Date: Wednesday 18 June 2025
Time: 18.00 - 19.00
Location: Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation, 36 Fenian Street, Dublin 2 DO2 CH22 and ONLINE
Please register here for a free in-person or online ticket for this event.
Professor Sandra Guardini T. Vasconcelos, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of São Paulo, will give a talk about the translation of James Joyce's Ulysses into Brazilian Portuguese and the translation into English of Grande Sertão: Veredas by João Guimarães Rosa. This book is widely considered one of the greatest works of Brazilian literature, and frequently compared to Finnegans Wake.
Brazilian Portuguese is said to be the only language into which Joyce's Ulysses has been translated three times. These translations have tackled the challenges posed by the novel and have come up with very different solutions in their rendering of Leopold Bloom's wanderings through the streets of Dublin.
João Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956), in its turn, was translated into English in 1963 and no other attempt was made until about ten years ago. Alison Entrekin decided to translate it afresh, and her new translation will be published in 2026. The subversion of literary conventions, highly experimental nature, and revolutionary use of language of both novels explain their translation histories. Our speaker will discuss these translations by examining some extracts and underlining the difficulties they pose not only in linguistic terms, but above all with regard to cultural references and, in the case of Rosa's novel, to a landscape that is completely unfamiliar to foreigners.
Sandra Guardini T. Vasconcelos is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of São Paulo. She completed postdoctoral studies at the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester. She was also Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Brazilian Studies (University of Oxford) and Honorary Senior Research Fellow (Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London). She has edited several books, has published articles and chapters both in Brazil and abroad and she is the author of Puras Misturas. Estórias em Guimarães Rosa, Dez Lições sobre o Romance Inglês do Século XVIII, and A Formação do Romance Inglês: ensaios teóricos, for which she was awarded the Jabuti Prize for Literary Theory and Criticism. At present, she is the coordinator of the Laboratory for the Study of the Novel, curator of the João Guimarães Rosa Archive (Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, USP) and holds a CNPq Research Productivity Grant (Grade 1A).
This event is supported by the W.B. Yeats Chair of Irish Studies, USP, and the Embassy of Brazil in Ireland.
For further information please email the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation at <littrans@tcd.ie> or visit the Centre’s website here.