Ancient Tillage by Raduan Nassar (review)

Karen Sherwood Sotelino’s translation, Ancient Tillage, is a great opportunity for Englishspeaking readers to get to know Lavoura arcaica and its author Raduan Nassar, who received the Camões, the most important literary award in Portuguese, last year. It is also a valuable addition to courses on the twentieth-century novel as a cherished modern classic from Latin America.

When evaluating translations, it is important to avoid the native language reader’s instinct: to expect a translation to replicate and contain its source. Ancient Tillage and Lavoura arcaica obviously cannot be the same book. Differences between them are not mistakes and pointing to them as inaccuracies in a condescending manner is unfair. The relationship between source text and translation is generally not one of plain equivalency but of complex intimacy. We have to look at the terms of this complex intimacy between the two texts without presuming the unity of either language. Languages are composed of a myriad of registers—related to time, place, medium, genre, class, race, gender, etc.—and authors freely draw from and creatively transform them to build a unique textual fabric. First, the translator must understand this particular combination of registers in the source text by performing the closest textual reading while maintaining ears wide open to the relationships between all these registers and between their cultures. Then comes the translator’s greatest challenge: to assemble a new textual fabric in the target language, developing combinations and transformations of registers that somehow parallel those in the source text. Even in general terms, sameness is impossible because source and target languages have each its own particular set of contemporary oral literatures, creoles, vernaculars, loan words and contaminations from other languages, and each language contends with its own set of historical continuities and ruptures. Literary texts are within a continuum between two impossible extremes: sheer obedience that leads to perfection in the transparency effect English Empiricist tradition appreciates as “plain and simple prose” and sheer rebellion that leads to unintelligibility and unadulterated noise. In between, challenges/disruptions (blatant or subtle, many or few) share space with the submissive continuities with accepted usage that mark the allegiance to the language to which the text belongs.

Lavoura arcaica has its own unique mix of formal Portuguese with occasional forays into archaisms and the language of a certain strand of modernist poetry, incidentally not the mainstream in Brazilian modernism. It is a circumspect idiom unafraid of exploring old traditions, enhanced with bursts of odd phrasing that challenge accepted usage, combining moments of submission to the authority of traditional styles, genres or discourses with moments that violently disrupt the same authority. This peculiar combination of lexical and syntactic smooth continuities and violent disruptions treads a fine line between staying within the confines of formal, written prose and straddling into the unmapped linguistic territory we may call the poetic, framing the conflict between André’s rebellion and his father’s patriarchal rule.

The fundamental issue is whether Sherwood Sotelino’s translation offers its readers a similar reading experience, an analog of Nassar’s modernist prose. In order to establish that, I examined the English renderings of sixty passages of Lavoura Arcaica. Here I discuss but a string of disconcerting phrases from these passages that challenge the translator to recreate estrangement within elegant formal prose.

“Braços encharcados da família inteira” (11) becomes “the entire family’s soaking wet arms” (4) with an interesting and effective change from present participle to past participle. Two strange images that evoke the mother’s womb, “calcificações do útero” (33) and “na palha do teu útero” (66) are rendered as “calcified womb” (19) and “your straw womb” (41), switching roles between nouns and their attributes. The verb in “guardava seu sono desidratado” (46) gets an additional clarifying detail in the final preposition typical of English and becomes to “store his dehydrated sleep inside” (28). Cryptic, condensed passages such as “a santa bruxaria do infinito” (73) and “vinho mais lúcido no verso destas minhas...