Ricerc@Sapienza

Sonia Netto Salomão’s study examines the mechanism by which models - that belong to very specific cultural traditions - are transplanted and acculturated in post-colonial 19th-century Brazil. It focuses on Machado de Assis, an author who exemplified confrontation with the western canon, both ancient and modern, to illustrate how translations do not simply “transport” meaning. Salomão thus shows how a Shakespearean simile becomes a metaphor in Dom Casmurro, through a French eighteenth version. As she says, translations belong to diverse traditions and create other traditions, based on the reception of a given author’s poetics. She takes as a historical-cultural and theoretical backdrop a specific process within Brazilian culture, defined in the context of avant-garde Brazilian modernism as “Cannibalism”, and traces it back to the second half of the 19th century, demonstrating its power as a cultural paradigm.