Creative Transformations

Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas

By Krista Brune

Subjects: Latin American Studies, Literary Criticism, American Literature, Comparative Literature, Translation
Series: SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
Paperback : 9781438480626, 276 pages, July 2021
Hardcover : 9781438480619, 276 pages, November 2020

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Table of contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Theorizing Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas

1. The New World Travels and Translations of O Novo Mundo

2. Modernism for Export: The Translational Origins and Afterlives of Macunaíma

3. Silviano Santiago's Translational Criticism and Fiction

4. Testing Translatability: Adriana Lisboa's Hemispheric Brazilian Novels

Conclusion: Translating Brazil Today: Retranslations and Untranslatability

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Explores the role of travel and translation in Brazilian literature and culture from the 1870s to the present.

Description

In Creative Transformations, Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary and cultural history, translation becomes a way of navigating and representing the resulting encounters between languages, interactions with Spanish Americans, and negotiations of complex identities. While Creative Transformations engages extensively with theories of translation from different national and disciplinary contexts, it also constructs a vision of translation uniquely attuned to the place of Brazil in the Americas. Brune reveals the hemispheric underpinnings of works by renowned Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Sousândrade, Mário de Andrade, Silviano Santiago, and Adriana Lisboa. In the process, she rethinks the dynamics between cosmopolitan and national desires and between center and periphery in global literary markets.

Krista Brune is Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Spanish at Pennsylvania State University.

Reviews

"This sophisticated but easy to read study will enhance graduate courses on the Brazilian canon and translation … Those seeking to study and teach world literature in English would benefit from this book, which shows the many forms of Brazilian cosmopolitanism and encourages Anglophone readers to learn more about this half of South America." — Hispania

"This book presents the reader with an original hypothesis and a very thorough recapitulation of theories of translation. These theories inform Brune's analysis, but the analysis also adds its own voice to the chorus of studies dealing with translation. In this way, Creative Transformations provides a new way to understand translation and the position of Brazilian literature and culture in a global context." — Leila Lehnen, author of Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature