Brazil is a country of continental proportions, too big to easily explain or summarize to outsiders. Because of my work as a translator of Brazilian literature (and my existence as a Brazilian immigrant in the United States), I’m sometimes tasked with that responsibility. I’m suddenly struck with anxiety: Whatever facet I select risks casting a shadow over the rest. There’s no typical Brazilian experience, of course, try as we might to pin it down.

I grew up in Natal, in the Northeast, speaking Portuguese with an accent people from Rio or São Paulo might disparagingly call “regional.” The Northeast is Brazil’s poorest region, an area pillaged and exploited many times over, marked by the ripple effects of slavery and colonialism. After the Portuguese Crown was done with the land, the soil couldn’t grow anything anymore, ravaged by sugarcane monoculture. The Northeast became the Brazilian badlands, a place the rest of Brazil doesn’t want to be associated with, to this day. This experience shapes my relationship to Brazil to the degree that my regional status destabilizes my connection to the rest of the country and its national label.

In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film The Secret Agent, Brazil’s contender for best picture at the 2026 Oscars, the protagonist played by Wagner Moura also hails from the Northeast and speaks with a regional accent. In a pivotal scene in the movie, a pro-dictatorship São Paulo oligarch tells him to start acting like the rest of the country, “to be part of a whole,” or else. “I see you guys as a bit loose, disconnected from us, down south . . . I want to . . . avoid this thing that the North does it one way and the South does another,” he says. “I know you guys have this different accent, this way of doing things differently,” which makes people from the Northeast less Brazilian, he seems to think. “This is a regional center, isn’t it?” he says of the university lab Moura’s character directs. “This isn’t a national center, much less international.” The Northeast is niche and not universal, other and not same. In this context of ultra-nationalism, to exist in a Northeastern body that speaks its own language is inherently to be part of the counterculture.

The contemporary literature that comes out of the Northeast of Brazil is playful, strange, genre-defying, often carrying the weight of this legacy on its back. The seven pieces in this feature resist easy categorization and generalizations. “Gray and Red” by Maria Valéria Rezende, translated by Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey, for example, is almost painterly, impressionistic, showing that there’s tenderness in the hardened arid Northeastern landscape. By contrast, “Bye-Bye, Electricity” by Bethânia Pires Amaro, translated by Padma Viswanathan, shows the perils of modern life with the directness and interest in everyday life of the Brazilian crônica. “Saturday” by Marília Arnaud, translated by Ilze Duarte, is full of interiority, mysterious, episodic, and slight in its portrayal of girlhood. “Mothers” by Jarid Arraes, in my co-translation with Julia Sanches, offers a taste of tragicomedy, both absurd and grief-stricken. “Bull-Butcher” by Luciany Aparecida, translated by Juliana Barbassa, unflinchingly shows the violent and exhilarating potential of life on a farm. At least two of the stories have an international bent: “Tangerine Girl” by Rachel de Queiroz, in my own translation, shows a Northeastern girl under the gaze of American sailors stationed in Ceará during World War II. “Fifty Words” by Camila Santos, originally written in English, is entirely set in Los Angeles and shows a young immigrant’s first days in a new country. Not even setting and language are unifying forces here.

Still, one pattern emerged as I assembled these stories: all the writers and translators in this folio are women. It’s well documented that women still make up a small percentage of international writers from any language translated into English, enough that every August translators celebrate Women in Translation Month and award the Women in Translation Prize. Brazilian authors are no exception. It might be impossible to explain or summarize Brazil and its literature, and this small sample is not meant to be illustrative of either the region or the country. My humble hope is that this hints at how much has been obscured, ignored, and undertranslated. That there are many ways to speak Portuguese, many ways to write, many ways to tell stories, many ways to be Brazilian, many ways to be human within and beyond our borders—no explanation needed.

—Bruna Dantas Lobato