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Latin America and Translation: Three Contributions to Knowing “The Other”

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THE SUBVERSIVE SCRIBE: TRANSLATING LATIN AMERICAN FICTION By LevineSuzanne Jill. (Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1991. Pp. 196. $12.00 paper.)
TRANSLATING LATIN AMERICA: CULTURE AS TEXT Edited by LuisWilliam and Rodríguez-LuisJulio. Translation Perspectives no. 6. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Research in Translation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1991). Pp. 348. $15.00 cloth.)
O PODER DA TRADUÇÃO. By MiltonJohn. (São Paulo: Ars Poetica, 1993. Pp. 195.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Clifford E. Landers
Clifford E. Landers*
Affiliation:
Jersey City State College
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Abstract

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Type
Review Essays
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , 1995 , pp. 254 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the University of Texas Press

References

1. The other three were New Age style books by the Brazilian Paulo Coelho, a self-termed sorcerer whose writings bear a distant kinship to the mystical works of Carlos Castañeda. Coelho's works have recently been translated into English by Alan Clarke. The first of these, The Alchemist, has attained best-seller status in Australia and found a niche audience in the United States. Some Brazilian periodicals have adopted the expedient of publishing separate best-seller lists, one for foreign writings and one for national (meaning Brazilian) works.

2. The traffic sometimes flows in both directions. For example, John Updike is said to have become interested in Brazil after reading translated works by Rubem Fonseca. Updike's 1994 novel entitled Brazil has in turn been translated into Portuguese and is now available in the country where it is set.

3. Two examples will suffice. José Bento Monteiro Lobato (1882–1948) is considered the father of the Brazilian book-publishing industry because of his innovative marketing techniques in the 1920s. At a time when there were scarcely as many as thirty bookstores in the entire country, he sold books in pharmacies, markets, and even butcher shops. Monteiro Lobato's experience as a cultural attaché in the United States led him to translate and publish the autobiography of Henry Ford, whom he greatly admired. As a second example, in the early 1990s, Rubem Fonseca translated into Portuguese Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry (an indirect translation from an English version), after becoming intrigued with the Russian writer while doing research for his own novel Vastas Emoções e pensamentos imperfeitos. Fonseca's prestige was sufficient to ensure publication of the work, which sparked a minor surge of interest among Brazilian intellectuals in Babel, who had never before been translated into Portuguese.

4. In a Mexican translation of a U.S. political science text on government, I once encountered the phrase “rudos guerreros.” Only from the context of U.S.-Soviet tensions was I finally able to deduce that the translation was referring to “cold warriors.”

5. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert (New York: Vintage, 1973), translated by Frances Partridge, 112.