The Brazilian Translation of Franz von Liszt’s Lehrbuch des deutschen Strafrechts (1899): A History of Cultural Translation between Brazil and Germany

Abstract

The Brazilian Portuguese version of Franz von Liszt’s Lehrbuch des deutschen Strafrechts published in 1899 was the first translation of this book (the French and the Spanish ones were made only more than a decade later). Nevertheless, it was not analysed yet by the legal historiography. The aim of this article is to comprehend this book as a cultural good within a process of cultural translation that deals with the legalistic and codified legal context of the nineteenth century. In order to understand the operation of the Brazilian translator (Jose Hygino), the article proposes an adjustment of the intellectual mediator concept as a historiographical tool. The mediation is analysed mostly through the translator’s preface and notes i) by mapping Hygino’s comparisons between Brazilian and German criminal legislation; and ii) by analysing Hygino’s dialogues with foreign scholars. Considering the relevance of cultural differences within a discursive action as the main feature of an intellectual mediator, it is possible to distinguish: i) Hygino’s book as a cultural mediation (in a general level); ii) part of Hygino’s notes and preface as cultural mediation; iii) and part of them as simply participation within a common (or entangled) intellectual space. As a cultural translation process, Hygino’s translation is an important piece of relevant transformations of Brazilian criminal literature of the late nineteenth century not only in the obvious level of the technical dialogues, namely: as an expansion of the literary genres of Brazilian criminal literature and as a shift of its international dialogues.