North Hollywood isn't actually Hollywood, it's in the San Fernando Valley. . . it's not the most glamorous part of L. A.
Nom de Plume uses the device of the pseudonym to unite the likes of Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, Fernando Pessoa, and Patricia Highsmith into a cohesive yet highly idiosyncratic literary history. Each page affords sparkling facts and valuable insights onto the manufacturing of books and reputations, the keeping and revealing of secrets, the vagaries of private life and public opinion, and the eternally mysterious, often tormented interface between life and literature.
I'm not like a voracious hoarder who has 50,000 albums of vinyl stacked in a storage space in the San Fernando Valley. But I do have albums from the last 40 years of my life.
I can tell some names that played with me at Real Madrid and there's so many legends, everything is there. You know Roberto Carlos, Fernando Hierro, Raul, Zizou, Figo, Makelele, Ronaldo - the big one! - and Cristiano Ronaldo afterwards. . . pick any of those guys and you'd have an incredible team.
Fernando Torres needs to be loved on a regular basis
Fernando Vargas may have had a 6-pack in his stomach, but he didn't have a six-pack on his chin.
I've never translated more than one book by any author. But I'm fascinated by translators who have, like Richard Zenith, who's translated so much of Fernando Pessoa's work. I get restless for a new kind of influence. The books I've translated are books I want to learn from as a writer, to be intoxicated by. And translation is an act of writing in itself. It's an act of recreation - of a writer's cadence and tone and everything that distinguishes the voice in the book.
