Novas traduções exploram o caráter “infinito e inacabado” do Brasil

Duas traduções trazem obras canônicas de Mário de Andrade para o inglês, permitindo vislumbrar o "problemático sentimento de pertencimento" do autor.

Lucas Iberico Lozada

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/books/mario-de-andrade-macunaima-apprentice-tourist.html

O autor Mário de Andrade ficou "profundamente encantado com o caráter infinito e inacabado do Brasil", disse Pedro Meira Monteiro, estudioso da literatura brasileira. Ao mesmo tempo, seu trabalho reflete um profundo "senso de pertencimento". Arquivo IEB-USP, Fundo Mário de Andrade

O romance “Macunaíma: O herói sem nenhum caráter”, de Mário de Andrade, segue um trapaceiro que muda de forma, desrespeita as regras e muda de raça enquanto ele percorre a vasta nação do Brasil, encontrando personagens históricos, figuras folclóricas e estereótipos escandalosamente satirizados ao longo do caminho .

Rico em palavras e referências das culturas indígenas e afro-brasileiras, o romance modernista foi aclamado como um clássico quando foi publicado em 1928 e há muito é visto como uma alegoria da mistura cultural única do Brasil. Confrontado com as críticas à confiança não creditada do livro na investigação antropológica, Andrade ofereceu, em uma carta aberta, uma resposta tipicamente despreocupada: “Eu copiei o Brasil”.

Alguns estudiosos consideraram a complexidade do livro praticamente intraduzível - mas esta semana, a New Directions publicou uma nova tradução de “Macunaíma”, de Katrina Dodson, que visa transportar a prosa idiossincrática de Andrade para o inglês.

Ao longo de seis anos de pesquisa, Dodson se familiarizou com todos os aspectos do romance. Ela perseguiu flora e fauna obscuras em duas viagens à Amazônia, percorreu uma série de comentários críticos, mergulhou nos arquivos de Mário de Andrade em São Paulo e discutiu a relevância contínua do livro com os brasileiros contemporâneos. Embora ela tenha descoberto que para alguns leitores o livro continua a representar o espírito nacional “infinito e inacabado” do Brasil, ela também conheceu muitos artistas afro-brasileiros e indígenas que se propuseram a recuperar as raízes folclóricas nas quais Mário de Andrade se baseou.

Inspirada por sua pesquisa, Dodson espera que sua nova tradução enfatize o quão profundamente pessoal e multifacetado o conceito de Brasil era para Mário de Andrade.

“Andrade era gay, mas muito fechado e também muito conflituoso sobre sua identidade racial”, disse ela. “Ele tinha herança africana em ambos os lados. Depois de saber mais sobre ele e mais sobre o contexto de como ele escreveu este livro, você entenderá que há muitas questões sinceras e sérias no cerne dele.”

A noção de que o livro e seu personagem principal são um substituto do país e de seu “amálgama de diferentes raças e etnias” ajudou a estabelecer “Macunaíma” como um romance canônico, lido em todas as salas de aula dedicadas à literatura brasileira, disse Pedro Meira Monteiro, catedrático de Espanhol e Português da Universidade de Princeton. Mas seria um erro lê-lo como um projeto nacionalista, disse ele.

“Mário is so profoundly charmed by the endless and unfinished character of Brazil,” he said, referring to the author by his first name, with the familiarity common to Andrade’s readers in Brazil.

“He is seeing something that he recognizes as his and at the same time not,” he said. “There’s a problematic sense of belonging in his work that is profound.”

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.

Andrade was born in São Paulo, the country’s industrial capital, in 1893. He enrolled in São Paulo’s Dramatic and Musical Conservatory at age 11 to train as a concert pianist, taught himself French and became enamored with the poetry of the Symbolists. By his mid-20s he was traveling throughout Brazil, publishing poetry and essays on folklore along the way.

Andrade’s fascination with the multiplicities of Brazilian culture placed him at the center of the modernist movements that were sweeping the country in the 1920s. “Macunaíma” was first excerpted in the Revista de Antropofagia, the journal edited by Oswald de Andrade (no relation), whose 1928 manifesto proclaimed that Brazilian thinkers needed to reject European artifice and “cannibalize” native forms of storytelling to produce a new Brazilian art. Antropofagia, or anthropophagy in English, refers to the eating of human flesh.

The book found an admiring readership among the Brazilian intelligentsia, but even they were struck by its incongruities. One critic, João Ribeiro — a prominent folklorist himself — called it “voluntarily barbarous, primeval, an assortment of disconnected fragments put together by a commentator incapable of any coordination.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/07/02/multimedia/02Andrade-04/00Andrade-04-vlpk-jumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp

“My goal was to make you feel the joy of language in the book,” Katrina Dodson said, “to be carried along by all the humor and the colloquial ways in which people speak.” Credit...Lila Barth for The New York Times

Dodson approached the book because she felt the existing English translation, E.A. Goodland’s 1984 version for Random House, had smoothed over the “joy and poetry of the language, and the cultural politics of the particular mix of languages.”

Take the book’s first line, which half a dozen Brazilian artists and scholars interviewed by The New York Times quoted, unprompted, from memory: “No fundo do mato-virgem nasceu Macunaíma, herói da nossa gente.”

Goodland’s translation of the first line ignores Andrade’s sentence structure. It starts: “In a far corner of Northern Brazil” — words that do not exist in the original — then continues, “at an hour when so deep a hush had fallen on the virgin forest….” Goodland, a retired technical director for a sugar company in Guyana, was “well-versed in all of the natural history foundation of the book,” Dodson said, “but he completely missed the spirit of what the book is trying to do. His translation really leans into stereotypes of Brazil being this sexy, wild place where everyone loses their head.”

Dodson decided to essentially transliterate the line, despite the grammatical awkwardness it introduces in English: “In the depths of the virgin-forest was born Macunaíma, hero of our people.” The importance of the line, she said, is not in establishing where the action is taking place, as Goodland had done, but in bringing the reader into the fold of the people at hand. “Macunaíma is our hero,” she said.

As her knowledge of the book deepened, Dodson said, she found herself walking back some of her own interventions to maintain the “music” of the original.

“A lot of the words in the book are not in the regular Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries,” Dodson noted. “Or if they are, the meanings are ambiguous. My goal was to make you feel the joy of language in the book, to be carried along by all the humor and the colloquial ways in which people speak, but also by the beautiful sounds of the Indigenous words.”

For the Brazilian artists behind the book’s many adaptations into film, theater, and art, Andrade’s insistence on maintaining the complex vernacular that he overheard on his travels is precisely what makes the book so vital.

Image

This image shows the cover of a book with the title, "The Apprentice Tourist," and the author's name, Mário de Andrade, on a black section at the bottom, and at the top, a colorful illustration with a peach background and the figure of the author prominent in the foreground. 

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/05/books/05Andrade-02/05Andrade-02-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp

Andrade took the trip recounted in “The Apprentice Tourist”...

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/05/books/05Andrade-01/05Andrade-01-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp

... between revisions of “Macunaíma,” and aspects of what he observed appeared in the second book.

“The book’s difficulty is its genius,” said Iara Rennó, a São Paulo-based musician. Shortly after reading the book for the first time and becoming enamored by its musicality, Rennó began writing her 2008 album, “Macunaíma Ópera Tupi.” “‘Macunaíma’ puts the reader, who is used to so-called ‘well-written’ Portuguese, into a state of transgression,” she said. “And that transgression is so important. It feeds culture.”

Some scholars have compared “Macunaíma” to James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” another totemic modernist novel from the 1920s whose allusive, wide-ranging play with language is as central to its identity as its plot.

“The elites in Brazil love to think of themselves as dislocated Europeans,” said Caetano Galindo, whose innovative 2012 translation of “Ulysses” into Brazilian Portuguese won the prestigious Jabuti prize. Andrade, he added, “had a huge role in facing the fact that this is not a true monolingual country.”

While their new translations offer an important corrective in bringing canonical Brazilian works into English, both Dodson and Thomson-DeVeaux are careful to address the criticisms that Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian artists have raised about the modernists’ central role in Brazilian cultural histories.

As Dodson notes, Andrade’s book is indebted to the work of Theodor Koch-Grünberg, a German ethnologist who transcribed a long saga cycle featuring a trickster figure from Indigenous Pemon-language storytellers on the border shared by Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana in the early 1910s. For the Macuxi and other Indigenous peoples in the Pemon language group today, this figure — Makunaima or Makunaimã — bears only passing resemblance to Andrade’s Macunaíma.

Starting around five years ago, Jaider Esbell, a Macuxi painter and performance artist, fashioned himself into “Makunaima’s grandson,” re-claiming the figure from the modernists and rendering him in dozens of paintings.

Esbell’s friend, the Amazonian painter and curator Denilson Baniwa, said he and Esbell had made a pact shortly after meeting and discussing the art world’s continued mistreatment of Indigenous artists.

“I was going to kill Mário’s Macunaíma,” he said, “and Jaider was going to bring the Macuxi Makunaima back to life.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/05/04/multimedia/04Andrade3-kvlj/04Andrade3-kvlj-jumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp

A painting shows a gray background and a brown surface with a woven shallow basket containing a man’s head with Andrade’s distinctive glasses and the book “Macunaíma.”

A painting by Denilson Baniwa, an Indigenous artist, that shows Andrade’s head and “Macunaíma” as an offering among Indigenous artifacts was part of an effort to reclaim the trickster figure.Credit...Denilson Baniwa

Denilson’s 2019 painting, Re-Antropofagia, shows Andrade’s head being served on a platter as an offering to Indigenous artists. The painting is now hung in the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, adjacent to Tarsila do Amaral’s seminal modernist painting, Antropofagia, from 1929.

Dodson met Esbell and Denilson in 2019, and the three spent hours discussing her translation. Esbell, Dodson and Denilson both said, didn’t have a problem with Andrade’s novel itself, but rather with the misconception that the modernists had “discovered” long-running Indigenous cultural practices.

In an essay, Esbell described asking Makunaima why he had allowed Andrade to “steal” his story. “My son,” Makunaima responds in the essay, “I glued myself to that book’s cover. They say I was kidnapped, robbed, betrayed, duped. They say I’m an idiot. No! It was my idea to be on the cover. I wanted to go with those men. I wanted to make our history. I saw our chance to find our eternity.”

Esbell died in late 2021, and Dodson requested that New Directions use one of his paintings as the cover art of her translation of “Macunaíma.”

Nearly a century after its publication, many of the novel’s Brazilian admirers are unsure of how it will be received in the United States. “Macunaíma is always on the verge of being canceled,” said Meira Monteiro, the Princeton professor.

Yet Dodson, for one, thinks that the book will resonate with a new American audience attuned to a history haunted by slavery and Indigenous dispossession, marked by the interplay of immigration and xenophobia — and underlain by a long-running strain of “utopian multiculturalism.”

“I think Americans will understand feeling the absurdity of this great variety of people from all over united under one flag,” said Dodson.