the final preparations for the party, I went back to her room to take another peek at the dress upon the bed. I had never questioned the fact that a dress was a dress. But that one, as I looked and looked at it, gave me a bad feeling, the sensation it was squinting its wild eyes and baring its bloody fangs at me.
She caught me in my torment. As if guessing what was going on inside me, she took my hand and sat me down at the edge of the bed. She wanted to tell me the reason for the party, a secret she had kept for months, but now it was time to reveal it. She had so many secrets. I didn’t want to hear about that one.

From Saturday

I sit back up and see a young woman with short blond hair and long white legs perched on very high heels. She’s playing with a cigarette; she drags on it and blows out rings of smoke. I want to smoke, but it isn’t allowed, and I don’t have any cigarettes. If I got off here, I could bum one from the young woman. No, I wouldn’t ask her with those thin lips pressed tight, squinting eyes, hard profile. I would never ask her for anything. The lack of cigarettes makes me anxious. The sidewalks teeming with scurrying people get on my nerves. I want to look at the young woman again. I want to see her very white neck, take in the details of her summer clothes. I turn and am taken aback: her roomy dress reveals a round bump. How can she be so slim and so far along her pregnancy?
The bus moves on. Now it enters the darkness of the tunnel. I think of the pregnant woman now behind me. I should have yelled out to her that smoking is harmful to the fetus, but my voice would have been drowned out by the street vendors’ shouting, the sounds of honking horns and advertising loudspeakers. Better to get off the bus and take away her cigarette. If she tried to fight me off, I would squeeze her throat. She would flail her arms, all slender and pale, and finally the cigarette would fall from her fingers.

From Like a Kiss from God

They waited for me or for Raposinha to decide how we would punish the would-be poet. And to say something that could lessen their shock. Nonsense, I said and sighed, my heart jumping in my chest. If only he had copied the poem. No. I knew he hadn’t. I tried to hide my emotional reaction and added: a moron’s dribble. They all laughed and joined me in pretending the poem hadn’t impressed them.

At that very moment, we decided to go low.
Not that we hadn’t warned him. We'd let him know on day one. He had to make up his mind, decide what group he’d be in, mine or Raposinha’s. If he chose one or the other, he’d get protection, no one would mess with him or make his life hard. That was one of the rules. But he chose to defy us with his silence and indifference, with a freedom that insulted us.

Claudia Nina

Porcelain Landscape (2015, 2025)

The Cabbage Woman (2023)

In Paisagem de Porcelana (Porcelain Landscape), Helena, a young woman from Brazil, travels to the Netherlands in search of adventure, although she doesn’t quite know what kind. Unable to adjust to Amsterdam and connect with the local people, she finds temporary solace in her friendship with Yasuko, wife of a Japanese researcher, and in her romantic relationship with Ernest, a sullen Dutchman who turns out to be a destructive presence in Helena's life. Present-day Helena recounts her journey of alienation and erasure as she tries to piece together the events that led up to the traumatic end of her stay. Helena’s narrative is fragmentary and often contradictory, and it is up to the reader to fill in the gaps of her memory and her attempts at glimpsing the truth. In Nina’s captivating narrative, elements of the fantastical aptly and effectively convey Helena’s estrangement from others and from herself, which grows so deep as to border on the surreal.
Here is an excerpt from chapter 2.

In a flat country, falls are metaphysical. A person can sink into the ground and no one will notice she has disappeared. No one there can tumble from hills or steep roads; one falls from the ground to the ground. One crumbles into a wreckage of inner layers, silently. That is how it went from the moment I boarded the spaceship—Schiphol—and then it kept getting worse as Ernest started to go insane.
The past is divided into a thousand tiny pieces. The city-horseshoe. The map-labyrinth. The rings. This all feels like an absurd brain fog after all these years. The episodes come back to me in spurts. Between my breaths, the curtains slide open: the setting is fake—like prisoners thrown out into the desert assure you they have seen an oasis, so too I create images that are not true. Memory has no lie detector, the fogginess is normal in such cases. One’s feet freeze. How to go back, then? The first fall I experienced was when I thought I was going to lose a finger.
As soon as I arrived, the bright light of the long days looked blue to me. It was a pretty sight, the people scattered on the grass, riding their bicycles from a small town to another, the florists selling tulips and other flowers I had never seen. The Dutch swam in public parks and turned the public lakes into private swimming pools. Their parties didn’t belong to me, but they were parties.
Gradually the cold transformed the landscape. The water in the parks was again returned to the ducks. The wind was the reason why there were no tables out in the sidewalk cafés; the chairs and glasses would be blown away. The blue was reduced to a blurry spot at the end of each day. I remember when the first great frost assaulted me, and that wasn’t even the worst that winter had to offer.
When the illusory euphoria with Ernest had worn off, the falls followed. I fell into pits opening up in the ground.

Watch a video of Ilze reading her translation of the entire chapter.

Praise for Porcelain Landscape

Porcelain Landscape by Claudia Nina is a delirious novel, literally. The reader moves in limbo between reality and imagination, constantly in transit through an inner world yanked inside out, a labyrinth of the protagonist’s memories, bursting forth “in spurts.”
It is only years later that she can put back together the fragments of an image that is still missing pieces, an experience too painful for her memory, which then rearranges her recollections, real and imagined. The picture that emerges is that of a young woman trying to balance on a tenuous line between a sense of exclusion and the horrifying certainty that she doesn’t fit in any world. In this regard, the author also emerges as a great painter: her images trace with clarity what is unclear, cloudy, blurred.
Despite revolving around the main character’s interiority, the narrative never gets lost in self-centered hyper-sensibility because the self is not only the one who narrates but also a little or a lot of the other as a source of identity and escape. The poetics here, in the widest sense of text construction, is piercing. The tension in the writing functions as a blotter to Helena’s despair and thus precludes any excesses, as the author never loses her grip on her device. With great skill, Nina keeps up the suspense by creating the constant expectation that something is about to happen, and thus the reader is compelled to keep turning the pages. Carla Bessa, author and translator

A Repolheira (The Cabbage Woman) takes place in a small village where the short summers are filled with much-anticipated outdoor activity, as the residents sell their bread and produce at the street market. In this close-knit community, the villagers all know and care for each other—except the Cabbage Woman. They don’t know her name and can only guess how old she is. They avoid her out of fear that they will catch some disease she is hiding, especially her loneliness. Every summer is the same as the year before, until a stranger comes along to change the villagers' routine. The stranger is a young salesman who spots the Cabbage Woman and wants to get close to her. Amid all the activity in the market, the villagers are oblivious to what is happening between the young man and the Cabbage Woman. They are also unaware that this very encounter will bring about significant changes in the village as a whole. The Cabbage Woman is a tender story of compassion, discovery, and the human capacity for acceptance and renewal. For children ages 11 to 13.
In the passage below, we are about one third into the narrative.

Like the other sellers, the Cabbage Woman would save the coins from her sales in the summer to buy the provisions that would help her get through the days of reduced work in the winter. Day after day, night after night, in the company of no one, she would experience the passage of the cold season. She would reemerge for the harvest and then for the sales at her stall, which always brimmed with fresh vegetables.
And so the days, the months, and the years went by, bringing nothing that would alter the setting of such a peaceful village. No edges of the mystery enveloping the old Cabbage Woman had been revealed. In fact, no one was really interested in pulling the secret veil off that strange character … Life went on at its usual slow pace. “With change come threats,” most villagers thought. It would be best if everything stayed exactly the same and the setting only changed along with the seasons.
Until, one day, the unexpected happened. A powerful storm couldn’t have transformed this once-frozen setting. Not even a whirlwind or an earthquake. It was a man who rode into the village to change the course of this story. On his shiny horse, the handsome man had arrived by mistake—he was heading northeast to do business and ended up there. He looked rich and elegant, with thick, dark, wavy hair and brown eyes that were small but smart. Medium height. He wasn’t a prince, had no gems on his fingers, no gold on his person. The stranger was a salesman.
He carried a big sack made of good cloth. Since he had gone off the planned path, it might take him a long time to get to his destination. He would need provisions for the rest of his trip, and so he decided to do some shopping in the area. It was the end of summer. As usual, the stalls were set up along the main street.
“Oh, the stranger will bring money to the village,” said those with the keenest eyes when they saw the young man’s large, generous hands and the sack he carried on his shoulder, big enough to hold a lot of goods! The young man’s presence caused a great deal of commotion.
A mysterious figure, he rode down the narrow streets that cut through the village like slices of cake. After watching the excitement for a while, he stopped the horse and got off at the market. It was the last day. The warmest season would soon be over.

Praise for The Cabbage Woman

Although there is no princess or prince charming in The Cabbage Woman, Claudia Nina’s fairy tale belongs in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm stories: the possibility of the supernatural permeates the narrative, where the fantastical invites realistic interpretations. And although there is no intention, overt or covert, to impart a moral lesson, the last pages offer an edifying conclusion. In fact, Nina’s main accomplishment here is her use of the fantastical to shed light on such current issues as prejudice, discrimination against those who are different, lack of trust in human relations, and the resulting avoidance of social contact. Equally praiseworthy is the work of Spanish illustrator Raquel Díaz Reguera, whose fine graphic skills and use of muted colors have fully captured the atmosphere of the story. Sergio Tavares, author and journalist