Translation and Americanism in Brazil 1920–19701.

Abstract

This article examines American cultural influences in Brazil, particularly in terms of translations published in Brazil. It proposes that the great majority of American books published occupied a conservative position in the Brazilian literary system, and in certain periods, such as the post-1964 military dictatorship, the US government financed the publication of American works translated into Portuguese in order to help to provide the right-wing military government with a cultural focus. However, the importation of American literature has been seen in very different ways: in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the cheapness of American culture and the global aims of the future superpower were already being criticized. For others, America meant democracy and an economic model to emulate. In the 1920s and 1930s the publisher, translator and writer of children’s stories, Monteiro Lobato, saw the importation of American ideas and technology as a way of taking Brazil out of its backwardness, and expected translations of American works to counterbalance the dominant French trends. In the most repressive years of the military dictatorship, from the end of 1968 to the mid-seventies, the translation of Beat poetry acted as a form of protest.