The quincentennial of Portugal's encounter with Atlantic South America and the turn of the millennium combined to make for an outpouring of considerations of the ‘Whither Brazil?’ variety. Brazil watchers will remember, and some will have come across, Brasil: um século de transformações, published in 2001 by Companhia das Letras, the country's premiere publishing house. The work of 15 leading academic and extra-academic experts on a range of issues, it is now available in an English translation, accompanied by a foreword written by Jerry Dávila expressly for this second volume in what the University of North Carolina Press is calling ‘The Brasiliana Collection’ of the trilingual Latin America in Translation series that it has published in collaboration with Duke University Press for the better part of two decades.
Translations, as a rule, are to be welcomed, and it may seem churlish to be anything but enthusiastic in one's treatment of a new addition to a series that has provided so much to the field, beginning with John Charles Chasteen's painstaking translation of Tulio Halperín Donghi's Historia contemporánea de América Latina (The Contemporary History of Latin America, 1993) and including the prize-winning first volume in ‘The Brasiliana Collection’, João José Reis' Death is a Festival (2003), a workmanlike English edition of another Companhia das Letras book (A morte é uma festa, 1991). Some translations are more welcome than others, however, and certain books, translations and non-translations alike, present particular puzzles to readers and especially to reviewers.
Brazil: A Century of Change is one of these latter books, though its editors and contributors are very nearly blameless in the matter. The first problem presented by A Century of Change is that its fourteen chapters were intended to serve as interventions at a particular moment in time that has now passed. That is not to say that the issues that those interventions addressed, from ‘the (un)rule of Law’ (discussed by Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro) to federalism (Aspásia Camargo) to the especially daunting question of inequality (all 15 contributors), have been laid to rest, only that the context in which they will be debated and, one hopes, eventually resolved has changed. The second problem is that the contributions to the original volume were never intended for non-specialist readers beyond Brazil's borders. For foreigners familiar with contemporary Brazilian intellectual life, like Um século de transformações' original target audience in Brazil, these essays will be easy reading; indeed, specialists may safely skim or skip over some contributions as the contributors' positions on the issues in question have long been established and are merely rehearsed or recycled here. Upon encountering these same essays, however, beginners may well find themselves adrift or befogged, despite Professor Dávila's heroic attempt to chart the shoals ahead. It will be little comfort to such readers to learn that sentences such as ‘In the social realm, the hegemonic portion of the dominant classes was still the agro-exporting oligarchies, mostly coffee growers’ (p. 66) possess at least marginally more charm in their original Portuguese.
If A Century of Transformations will be largely unintelligible to the ‘U.S. public with limited familiarity with Brazil’ that the book's ‘Translator's Note’ identifies as its intended audience (the world's other English-speaking publics go unmentioned), and actual and aspiring specialists will prefer the Portuguese-language original, who will read it? The press's selection of Professor Dávila to write the foreword, together with its solicitation of a back-cover blurb from another US-based historian of Brazil, suggests the hope that the book will be adopted by instructors at US universities.
While the entire volume would be too much to inflict upon undergraduates, portions of it might fruitfully be used in classroom settings. Hervé Thery's ‘A Cartographic and Statistical Portrait of Twentieth-Century Brazil’, for example, delivers nearly exactly what its title promises: an accessible overview of some of the most striking changes that the country experienced between the late nineteenth century and the turn of the twenty-first. José Seixas Lourenço's ‘Amazonia: Past Progress and Future Prospects’ offers a singularly dispassionate introduction to a region of Brazil that has aroused a great deal of excitement and agitation abroad. Some will find Lourenço's approach to be refreshingly even-handed, while others will argue that it is unconscionably cool; either response will be an invitation to debate. Cristovam Buarque's cleverly arranged ‘The Northeast: Five Hundred Years of Discoveries’ stands to be another discussion starter, providing as it does a compellingly humanistic brief for a national (not regional) struggle against poverty via a ‘productive, social Keynesianism’ in which the state would ‘create employment that directly produces the supply of essential goods and services’ ranging from sewer lines to public schools (p. 287).
These three contributions are not the volume's only chapters of interest. Far from it; further chapters deserve the attention of anyone lecturing on modern Brazil. But the members of that audience will want to consult Um século de transformações, rather than its translation, while keeping in mind that the essays in question belong to a hallowed intellectual tradition (‘Whither Brazil?’) and to an unhallowed, increasingly distant past.
