To most English speakers, this anagram is a familiar one. What is striking is the interplay between “god” and “dog”. Taking a small excerpt to compare:Įh, well, thereafter, the rest the Sir provide: comes the bread, comes the hand, comes the god, comes the dog.
Without a doubt, the translation is incongruous to the Portuguese. If one could descend a mountain in the pitch dark of night, each step shocking the body, unable to acclimate to the unleveled heights. It is the assemblage of paradox as a new logic that can be navigated, if only one could suspend the comfort of readability, of expectation. And W.Martinez does us the service of recognizing this, as what configures the shapes of words and sentences is not as simple as neologisms, portmanteaus, and digressions, but as terrifying as the path the fool traverses: all paths.Īs such, this translation doesn’t speak English, just as the original does not speak Portuguese. If anything, GRANDE SERTÃO: VEREDAS is speaking a cosmic language through a linguistic one. That is, this translation, one that purports to know nothing, creates access into the guileful world Rosa had created in Portuguese. What stands, resoundingly amid such absences, is the awakened challenge of reading. Liberties are not assumed on account of improving readability. The idiomatic differences between English and Portuguese are not accented. This is an approach that reductively converts, as opposed to translates. And it takes its risks by not taking risks: by being, almost word for word, a literal translation. The work undertaken by Felipe W.Martinez is a new form of translation that risks everything in order to encounter the same treacherous knowing Rosa had traversed. Or, alternately, to convey the despair of terrain slipping beneath one’s feet, and to encounter the heightened suspense of magic, the translation, as part of its strategy, cannot devotedly rely on its original language, not as its source text. However, this notion of translation is partly antithetical to the ideas in Rosa’s work. And that a translator is to serve as a mediator, acting ultimately in service to ideas within the source text. That what was written in one language be accessible in another. There is the expectation that translations enable mobility. That language mirror with a sort of precision that enables the reader to become of another location, condition, to grasp in English in a similar vein as readers of Portuguese might from João Guimarães Rosa’s GRANDE SERTÃO: VEREDAS. It is inevitable that readers expect fidelity from translations. What is a translation that stalls comprehension? That, when read, parsed, obfuscates comprehension through any language – English, Portuguese.
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