Tracing Exilience Through Literature and Translation: A Portuguese Gargantua in Paris (1848)

Abstract

Abstract The present article explores the way translated literature informs on (i) how exile shapes the cities’ landscapes (both the starting city and the arrival), as well as (ii) the emotional hardship of the exilic condition, which entails a feeling of estrangement and the longing for imaginary homelands. To attain this twofold aim, it focuses on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Portuguese migrant movements to Paris. It searches, on the one hand, to retrace exilience in descriptions of Lisbon and Paris in biographical accounts of Portuguese exiles. On the other hand, it analyses an 1848 rewriting of Rabelais’ Gargantua in Portuguese. It is contented that Gargantua Portuguez [Portuguese Gargantua] bears testimony of the presence of anonymous Portuguese-language exiles in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, while creating a “safe house” for them, by seeking historical justice which would, in turn, assist in coping with the exilic condition.