Machado de Assis

September 10, 2012 12:25 PM

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is the greatest of Brazilian writers, an ironist, realist, and fabulist in the leauge of Chekhov, Flaubert, and Borges.

Here are Machado de Assis' complete works in Portuguese. And here a few pieces in English translation:

-The first ten chapters from his novel Dom Casmurro, translated by Antonios Sarhanis.

-The opening of his Tristram Shandy-esque The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas: Epitaph of a Small Winner, translated by Gregory Rabassa.

-Two chapters from his novella The Alienist, translated by Matt Rowe (with commentary).

-"Dona Paula", translated by John Gledson.

-"The Attendant's Confession," "The Fortune-Teller," and "Life;" all translated by Isaac Goldberg and collected with stories by José de Medeiros e Albuquerque, Coelho Netto, and Emília Bandeira de Melo as Brazilian Tales.

posted by Iridic (4 comments total)

omfg, am having flashbacks of my PhD exams. i had no idea all his works were on the net, EM PORTUGUES. obrigada
posted by liza at 1:38 PM on September 10, 2012

Thanks very much for this post! I know of this writer by name only but will start fixing that right away. If anyone knows of other English translations, please link 'em! I can contrive to stumble through Spanish and Italian with google translate and a cassell's as crutches, but not Portuguese.

How nice it would be if MiguelCardoso (literato and Portuguese speaker) put in one of his rare appearances in this thread to tell us what's what. I hope migs, like kibo, has something scanning the netnoise for vain uses of his name.
posted by jfuller at 1:58 PM on September 10, 2012

Machado's story is also very interesting from a social and historical point of view. Born black and poor, grandchild of slaves, he became highly respected, married a white lady and was the founding president of Academia Brasileira de Letras, the elitist association of Brazilian writers. And, surprise, surprise, his death certificate indicated that he became (officially) white.
posted by Deep Brazil at 3:47 PM on September 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

I've reading Dom Casmurro on and off since 1994, when I received a copy of it as part of my school books when I was an exchange student in Brasil. After the first few years, I learned to make notes in the margins so I wouldn't have to go back and start translating from the beginning every time I returned to the book.

I think I'm somewhere around chapter 3.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:38 PM on September 10, 2012