PinT Book Club 21th session

Welcome to the 21st meeting of PinT Book Club! Our second classic to be discussed, Macunaíma, was written by Brazilian author Mário de Andrade and translated by Katrina Dodson, who will join us for the session. The English translation was published in 2023 by Fitzcarraldo Editions. This will be a bilingual event (English and Portuguese). See interpretation details below.

To ensure we can pay our collaborators without relying on external funding, we are now charging a £6.00 attendance fee per session. You’ll receive a full refund if you cancel up to 24 hours before the session. We hope this fee is affordable for everyone; however, if your circumstances don’t allow you to pay it, please contact us via our website.

Doors will open at 18.50, so we can start promptly at 19.00h. Nearer the time, we'll send you the Zoom link via email.

About the book

Here at last is an exciting new translation of the modernist Brazilian epic Macunaíma, by Mário de Andrade. This landmark novel from 1928 has been hugely influential. It follows the adventures of the shapeshifting Macunaíma and his brothers as they leave their home in the northern Amazon for a whirlwind tour of Brazil, cramming four centuries and a continental expanse into a single mythic plane. Having lost a magic amulet, the hero and his brothers journey to São Paulo to retrieve the talisman that has fallen into the hands of an Italo-Peruvian captain of industry (who is also a cannibal giant). Written over six delirious days – the fruit of years of study – Macunaíma magically synthesises dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna, and pop culture to examine Brazilian identity. This brilliant translation by Katrina Dodson has been many years in the making and includes an extensive section of notes providing essential background information for this magnificent work.

Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) was a poet, novelist, cultural critic, ethnomusicologist, and leading figure in Brazilian culture. He was a central instigator of the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), which marked a new era of modernism. He spent much of his life pioneering the study and preservation of Brazilian folk heritage and was the founding director of São Paulo’s Department of Culture.

Katrina Dodson’s translation of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector was awarded the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, the Lewis Galantière Award, and a North California Book Award. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

Praise for 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 

"Katrina Dobson’s translation, employing a colloquial American diction with palpable African American and Deep South overtones, gives Macunaíma a consistent, credible voice in English. She inhabits and breathes life into the novel as though she were a revenant from the Brazilian jungle of a century ago…. It is not only Brazil’s complexity that Mário de Andrade captures, but that of the Americas as a whole, and to some extent that of the entire modern world."

— Stephen Henighan, Times Literary Supplement

"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

"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