Please join us for an evening of Brazilian Culture as we revisit this masterpiece of Brazilian literature. The PEN Award-winning translator of Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories, Katrina Dodson, will join renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards to discuss her long-awaited new translation of the landmark 1928 modernist epic, Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character, by Mário de Andrade, one of the founding fathers of the modernist movement in Brazil.

Written over six delirious days—the fruit of years of study—Macunaíma magically synthesizes dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna, and pop culture to examine Brazilian identity. It follows the adventures of the shapeshifting Macunaíma and his brothers as they leave their Amazon home for a whirlwind tour of Brazil, cramming four centuries and a continental expanse into a single mythic plane. Dodson will discuss retranslating classics of world literature, as well as the challenges of conveying Andrade’s language experiments that incorporate Indigenous myth, Afro-Brazilian religion, and European folk and troubadour traditions.