Rediscovering One of the Wittiest Books Ever Written | Hacker News Reader

Rediscovering One of the Wittiest Books Ever Written

newyorker.com

77 pointsbenbreen26 comments

> Long forgotten by most... almost no English speakers in the twenty-first century have read it...

I'm surprised by the breathless tone of the opening paragraphs. Machado is a central figure in the literature of Brazil. In English, he is obscure and unread in the same way that other central figures of other national literatures are obscure and unread. This is not unique to either Brazil or Machado. Very few arbitrarily chosen readers in the US could name a national literary figure from, say, Hungary or Finland. But if you consider only the readers who are interested in world literature, Machado is certainly both well-known and widely read.

It varies on language. While Portuguese, Hungarian or Finnish authors are largely unknown, authors writing in French, Spanish, German and Italian are fairly well known.

I was about to suggest this may also vary by subject, but using philosophy as a case study it seems to at least somewhat hold water. I’ll use philosophy only because I minored in undergrad, so I’m not an expert but I’m also a bit more well versed than a laymen.

Anyway, I’ve extensively read Spinoza (Portuguese), Sartre/Beauvoir & Camus (French), Kant (German), Aquinas & Boethius (Italian). I’d expect most others with philosophy backgrounds to at the very least know these names and a synopsis about them too. All that being said, I’m hard pressed to name a Hungarian or Finnish philosopher. I wonder why these languages are less prominent internationally in literature.

I think you're conflating "internationally" with "in the US". Hungarian (Márai, Kertész, Esterházy), Czech (Kundera, Hrabal, Hašek), Polish (Sienkiewicz, Lem) novels, for example, enjoy quite some popularity in German translation.

Kertész is even an example of an author more popular in translation – namely those German editions – than in his own country. When he won the Nobel Prize, the response even among many Hungarian intellectuals was “Who?”, followed in some cases by anti-Semitic remarks, which just goes to show how little a prophet (for nearly all Kertész’s works grapple with the Holocaust and its impact on Hungarian Jewry) is honored in his own homeland.

Possibly. I think some of that is a lingering cultural hangover of the Austro-Hungarian empire (which is also reflected in the cuisine of the nations that formerly composed said empire). My first reading of a Hungarian author in translation was when I was in grad school studying under Tibor Fischer. Despite it being my heritage, I only read Czech authors for the first time when I was working on a novel set in 1900 Prague. On the flip side, I'm fluent enough in Spanish now that I only read translations of authors writing in Spanish unintentionally (I hadn't realized that Optic Nerve was a translation when I read it) in favor of reading them in the original.

"The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" and "Dom Casmurro", both by Machado de Assis, were required reading during the last 3 years of school in Brazil. It is common for college entrance exams to use the books as example for questions.

I forgot most of the plot because I only read it for school, maybe I should revisit it now that I no longer dread reading.

This must surely have been the best way to utterly destroy the book for all Brazilians.

I don't dread reading, but I am realizing I have to re-read all of my Russian poetry, because so little of it I could truly relate to at the age we were forced to read it.

It’s funny you mention this. One of my best friends went to secondary school in Moscow, a very nice one. I really enjoy reading Russian literature, and whenever I talk to him he says the same as you. We were chatting about Dead Souls, and he was like “you know, I have no idea who in their right mind gives a ten year old Gogol and expects him to come away enlightened.”

One of my good friends at work was raised in Germany, and he has similar things to say about Theodore Storm and Thomas Mann: “oh, that’s what all the old people tried to get us to appreciate in grade school”.

Maybe we should raise our kids on Harry Potter and Twilight, so we can save the good stuff for later :).

"The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,” by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is the book.

It is about a love triangle. The plot is nothing special, but the writing style is unique.

Would you say it is deserving of this article? I plan to read it but fear I may be disappointed due to the articles hype. A counterbalance would be appreciated.

never read it but Machado de Assis is considered one of the greatest Brazilian writers of all times and it's somewhat required reading if studying literature in any Brazilian university

I am Brazilian and I consider Machado de Assis the greatest Brazilian writer of all time. Posthumous Memories is the first book of Realism, so it is highly regarded. In fact, his stories are sometimes boring, but because of Assisi's style it is worth reading. If you want to read a better example of the author's work, I recommend reading Dom Casmurro. This book is a supreme masterpiece with a captivating story and unique style.

Is there a lot of Portuguese specific wordplay that is lost in translation? For instance, I loved Don Quixote but have read that the best English translation, masterpiece as it is, pales in comparison to the Spanish equivalent because of the loss in translation of language-specific jokes.

I do think it is deserving, but that doesn't guarantee you won't be disappointed. It has a lot of qualities, but it might be the case that none of those qualities matter much for you or impact you in the same way.

The only way to guarantee you won't be disappointed is if you are interested in some meta-learning about how the literature is developed by people from a different culture and from a different time. Machado de Assis is definitely a great writer, and a unique one, especially for people who are used to literature from Western Europe and North America.

So, if you want to expand your literature horizons, it is a sure win. But even so, you might not like his writing, for any legitimate reason. There is just one way to find out.

You have more eloquently expressed my feelings that I ever could.

If you ever have aspirations about becoming a writer yourself, there are certain authors you should absolutely read. This is one, Gene Wolfe Cormac McCarthy, Hemingway and Gabriel García Márquez are others I put in this category.

You may not get as much pure enjoyment out of any of their books, but you will marvel at their craftsmanship.

Blinkist is following me around the internet at the moment, and it did make me wonder if you could offer something along the lines you just have: the world’s books summed up in just one sentence. The Blinkist’s Blinkist, as it were.

A quick google suggests that a few essays have been written with this idea in mind, and a Quora thread does the same.

But a summary wiki of all books ever written? Not there yet.

Do I dare look past the first page of Google results, or just assume (like every good entrepreneur) that because it’s not on the first page it hasn’t been done?

I should point out that it's also been translated as "Epitaph of a Small Winner", in case anyone knows of it by this name.

Interestingly enough, I saw some comments on a review of this book say that the translation of that particular edition is pretty unrepresentative as the original is intentionally written in an archaic and very complex style, making it hard to translate. Would be curious to know if this is just an opinion of one reader of if the book is, indeed, a much improved read in the original language?

The book is available free in Portuguese and in French from Gutenberg.org: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/9685

Do you know if English or Spanish translations are any good? My Portuguese is not good enough to enjoy a book.

The article praises a new english translation by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

That's because the article is a review of the translation.

Published book reviews are of two kinds. Either the publisher of a book gets some magazine to print a review as a promotional tactic, or the book is notorious enough on its own for magazines to review it, so that they can capitalize on its notoriety.

In the case of the former, the review is a paid promotion, so it is invariably positive. Regardless of how sincerely Dave Eggers loves Machado in general and this translation in particular, he is still being paid to rhapsodize about them.

You can take away the facts that there is a new translation of Bras Cubas and that it is being actively promoted, in the New Yorker, by Dave Eggers. But those are not, on their own, reliable signs that the new translation is good or necessary.

This is a good insight. I’m still not sure whether I think the P&V translations of the Russian classics are any better than the old ones, or whether it’s the opportunity to fawn over the classics again that’s given them such good reviews. Who doesn’t want a good excuse to read Dostoevsky again, decades later? It makes it very hard to know which translations are “good” without, well, reading them yourself.

I’ll also offer that quality is in the eye of the beholder. Different people want different things, and the popular conception of good is a moving target. Today, people seem to like a translation that borders on transliteration, preserving archaic words and obscure metaphors as they were written. It’s a fashion that’s subject to change.

The novel has been translated several times into many languages

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9moires_posthumes_de_Br%...

https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mem%C3%B3rias_P%C3%B3stumas_de...

Sounds kind of similar to Fortress Beseiged which is kind of like the Chinese equivalent to Catch-22.

Catch 22 is one of my favourite novels; thanks for the recommendation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com