In Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas (SUNY Press, 2020), Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary and cultural history, translation becomes a way of navigating and representing the resulting encounters between languages, interactions with Spanish Americans, and negotiations of complex identities. While Creative Transformations engages extensively with theories of translation from different national and disciplinary contexts, it also constructs a vision of translation uniquely attuned to the place of Brazil in the Americas. Brune reveals the hemispheric underpinnings of works by renowned Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Sousândrade, Mário de Andrade, Silviano Santiago, and Adriana Lisboa. In the process, she rethinks the dynamics between cosmopolitan and national desires and between center and periphery in global literary markets.

“This book presents the reader with an original hypothesis and a very thorough recapitulation of theories of translation. These theories inform Brune’s analysis, but the analysis also adds its own voice to the chorus of studies dealing with translation. In this way, Creative Transformations provides a new way to understand translation and the position of Brazilian literature and culture in a global context.” — Leila Lehnen, author of Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature

Krista Brune is Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Spanish at Pennsylvania State University.

Victoria Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese literature and Global South studies.

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