The book “Memorial de Aires”, Machado de Assis’ last novel, will be translated into Italian, as a result of a program sponsored by the National Library to support the promotion of Brazilian authors abroad.
Published in 1908, the year of the writer's death, the work will be translated into the language of Dante Alighieri by Sonia Netto Salomão, senior professor at Sapienza University of Rome and candidate for chair 27 of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL), an institution founded by Machado.
“'Memorial de Aires' was translated into Italian more than 60 years ago, so it's practically as if it no longer exists. And every translation needs to be updated, because the language also ages,” says Salomão in an interview with ANSA.
The professor won a translation grant from the National Library, an institution presided over by the Italian-Brazilian Marco Lucchesi, in partnership with the Queen Kristianka publishing house.
Written in diary format, the novel covers two years in the life of retired diplomat José da Costa Marcondes Aires - 1888 and 1889, the years of the abolition of slavery and the proclamation of the Republic -, while addressing themes such as loneliness in old age and the social reality of Brazil.
According to Salomão, the translation of “Memorial de Aires” must be delivered to the publisher by July 2025, which will give Italy updated versions of all the novels from the so-called “second phase” of Machado’s work, which also includes “Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas” (1881), “Quincas Borba” (1891), “Dom Casmurro” (1899) and “Esaú e Jacó” (1904).
The project comes at a time of recovery of the work of Machado, considered by many to be the greatest Brazilian writer and who climbed the bestseller lists in Brazil and the United States after a viral publication by American tiktoker Courtney Novak about “Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”.
“This only proves what scholars have been saying for a long time: there needs to be work to internationalize Machado,” says Salomão, adding that Italy still does not have researchers specialized in the author’s work.
To try to reverse this scenario, in October 2023, at Sapienza, the professor organized the first international seminar in the country dedicated exclusively to the Brazilian writer, which gave rise to the book “Machado de Assis. A complexo de um Clássico”, written by Salomão herself.
Available free of charge on the internet, the work brings together 32 articles by researchers from Brazil and other countries, such as Italy, Portugal, Spain, England, France, Germany and the United States, about the author.
“This congress brought representatives from 25 universities to Rome and showed the Italian academic community the importance of studying Machado's work,” says Salomão, who moved to Italy in 1990 for family reasons and has been teaching at Sapienza University since 2002, where he founded the first chair of Portuguese Language in the European country.
Now she intends to use her experience of more than three decades of working with Brazilian culture abroad to win the ABL chair that belonged to Antonio Cicero, composer, poet, literary critic, philosopher and writer who died last October.
“When I retired, it was natural to think about how I could bring to a Brazilian institution what I learned abroad. I say this with great humility: it’s not that I have to teach others, but rather enrich them with a different perspective, an outside perspective,” says the professor, who believes she has “the profile for chair 27.”
The election at the ABL will take place on December 11th. (HANDLE)
