Translating worlds | Ana Paula Maia's 'On Earth As It Is Beneath'

It’s 7.30 in the morning in the southern US city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, where International Booker Prize nominee Padma Viswanathan lives. The 58-year-old writer-translator-educator wears many hats, between teaching creative writing at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville and bringing stories in different languages to life in English. Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia’s Portuguese-language book Assim na Terra como embaixo da Terra, published in 2017, was on the Booker International shortlist for the English translation, On Earth as it is Beneath that Viswanathan worked on and published in 2025 (the winner, announced on May 19, was the Taiwanese novel Taiwan Travelogue by Yng Shung-z, translated into English by Lin King). It’s not the easiest job to maintain the tonal integrity in such a translation—at what point does she rein in her interpretative voice to ensure the writer’s isn’t dimmed? “That’s the real interest for me,” Viswanathan says. “Translation, for me, is a matter of going deeper and deeper into the book until it’s hard for me to tell almost where the writing is coming from. Translation has the same momentum as the process of original composition.”

Set in a remote Brazilian prison raised over the bones of a former slave plantation, On Earth as it is Beneath drifts through a world of guards, inmates and wandering priests, where brutality festers beneath ritual and routine. Paula Maia’s novel excavates violence, guilt, masculinity and the lingering afterlife of colonial power. It’s a world far removed from Viswanathan’s own, and it’s this distance that fuels her love for amplifying the voices of underrepresented communities, like Brazilian women of colour.

The process is not always joyful. The thing about working with “visceral writers” like Paula Maia is that they uneasily crawl under your skin in your most vulnerable moments, but for the best possible reasons. Viswanathan couldn’t avoid spending time with the character of Melquades, the prison warden—an austere, menacing, predatory figure whose ethics have been shaped by the moral decay of the colony at large. The kind of mileage that a recognition like the Booker Prize—even in the shortlist—provides is undeniable, and a book like Paula Maia’s, despite being rooted in local histories, appeals to the universal and timeless themes of discrimination and violence. So, the passage of these nine years since the original’s release is irrelevant. “It could easily be a story that takes place in America,” says Viswanathan—or one in India. She hopes that more written words can find homes across the world in other languages from India, where so many of her own stories come from.

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