The Brazilian translations of Thomas Hardy's novels

This paper examines the existing Brazilian Portuguese translations of Thomas Hardy's novels, drawing attention to the specific problem of dialect translation, and it also examines the general reception of Hardy's works, as exhibited in articles, prefaces, translators' notes, as well as in the translations themselves. In Brazil, Hardy started being translated in the 1940s, a period in which translation and the book industry was booming in the country because of a shortage of production in Europe during the wars. Jude and The Well‐Beloved were translated in this decade, and Tess was translated in the 1960s. There was then a gap until 2003, when a new translation of The Well‐Beloved was published. But before all that, in the 1920s, Thomas Hardy was read by a rising Brazilian intellectual, Gilberto Freyre, who became interested in how Hardy combined the regional and the universal in his works so as to expand their boundaries and reinvent the regionalist genre. In contrast, Freyre's contemporary, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, sought in Hardy the tragic and the modern, associating these features with the universal appeal of Hardy's works and reflecting on their afterlife. With regard to the translation of dialect, this paper suggests that the earlier translators' strategies were closely connected to the view at the time of what constituted appropriate literary language, whereas the different perceptions of Hardy seem to struggle to fit his works into categories that related to domestic literary interests.