SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture

Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas

Krista Brune

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438480633
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Creative Transformations, Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary and cultural history, translation becomes a way of navigating and representing the resulting encounters between languages, interactions with Spanish Americans, and negotiations of complex identities. While Creative Transformations engages extensively with theories of translation from different national and disciplinary contexts, it also constructs a vision of translation uniquely attuned to the place of Brazil in the Americas. Brune reveals the hemispheric underpinnings of works by renowned Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Sousândrade, Mário de Andrade, Silviano Santiago, and Adriana Lisboa. In the process, she rethinks the dynamics between cosmopolitan and national desires and between center and periphery in global literary markets.

Chapter 1

The New World Travels and Translations of O Novo Mundo

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Brazilian elites traveled and engaged in acts of translation as they sought new models of political and economic development in the United States and the rest of the Americas. In parallel to these travels north by Brazilians, North American naturalists traversed Brazil in search of scientific discoveries. O Novo Mundo, a Portuguese-language periodical edited by Brazilian José Carlos Rodrigues and published in New York from 1870 to 1879, documented these hemispheric travels for readers primarily in Brazil. As it traveled from New York to Brazil, this “new world” newspaper translated scientific, industrial, educational, and cultural developments unfolding in the United States for an elite Brazilian readership. O Novo Mundo also featured representations of Brazil that appeared in travelogues and international exhibitions. The periodical captured exchanges unfolding in both directions as North American scientists traveled to Brazil, Brazilian politicians traversed the United States, and Brazilian men of letters lived in New York. Through forms of translation and retranslation, O Novo Mundo projected a hemispheric vision of “progress” that blinded it to future dangers posed by capitalist extraction and neocolonial ambitions of the United States.

Scientists, writers, and other elites featured in O Novo Mundo desired to foster greater knowledge of and within the Americas. Their trajectories contrasted with those of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century naturalists, whose travel books about non-European places gave European readers an investment in the imperial project, according to Mary Louise Pratt. The artists and intellectuals that I examine here aimed to share discoveries with readers and to inspire further interest in Brazil among North Americans and in the United States among Brazilians, even as they failed to safeguard the nation from future exploitation. A desire to construct a modern Brazil informed O Novo Mundo’s editorial outlook as it critiqued both nations and advocated for greater hemispheric dialogue. This chapter situates O Novo Mundo in a translation zone to highlight how its travels and translations produced creative transformations and potential misunderstandings. Emily Apter conceives of the translation zone as a realm of possible conflict and reciprocal exchanges, which contrasts with Pratt’s vision of the contact zone resulting from colonial and imperial hierarchies that result in “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (7). Though Apter proposes this concept to account for contemporary geopolitical, social, and psychological ramifications of translation, her idea provides a useful tool for analyzing the exchanges between Brazil and the United States in O Novo Mundo. In its role as translator, the periodical transferred ideas, images, and experiences between nations of the Americas and, thus, suggested a shift in foreign influence among Brazil’s elites away from Europe and toward the United States.

O Novo Mundo’s editor Rodrigues and other proponents of this hemispheric vision did not fully foresee the implications of a close relationship between Brazil and the United States.1 Instead, as indicated by the journal’s documentation of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, it seemed possible to establish mutually beneficial connections between Brazil and the United States. At the fair’s inauguration on May 10, 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro II toured the grounds together. Accompanied by four thousand invited guests, they examined national displays as they made their way to the fair’s industrial centerpiece, the Corliss engine. Turning the wheels on the enormous machine, the two heads of state started the generator that powered the other displays in machinery hall.2 With this symbolic act, Grant and Dom Pedro affirmed their belief in Eurocentric visions of progress as a teleological ideal that could help their nations achieve global prominence. While the United States would soon emerge as a global force of industrial capitalism, Brazil would remain on the political and economic margins as a nation of primitive accumulation.

Touring the Centennial Exhibition together allowed the president and the emperor to envision possibilities for their nations during difficult periods of transition. They faced similar challenges of governing an expansive territory, grappling with legacies and burdens of colonialism and slavery, and establishing unified national identities. The two countries were also worlds apart, with the United States a democracy recovering from a devastating Civil War and Brazil a tropical monarchy holding on to the vestiges of slavery.3 Being the only nation in the Americas with a monarch contributed to Brazil’s isolation and exceptionalism, especially in relationship to its Spanish American neighbors, so it instead looked toward the United States for potential points of dialogue.4 The encounter between the president and the emperor provides an entrance into exploring the shared desires for and distinct claims to modernity of the United States and Brazil. Political and labor reforms over the next decades would facilitate the embrace of industrial capitalism to varying degrees in the two countries as the Americas increasingly became a center of global capital. The Philadelphia exhibition suggested this shift spatially and visually with the prominence of the United States and Brazil in the displays where they translated curated visions of national identity and economic potential for a foreign public.

O Novo Mundo dedicated significant coverage to the Centennial Exhibition, since it represented a material expression of Rodrigues’s hemispheric visions of industrial modernization that aimed to connect a print community across the Americas. With O Novo Mundo as my focal point, this chapter analyzes forms of travel and translation initially mentioned in the periodical, such as scientific writings, exhibition displays, Pedro II’s travels, and literary texts. O Novo Mundo provided subtle critiques of both the United States and Brazil that echoed Rodrigues’s views. Articles on the post–Civil War United States and translated excerpts of a novel by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe served to condemn the continued legality of slavery in Brazil. To complement its symbolic function as a hemispheric translator, the periodical published pieces on literary translation. Reading O Novo Mundo as integral to the archive underscores the centrality of translation to hemispheric relationships and the long-standing presence of Brazilians in the United States to reveal the transnational underpinnings of a modern Brazil.

A Hemispheric Turn: The Historical Context of O Novo Mundo

While efforts to strengthen connections between Brazil and the United States had previously manifested during struggles for independence, such exchanges took on heightened relevance in the late nineteenth century as slavery came to an end in both nations through a series of protracted measures.5 In the United States, the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed most remaining slaves, around three million people, without comprehensively abolishing slavery. President Abraham Lincoln’s decree did not apply to the nearly half-million slaves living in Union border states. Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 to abolish slavery throughout the United States.6 The Reconstruction Act of 1867 proposed a political, economic, and social vision for the New South. Most radically, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed black suffrage and national equality before the law. Reforms emphasized a concept of national citizenry and attempted to address regional inequities. While the plan’s architects envisioned an infusion of Northern and foreign capital to promote Southern industry, this economic growth failed to develop. By 1876, Reconstruction’s experiment of an interracial democracy had ended due to racial violence, corruption, and unmet promises.7

Abolition in the United States served as a model for Brazil’s struggle against slavery, which remained legal until 1888 and threatened Pedro II’s desires to modernize his nation in the model of western Europe and the United States. He longed to implement political, industrial, and educational forms observed during his travels to Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, Palestine, and Egypt in 1871 and the United States, London, Brussels, Rome, Vienna, Paris, the Baltic countries, and the Middle East in 1876.8 The Brazilian emperor had to address slavery after freeing a limited number of slaves to fight in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) as Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay struggled to eventual victory over Paraguay.9 Brazil’s slow process of abolition began with the September 28, 1871, passage of the Rio Branco Law, or the Law of the Free Womb, which freed all children, known as ingênuos or “innocents,” born after the law’s signing. This step functioned as a half-measure akin to the Emancipation Proclamation. During this period, Brazilian elites observed effects of abolition in the United States and considered how a similar transition would impact Brazil. By conveying abolitionist ideas for his limited readership in Brazil, Rodrigues contributed in a minor way to discussions of slavery. International influence and changing economic structures further swayed attitudes toward slavery in Brazil. In 1883 in O abolicionismo (Abolitionism: The Brazilian Antislavery Struggle), writer, lawyer, and diplomat Joaquim Nabuco (1849–1910) argued for complete abolition by critiquing the 1871 Rio Branco Law.10 Since the law was not retroactive, slavery would persist as a limited legal practice in Brazil until the death of every person born a slave prior to its passage. Nabuco claimed that Brazil could not wait for fifty years or more to abolish slavery, given that the institution impeded industrial and economic growth. Pressure for abolition grew until the passage of the Abolition Law, the Lei Áurea, on May 13, 1888.11

Rodrigues’s O Novo Mundo similarly posited that the continued legality of slavery would hinder Brazil’s development. This self-proclaimed, according to its subtitle, “periódico ilustrado do progresso da edade” (illustrated periodical of the progress of the era) framed Brazil’s trajectory as a modern nation in terms of political, economic, and industrial progress. Without fully examining the contradictions between the realities of the Brazil’s racial composition and the preferences for whiteness in the period’s dominant positivist ideologies, O Novo Mundo presented the United States as a model of how Brazil could transition from an agrarian, slave state to a modern, industrialized nation.12 Rodrigues’s position between Brazil and the United States allowed him to draw parallels in the periodical between the two countries and correct misunderstandings that Brazilian readers had about daily life in the United States. Born in the interior of Rio de Janeiro, Rodrigues received a formal education at the best schools in imperial Brazil: Colégio Dom Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro and the Law School of São Paulo. In 1863, while still a student, he published an interpretation of Brazil’s Imperial Constitution that previewed the republican and Protestant beliefs, specifically a concern with freedoms of religion and the press, that guided O Novo Mundo’s editorial outlook.13 After completing his legal studies in 1864, he worked as a journalist but soon became involved in an embezzlement scandal that forced him to leave Brazil in 1867. He settled in Lowell, Massachusetts, before moving to New York, where he lived for the next fifteen years. Rodrigues wrote articles about Latin America for The Nation and served as a correspondent for Diário Oficial and Jornal de Comércio until he founded O Novo Mundo in October 1870.14

Among the 378 foreign-language journals estimated to exist in the United States in 1872, Rodrigues’s periodical was the only one published in Portuguese, a language spoken by about one hundred people in the United States (O Novo Mundo 2.21, 162). Other Portuguese-language publications appeared later in the decade, including the Aurora Brasileira, published by Brazilian students at Cornell from 1873 to 1875, and Revista Industrial Ilustrada, published by Rodrigues and André de Rebouças from 1877 to 1879. O Novo Mundo and Revista Industrial Ilustrada aimed to interpret the United States for readers in Brazil, instead of addressing needs of Brazilians or other Portuguese-speakers in the United States as part of the ethnic or immigrant press.15 Existing scholarship on O Novo Mundo focuses on its historical or literary merits without situating it in a broader framework. George Boehrer’s 1967 article provides a well-researched, historical-biographical study of Rodrigues that stresses the periodical’s inter-American outlook. More recent work by Brazilian scholars concentrates on O Novo Mundo’s literary value, with Mônica Maria Rinaldi Asciutti framing the periodical in terms of Brazilian literature’s shift from romanticism to realism and Gabriela Vieira de Campos analyzing how scientific literature interacted with literary texts in the periodical. With a scope of analysis that expands beyond O Novo Mundo, I contend that it represents a late nineteenth-century entry into the genealogy of translating Brazil in the Americas. Its circulation illustrated how travels of people, ideas, and objects between Brazil and the United States required linguistic and cultural translations that helped to discursively construct a modern Brazil and to foster a hemispheric outlook.

O Novo Mundo accompanied its articles with high-quality reproductions of images originally published in Harper’s Magazine, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, or The Graphic. The journal depicted “popular, historical, artistic and other subjects, connected with the events of the day, by engravings executed in the best style of modern art and … printed with the utmost typographical neatness and skill” (O Novo Mundo 1.2, 31). The periodical captured the materiality of progress by facilitating the transnational circulation of lithographic images originally created in the United States and, thus, exposing readers in Brazil to more advanced visual technologies.16 According to Maria Inez Turazzi, developments in visual technologies during the nineteenth century placed an emphasis on rendering everything visible, rather than legible (“Imagens da nação” 120). O Novo Mundo contributed to this regime of visibility with new printing technologies that engaged in forms of translation at visual and textual levels.

For Rodrigues, translation functioned as a relational practice of cultural exchange whereby O Novo Mundo traveled from New York to Brazil to reach up to eight thousand monthly subscribers.17 Its monthly publication fell on the eve of the departure of the S. Thomas and Brazil ship, which carried the periodical to its readership in Brazil. To woo potential advertisers and investors in New York, O Novo Mundo emphasized the ties that it established:

This paper furnishes the countries and colonies where Portuguese and Spanish are spoken, a most thorough digest of the course of events, particularly the political and industrial progress of the United States, describing the peculiar features of American advancement and civilization, as embodied in the Government, and treating the topics of the day in elaborate articles, having in view the object of uniting more closely the existing bonds of a political, commercial and friendly character among the several countries of the Western hemisphere. (1.2, 31)

One of the few uses of English in the periodical, this statement expressed a desire to strengthen hemispheric relations by reporting to Brazilians primarily on news from the United States.

Over the course of 108 issues from October 1870 until December 1879, O Novo Mundo commented on develop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The new world travels and translations of o novo mundo
• Chapter 2 Modernism for export: the translational origins and afterlives of macunaíma
• Chapter 3 Silviano santiago’s translational criticism and fiction
• Chapter 4 Testing translatability: adriana lisboa’s hemispheric brazilian novels
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Backcover