XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Abolition After the Fact: Translating A Família Medeiros by Júlia Lopes de Almeida

• In Event: Translation, Print, and Publication of Brazilian Authors

Abstract

Despite being one of the best-known writers of her era and being put forward as a founding member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, from which she was barred on account of her gender, Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s body of work fell into a long period of neglect. Recently, however, there has been a critical and popular resurgence of interest in her work, with various new editions being published, as well as a handful of translations into Spanish and the first English translation of her novel, A Falência, in 2023. In this paper, I propose to lay out the strategies adopted in my translation of Almeida’s 1892 abolitionist novel A Família Medeiros, which she began writing before the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. The novel follows the son of a plantation owner’s return from his education in Europe to the family residence in the province of São Paulo. It portrays a range of characters, male and female, enslaved and free, and stages the contemporary debates around abolition as well as depicting the horrors of slavery. The novel documents various tensions in social relations and changes in the way of life of the region’s inhabitants, with the introduction of paid labour and the modernization of agricultural practices. I will deal with textual questions relative to the context of the novel, basing my approach on recent works in the field of translation studies and evaluating strategies employed by other translators of Brazilian literature from the nineteenth century.

Author

• Michael Tufft, Brown University