Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis, trans. by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books... [an] extraordinary book, a milestone in Latin American literary history ... While the narrative shifts in time and somersaults from cliché to searing originality, from the intimate to the universal, from the trivial to the metaphysical, Machado’s Portuguese is by turns florid and tight, rhythmic and fragmented, full of ifs, buts, qualifications, ambiguities, and irony. The overall effect is outrageously funny and volubly impertinent ... The author’s stylistic exercise in volubility disguises a strategic interrogation of arbitrary power ... Not only does Thomson-DeVeaux explore the issue of Brazilian racial dynamics in her excellent introduction and endnotes, her attention to these themes is also reflected in her translation choices ... The focus of her The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is not reader comfort but a deep engagement with social reality ... This commitment to historical memory is also prominent in the way previous English translations of Brás Cubas are explicitly mentioned, quoted, assimilated, or confronted in Thomson-DeVeaux’s careful and meticulous translation ... All five English translators of Machado de Assis’s masterpiece have ensured that his posthumous hero remains as alive and contradictory as ever.
Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books... [an] extraordinary book, a milestone in Latin American literary history ... While the narrative shifts in time and somersaults from cliché to searing originality, from the intimate to the universal, from the trivial to the metaphysical, Machado’s Portuguese is by turns florid and tight, rhythmic and fragmented, full of ifs, buts, qualifications, ambiguities, and irony. The overall effect is outrageously funny and volubly impertinent ... The author’s stylistic exercise in volubility disguises a strategic interrogation of arbitrary power ... Their new translation of Brás Cubas includes a brief and illuminating introduction, a short biographical note, and very few footnotes. The translation seems to be primarily concerned with accessibility for contemporary Anglophone audiences, which at times involves editing punctuation, expanding phrases for clarity, trimming back flourishes, and employing a stereotyped representation of African American form of address ... the translators...do not seem always confident in their readers’ resilience to ambiguities. No doubt with the intention to be helpful, the translators often expand and clarify with more words than the necessary, offering \'a regular and fluent style\' and thereby loosening the tight connection between form and content in Machado’s Brás Cubas ... All five English translators of Machado de Assis’s masterpiece have ensured that his posthumous hero remains as alive and contradictory as ever.
