Katrina Dodson
Bio
Katrina Dodson is the translator of The Complete Stories,by Clarice Lispector, winner of the 2016 PEN Translation Prize and other awards. She is currently adapting her Lispector translation journal into a book and translating the 1928 Brazilian modernist classic, Macunaíma, the Hero Without Character, by Mário de Andrade. Her writing has appeared in the Believer, McSweeney’s, and Guernica. Dodson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and has been a fellow of the Fulbright Program, National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, and Banff Centre. She gives talks and workshops on translation at various universities, most recently as a Translator-in-Residence at the University of Iowa and adjunct faculty at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Being a literary translator often means embarking on a labor of love with no guarantee of adequate compensation and very little promise of being widely read. This award more than doubles my publisher’s advance, funding further research in Brazil and generally enabling me to take a much more thorough approach to what has become my most complicated translation project to date. Alongside the generous financial support, the National Endowment for the Arts award offers a crucial testament to the value and appeal of this novel in translation—it is one of the most famous stories in Brazilian culture, yet many have declared it too experimental and too Brazil-specific to speak to an audience beyond its original borders. I have long wanted to convey the humor and brilliance of this dazzlingly inventive novel, and I lie awake at night in fear that it just won’t fly in English, that it will be written off as merely an absurdist romp instead of a serious yet playful work of art that engages with the complex collisions of race, religion, regionalism, and postcolonial contradiction that have shaped Brazil. When I’m feeling daunted by all that this translation must do, I remember that there is a group of people with discerning intellect and finely tuned creative instincts who believe this is worth doing and have faith that I can pull it off.
from Macunaíma, the Hero Without Character by Mário de Andrade
[Translated from the Portuguese]
And it was such a beautiful sight in the Sun on the rock, the three brothers one blond one red the other black, standing so tall and naked. All the beings of the forest gazed at them in awe. The black alligator the little white-bellied alligator the great alligator the ururau alligator with the yellow belly, all those alligators stuck their craggy eyes out of the water. In the branches of the flowering ingazeira trees the aninga lilies the mamorana trees the embaúba trees the fruiting catauari trees along the riverbanks the capuchin monkey the squirrel monkey the guariba howler the bugio howler the spider monkey the woolly monkey the bearded saki the white-fronted capuchin, all the forty monkeys of Brazil, all of them, stared drooling with envy. And the sabiá song thrushes, the sabiacica the sabiapoca the sabiaúna the sabiá-piranga the sabiagongá that never shares its food, the ravine sabiá the miner sabiá the orange tree sabiá the gumtree sabiá, all were shocked and forgot to finish warbling, eloquently clamoring and clamoring. Macunaíma was incensed. He put his hands on his hips and shouted at nature:
“Forget you saw anything!”
So then the natural creatures scattered back to living and the three brothers continued on their way once more.
However, upon entering the lands of the Rio Tietê where the coffee plant reigned and the traditional currency was no longer cacao, but instead, was called coins contos contecos milréis borós tostão two hundred réis five hundred réis, fifty bucks, ninety clams, and cash change pennies dough greenbacks owl-beaks massuni loot gravy rocks gimbra cotton weevils and vetiver, like that, where you couldn’t even get a pair of sock garters for two thousand cacao beans. Macunaíma was very upset. He’d have to work, he, the hero... He murmured despondently:
“Ah! feeling lazy!...”
He decided to abandon the endeavor, heading back to his homeland where he was Emperor. But Maanape spoke up:
“Don’t be a fool, brother! The whole swamp doesn’t go into mourning just because one crab dies! dammit! don’t give up I’ll take care of it!”
When they got to São Paulo, they bagged up some of their treasure to eat and, trading the rest on the Stock Exchange, made out with nearly eighty contos de réis. Maanape was a sorcerer. Eighty contos wasn’t worth much but the hero considered it and said to his brothers:
“Patience. We’ll get by on this. The man who seeks a horse without flaws ends up walking...”
On this pocket change, Macunaíma survived.
About Mário de Andrade
One of the leading figures of Brazilian modernism, Mário de Andrade was a poet, novelist, critic, and musicologist. His 1928 masterpiece, Macunaíma, the Hero Without Character, is a landmark of Brazilian literature. Composed in a wild combination of regional Brazilian Portuguese, with Tupi and other languages native to South America and to Africa, the novel transforms an indigenous mythical hero named Macunaíma into a trickster who is at once every Brazilian and no Brazilian. In episodes that evoke a picaresque version of an epic quest, Andrade creates a patchwork portrait of Brazil that navigates urban and natural abundance, interwoven with fragments of folklore ranging from the Amazon to the medieval Iberian peninsula and a cosmology that embraces Afro-Brazilian orixás alongside Christian saints and indigenous deities.