Macunaíma

‘Dodson’s translation captures all the playfulness of the Portuguese text. The Brazilian colloquialisms are transposed to a fizzy American vernacular, but flora and fauna maintain their original names, inviting a surrender to the story’s strange, defamiliarising atmosphere. Andrade conceived of Macunaíma as one long poem or “troubadour ballad”: we’re lucky to hear it sung in English.’ — Pablo Scheffer, Telegraph ‘Macunaíma is above all a vision of mythical Brazilian consciousness, a picaresque epic of birth, triumph, decline and death.’  — New York Times  ‘Macunaíma is a miracle. There’s nothing like it in all of literature. Katrina Dodson is a hero.’ — Mario Bellatin, author of Beauty Salon ‘Macunaíma is a self-consciously nation-founding novel that reads like a thick broth of painful historical truth, quoted myth, and irreducible pleasures. Rarely is so much pleasure given and pain revealed by overlapping languages.’ — Arto Lindsay ‘An explosion of language… The obvious comparison for English speakers would be Ulysses, as an encyclopedia of styles, of language forms.’ — Fredric Jameson ‘He’s an anti-hero hero, questioning and contradictory. Macunaíma is an emblem of the marvelous, metamorphosed into the errant question mark of his one-legged constellation. An anti-normative hero who points to a future, eventually more open, world.’ — Haroldo de Campos ‘Mário wrote our Odyssey and, with a swing of his native club, created our classical hero and the national poetic idiom for the next fifty years.’ — Oswald de Andrade ‘A deliberately provocative text, slangy, comical, antiliterary, assuming all the apparent contradictions of the struggle against European seriousness in its various forms.‘ — Pascale Casanova ‘We are so fortunate that Mário de Andrade’s rollicking Macunaíma is finally reappearing in English in Katrina Dodson’s dazzling translation.’ — John Keene, author of Counternarratives ‘Dodson, a PEN Award–winning translator of Clarice Lispector, breathes new life into this spirited modernist classic from Brazillian writer de Andrade…Electrifying and perplexing, this cornerstone of Brazilian literature shouldn’t be missed.’ —Publishers Weekly, starred review  ‘To describe Macunaíma as sui generis would hardly scratch the surface.’ — ​​Ratik Asokan, 4Columns