Thursday 12 December 2019

Declaration of intent

On the 3rd of March, 2018, I started the Autarcias blog in Portuguese language as a solo enterprise after being part of a couple of deceased group blogs, the original purpose was to publish book and music reviews as well as short texts whose length was not long enough to submit to any news outlet. Portuguese publishers kept sending more books than I managed or cared to read and even less review (the Portuguese edition of Pravda.ru has an average of 300,000 daily readers, mostly from Brazil, and they were all hoping to cash on it), so I decided to work only with a few publishers whose main output was non-fiction, horror and science fiction, with a little punk rock here and there. 

As the months passed by, I created a second blog for the reviews and other cultural irrelevancies so Autarcias could focus solely on politics. It seemed as the right thing to do, given that I was writing more and more about my work as a part of local government, Portuguese politics, European politics and international affairs from my perspective as a Left Libertarian member of the Portuguese Socialist Party, my translation works focusing on Democratic Socialist authors of old and Progressive modern authors such as John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek and Andre Vltchek, be it for my own journal Libertária or for other outlets, like the Brazilian edition of Jacobin, Global Research and Pravda

Reading Progressive news on both mainstream and alternative media websites on a daily basis, I realized there’s hardly, if any, Portuguese authors out there writing in English language and thought “oh well, why not do it myself?”. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that no one had yet registered the domain Autarkies, and here I am. Please keep in mind English is not my first language, and I’m more accustomed to translating from English and Spanish into Portuguese, not the other way around.

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