A review by david_wright
Macunaíma by Mário de Andrade

5.0

Preeminent Brazilian modernist Mário de 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 trickster who emerges jet black from the virgin forest, only to turn white as his journeys take him into industrialized São Paulo. 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 staunchly vernacular 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 “primitive” 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. It’s been said that Macunaíma put the magic in magical realism. Whatever its progeny may be, Andrade’s weird and wondrous tour de force is that rarity: a truly original masterpiece, and one deserving a place in any library of world literature.