A bitter and undiplomatic translator regarding the world around him. In Three Traitors and Some Others, Marcelo Backes's new novel, translation is a perfect metaphor for art and, by extension, life. "The world we have to face is a world that, in its reality, clashes with our ideals; we live taking blows from the outside when our interior manifests itself," argues Backes. Translation is, here, the purest form of betrayal: "The traitor spits in the plate from which he ate. But how hard it is to discover sometimes, and in the case of the translator this happens all the time, that betrayal is a necessary condition for being more faithful." A professor, literary critic, and translator, Backes used the premise of translations to create a plot that involves the contradictions of a man who returns to his inner self after accumulating experiences and failures throughout the world. The narrator, younger with each story—always cynical, sometimes perverse—unravels the thread of his self to weave a picture of the contemporary world, globalized in its economy, but medieval in its affect. A man capable of focusing solely on himself, whether translating a great German author with whom he had an affair in the past and whom he reunites when she is at the height of her fame, or simultaneously translating the counseling sessions of a German businessman who believes he has killed his wife. Three Traitors and Some Others is a work of fiction, but any reference to reality is no coincidence. "The character is a madman who goes out into the world on horseback, riding on himself, but in reality, he tells the world outside to forget the soul 'here' inside. Everything that happens, happens for real, but in fiction—and the starting point is my experience," he concludes.
