Traduzindo o Brazil : o país mestiço de Jorge Amado

Jorge Amado, who entered the Guinness Book of Records as “the world's most translated author” in 1996, was also the first Brazilian to have his/her name in The New York Times best seller list. His first book translated into English was published in the USA by Alfred Knopf Publishers in 1945 under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, who sponsored a cultural interchange program as part of president Roosevelt’s the Good Neighbor Policy. Translated literature was seen, at the time, as a means to understand “the other”. Such trend became a pattern as of the beginning of the 20th Century. Érico Veríssimo, Gilberto Freyre, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Samuel Putnam and Harriet de Onís were actors in this scenario. In spite of his support of the tenets of the political left, after leaving the Communist Party in the late 1950’s Jorge Amado became an American bestseller, a result of such « diplomatic » movement as well as of Alfred A. Knop’s translation project. Nevertheless, other influence networks also affected the author’s reception in the United States, which turned out to be quite different from that in the Eastern Europe, for instance. This paper draws on the relation between the aforementioned actors, such influence network and Brazil’s cultural representation in Jorge Amado’s translated literature in the United States. I intend to show, in this colloquium, a small part of this rich and long research on an outstanding chapter of this great author’s work.