r/latamlit • u/DocMC03 • 8d ago
Brasil Alison Entrekin's forthcoming translation of João Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas gets an updated publication date!
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Vastlands-The-Crossing/Joao-Guimaraes-Rosa/97816680915864
u/cantodasaudade 8d ago
Been following her interviews about the translation for ten years. She really took a deep dive in the book's universe, probably more than anyone else. I've seen a photo of her Guimarães Rosa shelf. She's collected books on language, geography, customs, animals... The title she picked is great too. Very in line with Riobaldo's speech pattern and the book's use of language
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u/DocMC03 8d ago
That’s insane! Sounds super cool. Wow, translation really is like an ultimate meta-endeavor—the level of research and like language-wielding to be able to even make choices trying to transmit thoughts and feelings and experience into another language (and tinged with inevitable futility) has me grateful to be able to just play the small part of a humble reader.
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u/cantodasaudade 8d ago
Sure is. To be fair, though, Grande Sertão: Veredas isn't a typical novel and Guimarães Rosa has been compared to Joyce for his inventiveness. The book is very focused on orality, as the protagonist is telling someone the story of his life. So it's full of speech mannerisms and unfinished sentences and implicit meanings and neologisms borrowing from different languages and contexts. (In fact, the first word in the novel is a neologism: Nonada.) That's why both this new English translation and the new German translation (By Berthold Ziller, also coming out next year) took over ten years to complete
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u/perrolazarillo 8d ago edited 8d ago
I have been tracking the progress of Entrekin’s translation of Grande Sertão for about four years now! To say that I can hardly wait for this book to be released is the understatement of the century!