Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character

by Mário de Andrade, Katrina Dodson (Translator)

Overview

A brilliant new translation of the Brazilian modernist epic that aims to capture the country’s complex identity

Here at last is an exciting new edition of the Brazilian modernist epic Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character, by Mário de Andrade. This landmark 1928 novel follows the adventures of the shapeshifting Macunaíma and his brothers as they leave their Amazon home for a whirlwind tour of Brazil, cramming four centuries and a continental expanse into a single mythic plane. Having lost a magic amulet, the hero and his brothers journey to São Paulo to retrieve the talisman that has fallen into the hands of an Italo-Peruvian captain of industry (who is also a cannibal giant). Written over six delirious days—the fruit of years of study—Macunaíma magically synthesizes dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna, and pop culture to examine Brazilian identity. This brilliant translation by Katrina Dodson has been many years in the making and includes an extensive section of notes, providing essential context for this magnificent work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811227025
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	623,334
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) was a poet, novelist, critic, piano teacher, ethnomusicologist, and leading figure in Brazilian culture. He was a central instiga­tor of the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), which marked a new era of modernism. He spent much of his life pioneering the study and preservation of Brazilian folk heritage and was the founding director of São Paulo’s Department of Culture.

Katrina Dodson’s translation of the Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector was awarded the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, the Lewis Galantière Award, and a Northern California Book Award. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/13/2023

Dodson, a PEN Award–winning translator of Clarice Lispector, breathes new life into this spirited modernist classic from Brazillian writer de Andrade (1893–1945), whose other translated works include Hallucinated City. A frequent refrain—“Ants aplenty and nobody’s healthy, so go the ills of Brazil!”—captures only a hint of the 1928 novel’s frenetic energy and satirizing humor. Over the course of hundreds of years, Macunaíma, a young man with ever-changing characteristics, travels with his brothers Jigue and Maanape from their homeland in the wild north of Brazil to the heart of São Paulo and back. Their mission is to retrieve a magical amulet, muiraquitã, from cannibal giant Venceslau Pietro Pietra. Along the way, de Andrade incorporates Indigenous Tupi and Pemon folklore, a West African Candomble religious ritual that allows people to communicate with deities, formal correspondence, popular vernacular, and continent-spanning botany. Macunaíma derives from an Indigenous Carib and Arawak shape-shifting trickster god, and de Andrade uses him as a blank canvas to explore Brazil’s mass of contradictions; he is at various times Black, white, and Indigenous; wild and urbane; comically officious and boorishly crude, and morally inconsistent. In other words, according to de Andrade, “quintessentially Brazilian.” Electrifying and perplexing, this cornerstone of Brazilian literature shouldn’t be missed. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

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

Pascale Casanova

"Mário 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

"We are so fortunate that Mário de Andrade’s rollicking Macunaíma is finally reappearing in English in Katrina Dodson’s dazzling translation."

John Keene

"Macunaíma 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

"The translation of the year for me was Katrina Dodson’s of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma, a brilliant, creative re-creation and creation and recreation, full of radical translation decisions and countless superb less radical ones too. "

The Millions - Damion Searls

"Macunaíma is a miracle. There’s nothing like it in all of literature. Katrina Dodson is a hero."

Mario Bellatin

"To describe Macunaíma as sui generis would hardly scratch the surface."

4Columns - Ratik Asokan

"He’s an anti-hero hero, questioning and contradictory. Macunaíma 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

"One of our sacred books, whose name we dare speak only on our knees."

César Aira

"Macunaíma is above all a vision of mythical Brazilian consciousness, a picaresque epic of birth, triumph, decline and death."

The New York Times

★ 05/01/2023

Preeminent Brazilian modernist Andrade's audacious 1928 saga gets a brilliant new translation from Dodson. Andrade's narrative follows the protean exploits, sexual and otherwise, of Macunaíma, an outrageous shapeshifting trickster. Macunaíma's antiheroic catchphrase "Ah! just so lazy…!" is belied by the magnitude of his misadventures, a rollicking rush of trickery, transformation, and offhand cosmological creation. In a decided improvement over the prior translation's Britishisms, Dodson renders Andrade's Brazilian Portuguese in a slangy, folksy American diction that captures the story's orality. Andrade's omnivorous, polyglot style is liberally seasoned with Indigenous terms, snatches of song, nonce words, and nonsense, combined in a vigorous and often incantatory mode. This is offset by parodies of European elaboration, such as breasts that "do indeed serve in numerous and arduous labours of excellent virtue and prodigious excitation." It's a huge amount of fun. Dodson's smartly curated endnotes gloss a selection of unfamiliar terms and references, without the distraction of footnotes or scholarly paraphernalia. VERDICT It's been said that Macunaíma put the magic in magical realism. Whatever its progeny may be, Andrade's weird and wondrous tour de force is that rarity: a truly original masterpiece, and one deserving a place in any library of world literature.

Library Journal