Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character

Preeminent Brazilian modernist Andrade’s audacious 1928 saga gets a brilliant new translation from Dodson. Andrade’s narrative follows the protean exploits, sexual and otherwise, of Macunaíma, an outrageous shapeshifting trickster. Macunaíma’s antiheroic catchphrase “Ah! just so lazy…!” is belied by the magnitude of his misadventures, a rollicking rush of trickery, transformation, and offhand cosmological creation. In a decided improvement over the prior translation’s Britishisms, Dodson renders Andrade’s Brazilian Portuguese in a slangy, folksy American diction that captures the story’s orality. Andrade’s omnivorous, polyglot style is liberally seasoned with Indigenous terms, snatches of song, nonce words, and nonsense, combined in a vigorous and often incantatory mode. This is offset by parodies of European elaboration, such as breasts that “do indeed serve in numerous and arduous labours of excellent virtue and prodigious excitation.” It’s a huge amount of fun. Dodson’s smartly curated endnotes gloss a selection of unfamiliar terms and references, without the distraction of footnotes or scholarly paraphernalia.