Brazilian Literature

Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
I´ve some names too, but the problem is, that none of their books were translated to English.
Carmen Dolores can be read in English. Not sure though if all they tales are hers or if it is a collection of public domain Brazilian writers.

Carmen Dolores - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Benny Profane

Benny Profane

Well-known member
Adding new names:

1) Renard Perez;
2) José Condé;
3) Bruno Menezes;
4) Paulo Setúbal;
5) Guilhermino Cézar;
6) Sinibaldo Trombini;
7) Alberto da Cunha Melo;
8) Lucilo Varejão;
9) Joaquim Cardozo;
10) Solano Trindade;
11) Carlos Pena Filho;
12) Mauro Mota
 
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Benny Profane

Benny Profane

Well-known member
I know that this forum doesn't support any political manifestations, but today is a party day for us:

"Tá na hora do Jair,
Tá na hora do Jair (vai!)
Já ir embora!
Arrume as suas malas,
Dê no pé e vá 'simbora! (Tchau!)"

I don't support Lula and I have some differences with him, but I recognize that my country will dialogue with another countries with some respect and no hate speeches.
 
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Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
Benny Profane said:
I know that this forum doesn't support any political manifestations, but today is a party day for us:

"Tá na hora do Jair,
Tá na hora do Jair (vai!)
Já ir embora!
Arrume as suas malas,
Dê no pé e vá 'simbora! (Tchau!)"

I don't support Lula and I have some differences with him, but I recognize that my country will dialogue with another countries with some respect and no hate speeches.
Click to expand...
Special thanks to the Northeast states!
 
Benny Profane

Benny Profane

Well-known member
The translation of the music:

"Tá na hora do Jair,
Tá na hora do Jair (vai!)
Já ir embora!
Arrume as suas malas,
Dê no pé e vá 'simbora! (Tchau!)"

"It's time to Jair,
It's time to Jair (go!)
Already goes home!
Arrange your suitcases,
Run away and go home (Bye!)"

There is a pun with "Jair" (the first name of Bolsonaro) and "já ir" (already go). :)
 
Benny Profane

Benny Profane

Well-known member
Speaking again about Brazilian Literature, I've discovered another great author who is broadly unknown here: Wanda Fabian.

There isn't an only page about her works available.
 
Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
Benny Profane said:
Speaking again about Brazilian Literature, I've discovered another great author who is broadly unknown here: Wanda Fabian.

There isn't an only page about her works available.
Click to expand...
I found this article about Wanda Fabian. In Portuguese it´s very well written. In English I don´t know, there is quite a list of languages one can choose from, so I guess it must be a kind of Google translation. Anyway one can get an idea about the author.
www.academia.org.br

A condição humana

Estudar um livro ou qualquer manifestação literária exclusivamente do ponto de vista estético ou político do momento foi a constante de uma corrente da crítica literária que se avolumou a partir do século XIX.
www.academia.org.br
 
tiganeasca

tiganeasca

Moderator
And now, the latest installment in the New York Times's series from around the globe:

Read Your Way Through São Paulo

By Paulo Scott
Paulo Scott is the author of, among many works, the novels “Phenotypes,” which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and “Nowhere People,” which won the Machado de Assis Prize, given by the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Feb. 15, 2023

The fifth largest city in the world, São Paulo is not only the richest urban center in Brazil: It is a rhizome fed by conflicting moral, ethical and aesthetic ambitions and imaginations, which lead and influence an entire country’s cultural production.

Absorbing, concentrating, dominating and replicating other collective imaginations in an ongoing colonizing project, today São Paulo is, for better or worse, the place where many decisions are made about what Brazilian cultural identity and Brazilian culture are understood to be. This causes an important number of artists from all over Brazil to migrate here. Among them are writers — including the young Black and Indigenous writers whose fictional narratives are, increasingly, and in ways not yet fully understood, opposing this colonizing project in ambitious ways, with language and characters that would have been unacceptable a few years ago.

São Paulo is a daunting metropolis. What are some books that can help me approach the city?
Conceição Evaristo’s powerful first novel, “Ponciá Vicencio,” translated by Paloma Martinez-Cruz, addresses the emotional impact of structural racism on Black Brazilian people. The eponymous main character, Ponciá, grows up in a small town, Vila Vicêncio, in a Black family working on a small subsistence farm. Her grandfather had been enslaved. Facing racism, Ponciá takes a train to the big city to find a new life. The name of the city is not mentioned, but there is no doubt it is São Paulo.

The São Paulo explored in the literature of the 21st century, as in Evaristo’s novel, is a space in which extreme situations unfold under a regime of oppression directed against those who are outside privileged social groups. This, in a dystopian way, is very well addressed by the writer Ignácio de Loyola Brandão in his novel “And Still the Earth,” in a translation by Ellen Watson. In this work of speculative fiction, set in a future São Paulo, “the System” governs its subjects’ every movement and thought.

Another important author for understanding São Paulo, and Brazil, is Carolina Maria de Jesus. Among her books, “Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus,” in a translation by David St. Clair, stands out. De Jesus was a contemporary of the world-renowned novelist Clarice Lispector, whose works capture that other important Brazilian city, Rio de Janeiro. There is an interesting dialectic between these two great writers that reveals Brazilian subjectivities.

The city is known for its bookstores. What are some of your favorites?
While it may not have the natural beauty of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo is a metropolis where encounters, conviviality and affection are fostered by its parks, theaters, museums, cultural spaces, cinemas, restaurants and bookstores. I cannot imagine São Paulo without the charm of its bookshops.

I live a few yards away from what I consider the best bookstore in town: the Ria Livraria in Vila Madalena, in the western part of São Paulo. It stocks nearly exclusively books by independent publishers. More than a place that sells books, it’s also a bar where you can find cheap beer and the best pastel de carne, a kind of meat-filled pastry (it’s hard to explain in a few words the magical experience of eating a Brazilian pastel). It is a place where concerts, readings and debates take place. It is where the newest generation of writers, as well as more established and acclaimed writers, can be found.

Another bookstore that deserves your attention is 1DASUL, run by the writer Ferréz — a bookstore that serves a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of São Paulo.

Martins Fontes, on Avenida Paulista, a major avenue lined with big glass buildings housing banks and cultural centers, has perhaps the largest collection of books by Brazilian authors translated into English, including a great collection of children’s books and art books about Brazil and Brazilian culture written in English.

There’s also Megafauna, in the historic center of São Paulo, on the ground floor of the city’s most emblematic residential building — the snaking, Modernist housing block called Edifício Copan. The building itself is well worth visiting: It was designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the architect who also designed the country’s capital, Brasília, and the United Nations building in New York. His thoughts and impressions of Brazil and São Paulo can be found in his memoir, “The Curves of Time,” in a translation by Izabel Murat Burbridge.

And there’s more. Mandarina offers the best home delivery options in town. Gato Sem Rabo only sells books written by women, including Sueli Carneiro, one of the most important Brazilian thinkers, as well as Andréa del Fuego, Eliana Alves Cruz and Cidinha da Silva, three of the most celebrated Brazilian writers in recent years. And Patuscada, which is run by the poet Eduardo Lacerda and his wife, Pricila Gunutzmann, belongs to Patuá, perhaps the most important independent publishing house in Brazil. Among their books — unfortunately not available in English translation yet, so you’ll have to wait! — are “Ao pó,” by Morgana Kretzmann, and “Nossa Teresa: Vida e Morte de Uma Santa Suicida,” by Micheliny Verunschk, both of which are winners of the Prêmio São Paulo, one of the three most important literary prizes in Brazil.

And what about the libraries? I’ve heard the city has a particularly wide range.
Also in the historic center of São Paulo, a few steps from Edifício Copan, is the Mário de Andrade Library, the first and main public library in the city, which houses an important collection as well as a theater and study and meeting spaces. Mário de Andrade was an important Brazilian writer who, among other fundamental works, wrote the foundational work of Brazilian Modernism, the poetry collection “Hallucinated City,” which explores the increasingly urban and chaotic metropolis.

Also close to my house is the Alceu Amoroso Lima Public Library, which is the only large public library in Brazil dedicated exclusively to poetry. There you can find many poetry books by Brazilian authors translated into English — for example, “Rilke Shake,” by Angélica Freitas, whose work is an example of how some of the best Brazilian poetry today is being written by women and transgender authors. The English translation of the book, by Hilary Kaplan, was a deserving winner in 2016 of the Best Translated Book Award given by Three Percent, the literary magazine of Open Letter Books, and the National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association.

Another library that cannot be missed is the Biblioteca de São Paulo, built where one of the largest prisons in the country, the Complexo Penitenciário do Carandiru, used to be. The routine and idiosyncrasies of the prison, where a security crackdown left 111 inmates dead in 1992, was transfigured into fiction by Drauzio Varella, who volunteered as a doctor in the prison for over a decade, in a book that was a best seller in Brazil: “Lockdown: Inside Brazil’s Most Dangerous Prison.”

(The printed version continues with the following question and answer: "If the weather is beautiful, what are some parks where I could sit outside with a book?" There isn't room in a single post for me to reproduce it here because of character limitations; if you're interested, you should be able to find it online here. If not, let me know by PM and I'll send you that piece.)
 
Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
tiganeasca said:
And now, the latest installment in the New York Times's series from around the globe:

Read Your Way Through São Paulo

By Paulo Scott
Paulo Scott is the author of, among many works, the novels “Phenotypes,” which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and “Nowhere People,” which won the Machado de Assis Prize, given by the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Feb. 15, 2023

The fifth largest city in the world, São Paulo is not only the richest urban center in Brazil: It is a rhizome fed by conflicting moral, ethical and aesthetic ambitions and imaginations, which lead and influence an entire country’s cultural production.

Absorbing, concentrating, dominating and replicating other collective imaginations in an ongoing colonizing project, today São Paulo is, for better or worse, the place where many decisions are made about what Brazilian cultural identity and Brazilian culture are understood to be. This causes an important number of artists from all over Brazil to migrate here. Among them are writers — including the young Black and Indigenous writers whose fictional narratives are, increasingly, and in ways not yet fully understood, opposing this colonizing project in ambitious ways, with language and characters that would have been unacceptable a few years ago.

São Paulo is a daunting metropolis. What are some books that can help me approach the city?
Conceição Evaristo’s powerful first novel, “Ponciá Vicencio,” translated by Paloma Martinez-Cruz, addresses the emotional impact of structural racism on Black Brazilian people. The eponymous main character, Ponciá, grows up in a small town, Vila Vicêncio, in a Black family working on a small subsistence farm. Her grandfather had been enslaved. Facing racism, Ponciá takes a train to the big city to find a new life. The name of the city is not mentioned, but there is no doubt it is São Paulo.

The São Paulo explored in the literature of the 21st century, as in Evaristo’s novel, is a space in which extreme situations unfold under a regime of oppression directed against those who are outside privileged social groups. This, in a dystopian way, is very well addressed by the writer Ignácio de Loyola Brandão in his novel “And Still the Earth,” in a translation by Ellen Watson. In this work of speculative fiction, set in a future São Paulo, “the System” governs its subjects’ every movement and thought.

Another important author for understanding São Paulo, and Brazil, is Carolina Maria de Jesus. Among her books, “Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus,” in a translation by David St. Clair, stands out. De Jesus was a contemporary of the world-renowned novelist Clarice Lispector, whose works capture that other important Brazilian city, Rio de Janeiro. There is an interesting dialectic between these two great writers that reveals Brazilian subjectivities.

The city is known for its bookstores. What are some of your favorites?
While it may not have the natural beauty of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo is a metropolis where encounters, conviviality and affection are fostered by its parks, theaters, museums, cultural spaces, cinemas, restaurants and bookstores. I cannot imagine São Paulo without the charm of its bookshops.

I live a few yards away from what I consider the best bookstore in town: the Ria Livraria in Vila Madalena, in the western part of São Paulo. It stocks nearly exclusively books by independent publishers. More than a place that sells books, it’s also a bar where you can find cheap beer and the best pastel de carne, a kind of meat-filled pastry (it’s hard to explain in a few words the magical experience of eating a Brazilian pastel). It is a place where concerts, readings and debates take place. It is where the newest generation of writers, as well as more established and acclaimed writers, can be found.

Another bookstore that deserves your attention is 1DASUL, run by the writer Ferréz — a bookstore that serves a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of São Paulo.

Martins Fontes, on Avenida Paulista, a major avenue lined with big glass buildings housing banks and cultural centers, has perhaps the largest collection of books by Brazilian authors translated into English, including a great collection of children’s books and art books about Brazil and Brazilian culture written in English.

There’s also Megafauna, in the historic center of São Paulo, on the ground floor of the city’s most emblematic residential building — the snaking, Modernist housing block called Edifício Copan. The building itself is well worth visiting: It was designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the architect who also designed the country’s capital, Brasília, and the United Nations building in New York. His thoughts and impressions of Brazil and São Paulo can be found in his memoir, “The Curves of Time,” in a translation by Izabel Murat Burbridge.

And there’s more. Mandarina offers the best home delivery options in town. Gato Sem Rabo only sells books written by women, including Sueli Carneiro, one of the most important Brazilian thinkers, as well as Andréa del Fuego, Eliana Alves Cruz and Cidinha da Silva, three of the most celebrated Brazilian writers in recent years. And Patuscada, which is run by the poet Eduardo Lacerda and his wife, Pricila Gunutzmann, belongs to Patuá, perhaps the most important independent publishing house in Brazil. Among their books — unfortunately not available in English translation yet, so you’ll have to wait! — are “Ao pó,” by Morgana Kretzmann, and “Nossa Teresa: Vida e Morte de Uma Santa Suicida,” by Micheliny Verunschk, both of which are winners of the Prêmio São Paulo, one of the three most important literary prizes in Brazil.

And what about the libraries? I’ve heard the city has a particularly wide range.
Also in the historic center of São Paulo, a few steps from Edifício Copan, is the Mário de Andrade Library, the first and main public library in the city, which houses an important collection as well as a theater and study and meeting spaces. Mário de Andrade was an important Brazilian writer who, among other fundamental works, wrote the foundational work of Brazilian Modernism, the poetry collection “Hallucinated City,” which explores the increasingly urban and chaotic metropolis.

Also close to my house is the Alceu Amoroso Lima Public Library, which is the only large public library in Brazil dedicated exclusively to poetry. There you can find many poetry books by Brazilian authors translated into English — for example, “Rilke Shake,” by Angélica Freitas, whose work is an example of how some of the best Brazilian poetry today is being written by women and transgender authors. The English translation of the book, by Hilary Kaplan, was a deserving winner in 2016 of the Best Translated Book Award given by Three Percent, the literary magazine of Open Letter Books, and the National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association.

Another library that cannot be missed is the Biblioteca de São Paulo, built where one of the largest prisons in the country, the Complexo Penitenciário do Carandiru, used to be. The routine and idiosyncrasies of the prison, where a security crackdown left 111 inmates dead in 1992, was transfigured into fiction by Drauzio Varella, who volunteered as a doctor in the prison for over a decade, in a book that was a best seller in Brazil: “Lockdown: Inside Brazil’s Most Dangerous Prison.”

(The printed version continues with the following question and answer: "If the weather is beautiful, what are some parks where I could sit outside with a book?" There isn't room in a single post for me to reproduce it here because of character limitations; if you're interested, you should be able to find it online here. If not, let me know by PM and I'll send you that piece.)
Click to expand...
Thanks, Tiga! I discovered several books and bookstores I had no idea of.
 
B

Ben Jackson

Well-known member
Brazilian writers I have read thus far: Lispector, Drummond, De Assis. Have read few poems of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, winner of Neustadt Prize in 1992. I have more books to read from Lispector and will read Joao Guimares Rosa, Julian Fuks and Milton Hatoum soon.
 
Benny Profane

Benny Profane

Well-known member
I recently discovered a new name: Anna Guasque (no, she isn't the homologue actress).

Who is she? No mentions about her works on Internet.
 
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tiganeasca

tiganeasca

Moderator
Very interesting article about books I've never heard of but now need to investigate:


New Translations Explore Brazil’s ‘Endless and Unfinished’ Character​

Two translations bring canonical works by Mário de Andrade into English, allowing a glimpse into the author’s “problematic sense of belonging.”

"Mário de Andrade’s novel “Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character” follows a shape-shifting, rule-flouting, race-switching trickster as he roams the vast nation of Brazil, meeting historical characters, folkloric figures, and outrageously satirized stereotypes along the way.
Rich with words and references from Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures, the modernist novel was hailed as a classic upon its publication in 1928, and has long been seen as an allegory for Brazil’s unique cultural blend. Faced with criticism of the book’s uncredited reliance on anthropological research, Andrade offered up, in an open letter, a typically insouciant response: “I copied Brazil.”
Some scholars have deemed the book’s complexity virtually untranslatable — but this week, New Directions published a new translation of “Macunaíma” by Katrina Dodson that aims to transport Andrade’s idiosyncratic prose into English....

A more personal register is on full display in “The Apprentice Tourist,” the first translation of another Andrade book by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux that was also published this week by Penguin Classics. Compiled from notes Andrade made during his first trip to the Amazon shortly before “Macunaíma” was released, “The Apprentice Tourist” shows Andrade’s fascination with Amazonian cultures — and his utter boredom with the government officials and elites who welcomed the group of travelers along the way."
 
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