Hispania

Krista Brune's book of inter-American literary criticism places Brazil at the center of a series of comparisons that span the late nineteenth century to the new millennium. She uses an ample definition of "translation" to discuss how texts are creatively transformed as they pass from the hands of one author to those of the translator and, eventually, the reader. While the focus of the work is canonical Brazilian narrative, the author relates it to film, journalism, history, anthropology, post-colonial theory, and Latinx cultural studies.

The aptly titled work begins with Brazilian king Dom Pedro II attending the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia during a tour of the United States. This origin story presents the South American nation as an "original copy," a recreation of foreign ideas for the United States and Europe to behold (2). She shifts to 2018 with a story of undocumented Brazilians in the United States as a parallel journey and translation, a mother separated from her children by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (3). Brune asks how translation—including travel and intercultural communication—contributes to our understanding Brazil's place in the Americas. She recognizes that this path has been trodden by Earl Fitz, Elisabeth Lowe, and Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta. Her innovations in inter-American studies include archival research on the newspaper, O Novo Mundo, comparing Guyanese novelist Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale (1997) to its inspiration, Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma (1928), her application of Silviano Santiago's postcolonial theory to his literary work, as well as her connection of Adriana Lisboa to Latinx literature and identity debates.

Brune advocates for a "politics of untranslatability" that gives greater priority to publishing linguistically and culturally challenging works that most publishers ignore in favor of straightforward texts (185).

Chapter 1 returns to the period from 1870 to 1879, when scientists, writers, and other elite travelers from Brazil published O Novo Mundo in New York for consumption in urban Brazil (27). It was the only US periodical in the language (30). The paper presented the United States as a model of progress, the Latin American obsession of the time. Articles on US independence (which, in Brazil, came from its local monarchy), abolition (which had not yet arrived), education reform, and the aforementioned Centennial Exhibition seemed to provide a way forward. Her analysis of the publication includes poet Sousândrade's understudied journalism.

The second chapter is devoted to literal and figurative translations of Mário de Andrade's experimental novel, Macunaíma (68). Brune traces the tale from German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg's account of Amazonian folklore to Andrade's hermetic idiolect (formed by imitating local dialects) to its textual multiplication via translations and retranslations into English. International reception of the work has also been fomented by Brazilian Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's 1969 filmic reinterpretation and Melville's novel. Only the connection to Guyana is a new direction in the study of Brazilian modernism's most-discussed novel but the chapter is thorough. [End Page 316]

The Santiago chapter expresses in clear language what the theorist does not always make so accessible, since he is following in the footsteps of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Brune shows how two key concepts in his thought apply to his narrative prose. "The space inbetween" is Latin American discourse, a place where the "copy" of European terms and ideas differs from the original in creative ways (113–14). Brune shows how his fiction exemplified the concept. She analyzes his "cosmopolitanism of the poor," which is a product of contemporary globalization and trans-national migration (133). She notes his personal distance from "the poor" as a middle-class intellectual and criticizes the theorist for trading in the exoticization of the marginalized (135, 138).

The chapter on novelist Adriana Lisboa shows how cosmopolitan she is by noting that she is based in the United States, writes in...