Macunaima
The Hero with No Character
Published on 14. April 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
224 pages
978-0-8112-2702-5 (ISBN)
Description
Here at last is an exciting new edition of the Brazilian modernist epic Macunaima: The Hero with No Character, by Mario de Andrade. This landmark 1928 novel follows the adventures of the shapeshifting Macunaima and his brothers as they leave their Amazon home for a whirlwind tour of Brazil, cramming four centuries and a continental expanse into a single mythic plane. Having lost a magic amulet, the hero and his brothers journey to Sao Paulo to retrieve the talisman that has fallen into the hands of an Italo-Peruvian captain of industry (who is also a cannibal giant). Written over six delirious days-the fruit of years of study-Macunaima magically synthesizes dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna, and pop culture to examine Brazilian identity. This brilliant translation by Katrina Dodson has been many years in the making and includes an extensive section of notes, providing essential context for this magnificent work.
Reviews / Votes
"Macunaima is a miracle. There's nothing like it in all of literature. Katrina Dodson is a hero." -- Mario Bellatin "An explosion of language... The obvious comparison for English speakers would be Ulysses, as an encyclopedia of styles, of language forms." -- Fredric Jameson "We are so fortunate that Mario de Andrade's rollicking Macunaima is finally reappearing in English in Katrina Dodson's dazzling translation." -- John Keene "Macunaima is above all a vision of mythical Brazilian consciousness, a picaresque epic of birth, triumph, decline and death." -- The New York Times "Mario wrote our Odyssey and, with a swing of his native club, created our classical hero and the national poetic idiom for the next fifty years." -- Oswald de Andrade "He's an anti-hero hero, questioning and contradictory. Macunaima is an emblem of the marvelous, metamorphosed into the errant question mark of his one-legged constellation. An anti-normative hero who points to a future, eventually more open, world." -- Haroldo de Campos "An explosion of language... The obvious comparison for English speakers would be Ulysses, as an encyclopedia of styles, of language forms." -- Fredric Jameson "Macunaima is a self-consciously nation-founding novel that reads like a thick broth of painful historical truth, quoted myth, and irreducible pleasures. Rarely is so much pleasure given and pain revealed by overlapping languages." -- Arto Lindsay "A deliberately provocative text, slangy, comical, antiliterary, assuming all the apparent contradictions of the struggle against European seriousness in its various forms." -- Pascale Casanova "Electrifying and perplexing, this cornerstone of Brazilian literature shouldn't be missed." -- Publishers Weekly "To describe Macunaima as sui generis would hardly scratch the surface." -- Ratik Asokan - 4Columns "One of our sacred books, whose name we dare speak only on our knees." -- Cesar Aira "The translation of the year for me was Katrina Dodson's of Mario de Andrade's Macunaima, a brilliant, creative re-creation and creation and recreation, full of radical translation decisions and countless superb less radical ones too. " -- Damion Searls - The MillionsMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 201 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
264 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8112-2702-5 (9780811227025)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Mario de Andrade (1893-1945) was a poet, novelist, critic, piano teacher, ethnomusicologist, and leading figure in Brazilian culture. He was a central instiga-tor of the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), which marked a new era of modernism. He spent much of his life pioneering the study and preservation of Brazilian folk heritage and was the founding director of Sao Paulo's Department of Culture. Katrina Dodson's translation of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector was awarded the PEN Translation Prize, the American Translators Association Lewis Galantiere Award, and a Northern California Book Award. She translated Mario de Andrade's 1928 Brazilian modernist classic, Macunaima: The Hero with No Character. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney's, Triple Canopy and elsewhere. Dodson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and is an affiliated scholar of the Brazil LAB at Princeton University. A San Francisco native, she now lives in Brooklyn and teaches translation at Columbia University.