Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Joana Estrela’s Pardalita and Our Own
by Travis Hedge Coke
[Pardalita will be released in English on April 18, 2023 by Levine Querido.]
Pardalita is one of my favorite kinds of comics, one unafraid of its prose being naked, its poetry, its still images, its panels with dialogue balloons and moment-to-moment action changes. Pardalita is slow and strained, fast and easy, warm, chill, irregular, delicate. Made by a confident author and rendered into English by steady translation.
“The only useful word in Portuguese is ‘obrigadinha.’ You can’t translate that.”
Portuguese can, largely, be translated into English, and in that way, Pardalita is translated, but as a whole, as a piece, Pardalita is untranslatable. As is said, in the comic, of irregular verbs, you are not meant to understand them, only memorize.
Like Thérèse and Isabelle, This One Summer, The Song of Wind and Trees, Nightwood, Pardalita is cozily behind its intimacy and nostalgic backwards glances. There is another Pardalita, living, which moves forwards, beyond pages, beyond covers and blurbs, beyond reviews, considerations, sample pages.
Pardalita for me, does not have to be Joana Estrela’s Pardalita, or your own.
If you ask my former schoolmates, many will attest that I fell in love with everyone at sixteen, and as many will change the subject before it comes to what came of that. You actually do get a lot of do-overs and penny ante in the game of being a teenager, just that you do not get it for everything and you cannot pick.
If you asked me about love and being sixteen, I do not know what I would say. I was full of nonsense and ambiguous feelings then and I am now.
I wish I had Pardalita around at that age. I am excited to have it now, at forty-two. The artwork is extraordinary. A density of information and tone never overwhelms the simplicity of its cartooning and focus. Common parts of life made vibrant by reduction to shapes and loose edges, line art which will sketchily, jauntily cross over the borders of the panels, toilets, bleachers, blushing and the inner cantal red of the lower eyelid are implied and implicated. A six panel grid closing tighter only a hand running fingers across someone else’s hand, tracing crease and rubbing skin is so potent we can feel the shiver, the texture, the temperature.
Like our characters, the lines of Pardalita can make us need to put on a sweatshirt and a jacket. Cover our faces with our hands in a mixture of emotions and notional thoughts.
The intimacy of jumprope games. The intimacy of making deliveries. Of homework. Neighborhood trees. Love.
