Like, “This book is amazing.” And what everything I would always say to people, it's, I can't, you know, you can't believe it, it was written in 1880. You know, I just, for a week, I must have just been insufferable, like, “Have you, have you heard of this book?” And I would, I would just carry it around with me.
This was sort of like “I'm going to take my medicine, I'm going to read this 19th century novel.” And very quickly, you know, a couple pages in, I was just shocked by how irreverent, how light, how unexpected, how sort of nasty this 19th century novel was. And I didn't know much more about it than that it was just, it was a very important novel, and I think I was not expecting to really enjoy myself. And I actually still have the copy, and it's still got all of my post-its in it from when I read it at age 19. She started with a 19th century novel she’d kept hearing about called The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.įlora Thomson-DeVeaux: There are certain encounters with books where you just feel like you've made a friend. She became more and more interested in Brazil and decided to dive deep into Brazilian literature.
The Carmen Miranda assignment sparked something in Thomson-Deveaux. One of her early assignments was to translate a biography of Brazilian dancer, singer, and actress Carmen Miranda, who famously wore elaborate hats made out of fruit in her performances. She randomly got invited to a department open house where she was talked into taking a class on Portuguese literature.
Zachary Davis: When Flora Thomson-DeVeaux showed up as a freshman at Princeton University, she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to study. His books include Machado de Assis, Historiador, about the literature and ideas of Machado de Assis and A Força da Escravidão: Ilegalidade e Costume no Brasil Oitocentista on illegal enslavement in nineteenth-century Brazil. Sidney Chalhoub is a professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Harvard Professor Sidney Chalhoub and translator Flora Thomson-DeVeaux discuss how this humorous, self-aware book brilliantly skewers the corruption and cruelty of the Brazilian elite.įlora Thomson-DeVeaux is the translator of a new English version of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, as well as many other texts. Machado de Assis is now widely regarded as the greatest Brazilian writer of all time, and his writing is particularly noted for its formal experimentation. Its author, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, was the grandson of former slaves writing to and about the slaveholding class at the time. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is such a complex, clever allegory of Brazilian society that many readers initially didn’t understand how searing its critique really was.
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