In just a week’s time, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas will be landing in bookstores and on doorsteps! (Though probably a bit longer before it gets to mine – the international mails aren’t what they used to be.)

In the absence of germy get-togethers, I’ve decided to do a countdown: every day till the launch, I’ll flip to a random page in my watermarked PDF and comment on some of the calculations, observations, calibrations, and curiosities that didn’t make it into the endnotes.

(Specialists say that footnotes to the endnotes are what today’s readers really crave.)

BRAS CUBAS T-MINUS 7: p. 234
This is one of a few places in the novel where Brás refers to vital energies flowing through his body like liquids, and I had fun picking from an array of watery verbs.

For the Portuguese “percorreu-me,” which is something like “to run through,” I chose “swam” to reflect back on the fact that his fatherly itchings take the form of a fluid, and then “roiling” for “se agitava” to again suggest troubled waters.

There’s a nice echo of the chapter where Brás dies (not a spoiler, since it’s Chapter I), in which he recalls that "a vida estrebuchava-me no peito, com uns ímpetos de vaga marinha" – “life floundered in my chest like the surging of an ocean swell” –

which to my ear combines the desperate movements of an individual swimmer sinking in the water and the implacable rise and fall of the water itself, contradictory and inseparable.

Also: very pleased to have used the word “behooved.” If my dissertation research is correct, this is the first English-language translation of the Memórias Póstumas to use the word “behoove,” but for some reason @PenguinClassics didn’t want to put that on the cover.

Also, fun fact: where Machado writes that the philosopher “proved" the Gospels wrong (the word is "provar"), the evangelical translator who did a version of the novel in the ‘50s rendered it as "he made good arguments.” Everyone's entitled to their adjustments.

And in case you were wondering if there was anything else to say about such short of a chapter, you can preorder the book to find out what I put in the endnote that actually DID get published! https://bit.ly/2X2RDbJ