Macunaima

Reviews / Votes

'Dodson's translation captures all the playfulness of the Portuguese text. The Brazilian colloquialisms are transposed to a fizzy American vernacular, but flora and fauna maintain their original names, inviting a surrender to the story's strange, defamiliarising atmosphere. Andrade conceived of Macunaima as one long poem or "troubadour ballad": we're lucky to hear it sung in English.'

- Pablo Scheffer, Telegraph 'Macunaima is above all a vision of mythical Brazilian consciousness, a picaresque epic of birth, triumph, decline and death.'

- New York Times 'Katrina Dobson's translation, employing a colloquial American diction with palpable African American and Deep South overtones, gives Macunaima a consistent, credible voice in English. She inhabits and breathes life into the novel as though she were a revenant from the Brazilian jungle of a century ago...It is not only Brazil's complexity that Mario de Andrade captures, but that of the Americas as a whole, and to some extent that of the entire modern world.'

- Stephen Henighan, Time Literary Supplement? 'Macunaima is a miracle. There's nothing like it in all of literature. Katrina Dodson is a hero.'

- Mario Bellatin, author of Beauty Salon '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 'An explosion of language... The obvious comparison for English speakers would be Ulysses, as an encyclopedia of styles, of language forms.'

- Fredric Jameson '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 '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 'A deliberately provocative text, slangy, comical, antiliterary, assuming all the apparent contradictions of the struggle against European seriousness in its various forms.'

- Pascale Casanova 'We are so fortunate that Mario de Andrade's rollicking Macunaima is finally reappearing in English in Katrina Dodson's dazzling translation.'

- John Keene, author of Counternarratives '[T]old in urbane vernacular but with a vast vocabulary of indigenous words that would have been foreign even to metropolitan Brazil, [Macunaima is] a reading experience that is wholly disorientating. It is also-perhaps rare for a modernist work-a lot of fun.... Andrade knew that the best way to begin a conversation was with a smile and a joke. Reading him almost a century later, his message is as simple and efficient as any good punchline: keep talking.'

- David McAllister, Prospect? 'Dodson, a PEN Award-winning translator of Clarice Lispector, breathes new life into this spirited modernist classic from Brazillian writer de Andrade...Electrifying and perplexing, this cornerstone of Brazilian literature shouldn't be missed.'

-Publishers Weekl?y, starred review 'Over the course of seventeen chapters and an epilogue, violent parables and raunchy parodies nestle within one another to create a dazzling and chaotic Luso-tropical Holy Grail epic... Perhaps through Dodson's masterful work, Andrade will finally be widely read alongside Joyce, Woolf, and Kafka, and Brazilian modernism will be cemented in a canon that has largely excluded authors from Latin America.'

- Meg Weeks, The Baffler?