08/05/2024, 00:51 Machado de Assis in Translation: Race, Slavery, and History | David Rockefeller Center for Latin American

Latin American Studies

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Machado de Assis in
Translation: Race, Slavery, and
History
Date:
Thursday, November 19, 2020, 5:00pm to 6:30pm

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08/05/2024, 00:51 Machado de Assis in Translation: Race, Slavery, and History | David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

A shared reading of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas with Flora

Thomson-DeVeaux and Sidney Chalhoub
This event is virtual. To register, click here.
This event will be held in English, but simultaneous translation will be
offered to Portuguese.
Speakers: Flora Thompson-Deveaux, PhD, translator and research director
at Radio Novelo and Sidney Chalhoub, Professor of History and African and

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08/05/2024, 00:51 Machado de Assis in Translation: Race, Slavery, and History | David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

African-American Studies at Harvard University

Built upon an elliptic, witty realism, Machado de Assis’ The Posthumous
Memoirs of Brás Cubas is considered the quintessential portrait of Brazilian
late XIX century. Its narrator, Brás Cubas, an heir and dilettante from Rio de
Janeiro, crafts his recollections directly from the otherworld, from where
he can write while being excused from any social inhibitions, and
conventions. Dedicated to “the worm that first gnawed at the cold flesh”
of his cadaver, the book is divided into short chapters, some of them quite
experimental – one consisting only of a sequence of dots, another skipped
for pure spectral playfulness.
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is a writer of labyrinths where writers
such as Susan Sontag, Phillip Roth, and José Saramago have delved into.
Brazil’s upper crust mentality, haunted by the dusk of slavery, obsessed
with cosmopolitanism while still primordially colonial and racist, are in the
epicenter of Assis’ prose. The multiple crossroads of this narration will be
explored by two scholars who have dedicated their researches to learning
hidden pathways of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. This event
will thus host a two-folded dialogue in which chapters will be randomly
chosen and analyzed by Professor Sidney Chalhoub, author of Machado de
Assis, Historiador (2003), and Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s, PhD, who has
recently translated the book, now published as a part of Penguin Classics
collection. DeVeaux’s careful devotion to the text will meet Chalhoub’s
encounters with a Machado from the archives.

About the speakers:

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux is a writer, translator, and researcher. She
received her BA in Spanish and Portuguese (SPO) from Princeton in 2013.
She defended her Ph.D. dissertation titled "Toward a New Translation of
Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas” at Brown University in 2018 and is
currently the research coordinator of Rádio Novelo in Rio de Janeiro.
Thomson's translation of Machado's The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás
Cubas was recently published as part of the Penguin Classics series.
Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard
University, and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Romance
Languages and Literatures, Sidney Chalhoub is the author of seminal and
original studies on the social history of Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho, Lar e
Botequim (1986), on working-class culture in the early twentieth century;
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08/05/2024, 00:51 Machado de Assis in Translation: Race, Slavery, and History | David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

Visões da Liberdade (1990), on the last decades of slavery in the city; and
Cidade Febril (1996), on tenements and epidemics in the second half of the
nineteenth century. A close reader and enthusiast of Machado de Assis,
Chalhoub is also the author of Machado de Assis, Historiador (2003), a
book about the literature and political ideas inside the writer’s poetics.
Chalhoub taught at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) for thirty years,
where he formed a generation of scholars who have deeply influenced the
field of social history of Brazil in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, with emphasis on the history of slavery, race, and public health.
Event organized by Prof. Josiah Blackmore, Ana Laura Malmaceda, Eduarda
Araujo, João Marcos Copertino, Omar Salomão
See also: Virtual, Brazil Studies, Student-Led Event
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