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NOTES TOWARD A HISTORY OF LITERARY TRANSLATION
IN BRAZIL
By Paulo Rónai
Tr. Tom Moore
O
ne who someday comes to write the history of
literary translation in Brazil will note a
phenomenon similar to that of the urbanization of the
country. In the great European cities, there was a slow
and progressive architectural evolution, which
allowed the formation of central neighborhoods with
aesthetic qualities and stamped each city with its own
unmistakable character. The evolution of our Brazilian
metropolises was feverish and excessively quick.
Neighborhoods with a provincial aspect, unpaved
streets, without drains, found their little houses
replaced overnight with skyscrapers, without having
passed through any intermediary stages. Elsewhere,
buildings of four and five stories were demolished far
before living out their normal span. Entire streets
disappeared to make way for viaducts, tunnels,
subterranean passageways. In the blink of an eye, we
found that in the midst of these radical
transformations, we had lost exactly that which in
other times once justified the creation of a city: a safer
and happier life among squares, tree-lined avenues,
with newsstands, rambles for the flaneur, with space
for living.
The publishing industry in Brazil is relatively
recent. The first large publishers began to appear in
the 1930s. Brazilian production was not very
abundant, and various publishers included
masterworks of world literature in their catalogs, in
part through having noted that the language used in
translations published in Portugal differed
considerably from that used in Brazil, in part because
there were no royalties to be paid on works in the
public domain. A process thus began that in cultured
countries had already come to a close: the
incorporation and naturalization of the great works of
fiction, especially those of the nineteenth century.
This was the brief golden age of Brazilian translation.
(In talking of gold, we are referring to the quality of
the translations, not their remuneration, of course.)
This was when publishers such as the Cia. Editora
Nacional, Globo, José Olympio, Melhoramentos,
Vecchi, Pongetti, and Difusão Européia do Livro
launched collections of world-renowned works. The
translators, though not very well paid, could take care
with their translations, and many did so out of love for
the art. This was when translations of Balzac,
Dostoevsky, Dickens, Fielding, Maupassant, Manzoni,
Flaubert, Proust, Tolstoy, Stendhal, and other
appeared.
More than 20 years later, the growing influence of
the media came to contribute to the growing
abandonment of literary fiction for best-sellers,
despite the fall in quality. After the first success in
Brazil for an international hit (Gone With the Wind),
the hunt for blockbusters began in earnest and has
never stopped. The publishers try to guarantee a quick
return on their investment, looking for works that will
certainly sell out their press run, and to do so, they
take advantage of international advertising, to strike
while the iron is hot. It is crucial, then, that the work
of the moment be published as soon as possible, and
by any means necessary, including, in some cases,
increasing the translator’s fee. The main victim is the
book. You might say that for the majority of best
sellers there is not a problem, since they do not
deserve better treatment. Sometimes, however, there
are among them items of real literary value, which,
given the haste with which they are translated, are
made useless for the Brazilian public. Even in the case
of mediocre books, a correct version is to be desired,
since the evolution of the vernacular is marked by the
influence of both original works and translations.
And in the meantime, the publication of great
works has come to a halt. Balzac’s Comédie Humaine
and Dostoyevsky’s complete works were not
reissued. 1 And even sadder, a carefully prepared
edition of the works of Dickens lies unpublished at
Livraria José Olympio. Edições de Ouro, which for
some time had republished in pocket editions the
masterworks that other publishers had had translated,
recently ended this project.
This means that at least these two factors push the
translator to be hasty, here as elsewhere the enemy of
perfection: the low remuneration, which forces him to
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