The Boom Novel that Never Was: Grande sertão: Veredas by João Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

When Joao Guimaraes Rosa published Grande sertao: Veredas (1956), Brazilian critics considered it the Ulysses of the Portuguese language. Because it exhibits many of the innovations of la nueva narrativa, some critics view it as a precursor to the Boom or even advocate for its inclusion. The fact that Rosa is not considered a principal player of the Boom exposes how academia has defined this literary period. We must consider a number of complex extraliterary factors, sometimes at crosscurrents with one another. First, a close analysis of Rosa's correspondence with publishers, editors, and translators at Knopf (English) and Seix Barral (Spanish) shows how the author leveraged his skills as a career diplomat to navigate the complex system of patronage. Second, the correspondence and the translations reveal divergent translation strategies of domestication and foreignization. Finally, we must contextualize the Boom within the sociopolitical climate of the 1960s. Several key events brought Cuba, and by extension the rest of Spanish America, to center stage in US relations with Latin America. Brazil, however, largely remained in the wings. An inter-American and transatlantic approach to studying Rosa's absence from the Boom reveals many of the undergirding issues that still affect the reception of Brazilian literature in translation today.