Hélio de Seixas Guimarães

Race and Color in the Reception of Machado de Assis

This article tracks the changes Machado’s figure underwent during over a century and a half and shows how classifications regarding race and color are projected upon the writer and his work. During his lifetime, his mixed-race features were stressed by detractors such as Augusto Fausto de Sousa and Sílvio Romero and minimized by enthusiasts like Joaquim Nabuco, who considered him to be white and only saw “the Greek” in him. In the first decades of the twentieth century, critics and biographers started associating mulattoism to psychopathology, which supported the constitution of the exceptional being, the genius who overcame all original challenges and filled a prominent role in the country’s cultural life. From the 1930s, the mestizo started to be positively emphasized in line with Gilberto Freyre’s thinking, which culminated in the reconfiguration of the writer as an exemplary mixed-race Brazilian during the Estado Novo (New State). More recently, Machado de Assis has been reclaimed by black movements that aim at configuring him as an icon of Negritude. This article recomposes and documents the path of the Machadian figure based on issues of color and race and examines how they are projected upon a character who has been at the center of literary, cultural, and political debate in Brazil for over a century.

Uma vocação em busca de línguas Notas sobre as (não) traduções de Machado de Assis

During Machado de Assis’ lifetime, literary and editorial productions became more and more internationalized, with intense circulation of fictional and non-fictional texts among periodicals from the two Hemispheres and varying latitudes. This article examines how Machado participated in this process, reading and collaborating with foreign publications, publishing some of his novels in spaces disputed with translated “ feuilletons,” engaging himself in three frustrated attempts to be translated into German and finally trying to have his works published in Portugal.