
Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act (2017) - benbreen
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/fernando-pessoas-disappearing-act
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wenc
I'm happy to see that Lusophone authors are being (re)discovered by the New
Yorker set. (another recent article [1])

The big names in Brazil are of course Machado de Assis, Jorge Amado and
Clarice Lispector (very abstract). Paulo Coelho does not count.

In Portugal, there's Fernando Pessoa and José Saramago.

Who else would folks recommend?

[1] [https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/rediscovering-
on...](https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/rediscovering-one-of-the-
wittiest-books-ever-written)

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coliveira
In my opinion the biggest name of Brazilian literature in the 20th century is
Guimarães Rosa. Unfortunately his language is very difficult to translate (it
is difficult and fascinating even to Brazilians).

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ponker
As someone who only speaks English... I'm fascinated by the concept of
language that is difficult to translate. Can anyone direct me to English-
language literature that is difficult to translate into other languages?

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Jtsummers
Look to literature that is "punny" or very culturally specific. An example:
The title _The Importance of Being Earnest_ is itself a pun on the character's
(eventual) nature and name. Translating that to another language you'd need to
change the name of the character to maintain the pun in the new language,
which may not be feasible. That's a small example, but it's common in some
books or plays to see things like this used frequently, especially in dialog.

~~~
the_af
> _The Importance of Being Earnest_

To add to this, in Spanish the title is translated so that it loses all sense
of being a pun: "La importancia de llamarse Ernesto". "Ernesto" in Spanish has
no correlation with "earnestness", it doesn't sound the same as the Spanish
concept, and in general, the title doesn't sound like a pun.

Spanish translators often add a footnote saying something like "this is an
untranslatable play on words in the original English".

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dang
Some good comments about Pessoa have appeared on HN over the years:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=pessoa&sort=byDate&type=comment)

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Witosso
I read the book recently. I definitely do not recommend it to anyone who has
any symptoms of depression...

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infinite_beam
Humberto Costantini.

