Katrina Dodson’s recent translation of Mário de Andrade’s epic modernist novel Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character (New Directions, 2023) is mystical, playful and poetic. Drawing heavily on Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian culture, Andrade published Macunaíma in 1928 and it has held an important place in Brazilian literature ever since. Experimentally plotted, the text rejects realism in favor of magic, embraces queerness, and attempts to distill the Brazilian culture itself in the character of the eponymous hero. Andrade called the book “a symptom of national culture.” As a poet, I especially love the paragraphs that read like list poems:
He left the room and came back carrying a humungous grajau woven from embira fiber and brimming with stones. There was turquoise emeralds beryl polished pebbles, rutile nuggets in needle formation, chrysolite teardrops ringing rocks emery stone pegmatites dove-egg quartz cat’s-eye kyanite hatchets machetes chiseled arrowheads, gris-gris amulets jagged crags petrified elephants, Greek columns, Egyptian gods, Javanese Buddhas, obelisks Mexican tables, Guyanese gold, ornithomorphic stones from Iguape, opals from the Igarapé Alegre, rubies and garnets from the Rio Curupi, itamotingas from the Rio das Garças, itacolumite, tourmaline from Vupabuçu, hunks of titanium from the Rio Piriá, bauxite from the Riberão do Macaco, limestone fossils from Pirabas, pearls from Cametá, the humongous boulder that Oaque, Father of the Toucan, shot out his blowgun from that mountain on high, a lithoglyph from Calamare, all those stones were in that basket.
I recently met Katrina Dodson at Molasses Books in Brooklyn, where we both read in a reading series dedicated to translation. Hearing Dodson read from her translation of Macunaíma and learning that she spent six years on the project added to my appreciation of this musical and magical text. If you have the opportunity to attend an event with this translator, either in person or over Zoom, don’t miss it.
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover.