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> Long forgotten by most... almost no English speakers in the twenty-first century have read it... I'm surprised by the breathless tone of the opening paragrap
by legerdemain 6y ago
> Long forgotten by most... almost no English speakers in the twenty-first century have read it...
I'm surprised by the breathless tone of the opening paragraphs. Machado is a central figure in the literature of Brazil. In English, he is obscure and unread in the same way that other central figures of other national literatures are obscure and unread. This is not unique to either Brazil or Machado. Very few arbitrarily chosen readers in the US could name a national literary figure from, say, Hungary or Finland. But if you consider only the readers who are interested in world literature, Machado is certainly both well-known and widely read.
- dhosek 6y agoIt varies on language. While Portuguese, Hungarian or Finnish authors are largely unknown, authors writing in French, Spanish, German and Italian are fairly well known.
- CSSer 6y agoI was about to suggest this may also vary by subject, but using philosophy as a case study it seems to at least somewhat hold water. I’ll use philosophy only because I minored in undergrad, so I’m not an expert but I’m also a bit more well versed than a laymen. Anyway, I’ve extensively read Spinoza (Portuguese), Sartre/Beauvoir & Camus (French), Kant (German), Aquinas & Boethius (Italian). I’d expect most others with philosophy backgrounds to at the very least know these names and a synopsis about them too. All that being said, I’m hard pressed to name a Hungarian or Finnish philosopher. I wonder why these languages are less prominent internationally in literature.
- marton78 6y agoI think you're conflating "internationally" with "in the US". Hungarian (Márai, Kertész, Esterházy), Czech (Kundera, Hrabal, Hašek), Polish (Sienkiewicz, Lem) novels, for example, enjoy quite some popularity in German translation.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoKertész is even an example of an author more popular in translation – namely those German editions – than in his own country. When he won the Nobel Prize, the response even among many Hungarian intellectuals was “Who?”, followed in some cases by anti-Semitic remarks, which just goes to show how little a prophet (for nearly all Kertész’s works grapple with the Holocaust and its impact on Hungarian Jewry) is honored in his own homeland.
- dhosek 6y agoPossibly. I think some of that is a lingering cultural hangover of the Austro-Hungarian empire (which is also reflected in the cuisine of the nations that formerly composed said empire). My first reading of a Hungarian author in translation was when I was in grad school studying under Tibor Fischer. Despite it being my heritage, I only read Czech authors for the first time when I was working on a novel set in 1900 Prague. On the flip side, I'm fluent enough in Spanish now that I only read translations of authors writing in Spanish unintentionally (I hadn't realized that Optic Nerve was a translation when I read it) in favor of reading them in the original.