Decade-long process of translating a canonical work results in a book

04 Sep - 25 Sep 2026

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Selected by the KEF Portugal Artistic Residency programme, Alison Entrekin will dedicate her time at Casa Mísia to writing a book about the more than ten years she spent translating João Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas into English, which will be published in 2027 under the title Vastlands: the Crossing by Simon & Schuster and Bloomsbury.

"In Brazil, Grande Sertão: Veredas is a canonical work, and its author, the diplomat and writer João Guimarães Rosa (1908–1967), is revered as one of the country's greatest writers, alongside Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector. Outside Brazil, however, with the exception of some European and Spanish-speaking countries, the work is little known. Some claim it is untranslatable, and in that sense, they are right: there is no dictionary equivalent for an invented word, nor a way to translate with 100% precision a sentence full of language games while maintaining exactly the same characteristics in the same places. With this book, I invite readers to join me in the recreation of a literary work written in a dialect of the Brazilian backlands (sertão), presenting the method I developed to tackle the undertaking. I hope it serves as a complement to the translation, enriching its understanding", she declares.

Alison's book addresses previous translations, experiments with voice and dialect, the methods she invented to deal with the challenges of Rosa's text, the influence of concrete poetry, the creation of neologisms, language games, orality, proper names, historical specificities such as the naming of hours in colonial Brazil, and the debate between domestication and foreignisation in translation. The volume concludes with studies of specific passages, reflections on the research process, and a glossary of neologisms with their respective etymologies. 

Alison is also translating the novel Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso, by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, which will be published by the American publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and will take advantage of this stay in Lisbon to familiarise herself with the geography of parts of the book and meet with the author. In the final days of the residency, the writer will give a public presentation of her work at KEF.

 

Alison Entrekin

 

Alison Entrekin is an award-winning Australian literary translator from Portuguese to English. She has translated many of the most iconic works of Brazilian literature, such as João Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas, Clarice Lispector's debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, Paulo Lins's City of God, and José Mauro de Vasconcelos's My Sweet Orange Tree. In 2019, she received the New South Wales Premier's Translation Prize and, in 2022, the Australasian Association of Writing Programs Translation Prize. Entrekin speaks regularly on the subject of literary translation at conferences and literary events, and her writings on translation can be found in Revista Pessoa, which is now part of the collection of the University of São Paulo.