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The Translator’s Dialogue: Giovanni Pontiero is a tribute to an outstanding translator of literary works from Portuguese, Luso-Brasilian, Italian and Spanish into English. The translator introduced authors such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Clarice Lispector and José Saramago to the English reading world. Pontiero’s essays shed light on the process of literary translation and its impact on cultural perception. This process is exemplified by Pontiero the translator and analyst, some of the authors he collaborated with, publishers’ editors and literary critics and, finally, by an unpublished translation of a short story by José Saramago, Coisas.
"Clarice Lispector was a born writer....she writes with sensuous verve, bringing her earliest passions into adult life intact, along with a child's undiminished capacity for wonder."—The New York Times Book Review "In 1967, Brazil's leading newspaper asked the avant-garde writer Lispector to write a weekly column on any topic she wished. For almost seven years, Lispector showed Brazilian readers just how vast and passionate her interests were. This beautifully translated collection of selected columns, or crônicas, is just as immediately stimulating today and ably reinforces her reputation as one of Brazil's greatest writers. Indeed, these columns should establish her as being among the era's most brilliant essayists. She is masterful, even reminiscent of Montaigne, in her ability to spin the mundane events of life into moments of clarity that reveal greater truths."—Publishers Weekly
"A radiant beauty of a writer."—The Los Angeles Times The Foreign Legion is a collection in two parts, gathering both stories and chronicles, and it offers wonderful evidence of Clarice Lispector's unique sensibility and range as an exponent of experimental prose. It opens with thirteen stories and the second part of the book presents her newspaper crônicas, which Lispector said she retrieved from a bottom drawer.
On Emerging from Hyper-Nation represents Ronald W. Sousa’s attempt to answer the question, “Why do I smile on reading one of Saramago’s ‘historical’ novels?” Why that reaction of emotional release? To answer the “smile question” the book engages in a critical mode that could be described as “discourse analysis.” It combines several critical strains and relies on basic concepts from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Adlerian psychology, and contemporary cognitive psychology for their discourse-analytical value rather than as entrées into psychoanalytical reading per se. The introductory chapter presents some of the concepts that underlie that compound analytical modal...
Within the cultural and literary context of contemporary Portugal and Western literature, 1998 was unquestionably the year that Portuguese writing gained international recognition as Jos Saramago became the first Portuguese writer ever to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Readers who had never thought about Portuguese letters began to consume his books and, most importantly, opted for expanding their reading lists to include other important writers not only from Portugal, but from Portuguese-speaking well beyond the borders of Portugal. Global Impact of the Portuguese Language is a collection of Portuguese writing that is as rich in content and broad in scope as the diversity of its top...
Combining bitter satire, outrageous parody and uncanny hallucinations, this collection of Jos Saramago's earliest stories from the beginning of his writing career attests to the novelist's imaginative power and incomparable skill in elaborating the most extravagant fantasies. Each tale is a wicked, surreal take on life under dictatorship: in 'Embargo' a man drives around a city that is slowly running out of petrol; 'The Chair' recounts what happens when dictator Salazar falls off his chair and dies; in the Kafkaesque 'Things' the life of a civil servant is threatened as objects start to go missing.
Despite the numerous studies of the politics, economy, culture, and society of the Estado Novo, the relations established between publishers, authors, and governmental institutions and their contribution to the making of the literary canon are still marginal subjects of analysis. Based on the systems theories developed by Bourdieu, Dubois and Even-Zohar, this study focuses on the cultural production produced during the Estado Novo (1933-1974) and after the Revolution (1974-2004), within their political, economic and social framework. The chapters on José Saramago and José Luís Peixoto show them as examples of literary consecration that confirm the systemic relations in the Portuguese literary field. This research makes use of a survey on habits of purchase of Portuguese fiction, interviews with publishers, original statistical analyses, and takes a new approach to the study of Portuguese literature.
In early eighteenth-century Lisbon, Baltasar, a soldier who has lost his left hand in battle, falls in love with Blimunda, a young girl with visionary powers. From the day that he follows her home from the auto-da-fe where women are burned at the stake, the two are bound body and soul by love of an unassailable strength. A third party shares their supper that evening: Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco, whose fantasy is to invent a flying machine. As the Crown and the Church clash, they purse his impossible, not to mention heretical, dream of flight.
Forges a new understanding of how these two Lusophone nations are connected. The closely entwined histories of Portugal and Brazil remain key references for understanding developments--past and present--in either country. Accordingly, Fernando Arenas considers Portugal and Brazil in relation to one another in this exploration of changing definitions of nationhood, subjectivity, and utopias in both cultures. Examining the two nations' shared language and histories as well as their cultural, social, and political points of divergence, Arenas pursues these definitive changes through the realms of literature, intellectual thought, popular culture, and political discourse. Both Brazil and Portuga...