From Burton into the Twentieth Century Silviano Santiago points out that Latin American culture has occupied ‘the space in-between’. Through the destruction of the concepts of unity and purity, Latin American writing has been produced based on other writings, as the writer ‘plays with the signs of another writer and another work’, which becomes a kind of global translation ( ). Therefore the Latin American writer lives between the assimilation of the original model, which has already been written, and the need to produce a new text that confronts and sometimes negates the original ( ). These contrasts show the forces which have driven Brazilian literature through the centuries, as well as the emerging criticism found in a type of literature which has dealt with a range of translation processes involving historical and social circles of assimilation and transgression, neocolonialism and cultural exchange.
It is within this in-between cultural context that Brazilian literature in translation started to be formed. Between the frontiers of two different processes of reception – on the one hand, the domestic recognition, and on the other hand, the international receptive patterns – it has struggled to create major interest in the eyes of a supposed world literature. As Santiago observes, in Latin American culture, Brazilian literature has lived between dialectic forces, which generated different translation processes through the centuries. As an effect of this, the history of translation of Brazilian fiction into the English language has been marked by great challenges regarding its international circulation. Brazilian literature starts with the story of travellers in Latin America rather than with the effort of publishing houses, government and academia to bring forward a legacy of contributions towards literary translation. Among them, the English explorer Richard Burton is known for his pioneering work.
Either translating Brazilian literature into English or translating the New World through travel account writings, such as the book Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil, Burton made the first push towards an English translational historiography within Brazilian culture and the arts (see table ). Elizabeth Lowe ( ) suggests that ‘Amado is among the writers who have contributed most to the emergence of a post-modern Inter-American literature’ as he was the ‘first Brazilian writer to achieve commercial success in the United States’ and ‘he is credited with opening the international market to the post-dictatorship generation of Brazilian writers’. However, his mixed reception brings to light the controversy around stereotyping in his post-1958 works, even acknowledging that Amado has enjoyed a great reception among the English-reading public. According to Lowe ( ), ‘for his English and French language readers, he is a fascinating source of exotic and titillating narratives’, and for Brazilians he is either a ‘great ambassador of Brazilian culture and civilization around the world’ or a faux populist who thinly disguises sexist and racist attitudes behind charming prose. Another important case to consider is that of Clarice Lispector (see table ).
Perhaps the greatest writer of contemporary Brazilian fiction, she also remained little known in the anglophone world throughout the twentieth century. First translated into English by Gregory Rabassa, some of her works were recreated in the USA and in the UK, mainly after her death, but these efforts seem not to have been enough to give her a better reception within the English-speaking world until a new wave of translations and re-translations were made in the twenty-first century, as we observe in the next section of this article. The ‘Paulo Coelho phenomenon’ has brought to Brazilian fiction a position in the cultural market that it had only previously achieved with Jorge Amado’s works. Despite his works not being considered literature by many critics and the fact that they are not within the Brazilian canon, it is necessary to highlight Coelho’s reception in both the USA and the UK, as well as many other countries, including Brazil, by the readership. Moreover, the canonical writer Clarice Lispector seems to have been rediscovered in the twenty-first century as her works have been republished in the anglophone world, with good international reception (see table ). The idea of ‘rediscovering Lispector’ came from, when he published the book Why this World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, in 2009 (Oxford University Press/Penguin), which had a high profile among the Notable Books of 2009 as part of the New York Times Review.
Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma is a novel by Pre-Modernist Brazilian writer Lima Barreto. Create a book Download as PDF Printable version.
According to Moser, ‘it’s rare enough to get one chance to be translated into English. It’s even rarer – almost unheard of — to get two’. Lispector has indeed had a second chance in English, as New Directions and Penguin Modern Classics expressed their interest in a project to be launched in both the UK and the USA. The result was that several of her most important novels were re-translated within a period of four years. Final Remarks Heloisa Barbosa ( ) stressed in her thesis that ‘From the point of view of visibility in the world scene of literature, it is possible to say that the Brazilian system is “small”, that is, it occupies a subordinate position in the world panorama’, a result of cultural, economic and political factors. Looking at this panorama from the perspective of the twenty-first century, we can observe that the number of translated works has not increased significantly, as can be seen in figure.
9According to Pinheiro, ‘the fact is that the most widely read writer in the world, whose sales have reached 100 million copies in 150 countries, translated into 62 languages, is Brazil’s Paulo Coelho’. However, ‘Coelho’s best-selling success has been followed by continuous critical disqualification, more commonly expressed by utter silence, a sign of his scant value on the scale of objects worthy of intellectual interest. In that hierarchy, the Coelho phenomenon is linked only to the market, not literature; it can interest the sociology of consumption, but not literary studies.’.