Read, listen, transcreate

17 Sep 2026

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Australian translator Alison Entrekin recreated the entire backlands of Brazilian writer and diplomat João Guimarães Rosa. Recognized as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, Grande Sertão: Veredas, in Alison's translation, will soon reach the English-language publishing market, in the year in which the monumental work celebrates 70 years. It will be published under the title Vastlands: the Crossing by Simon & Schuster and Bloomsbury.

The anniversary is marked by another literary event. Alison's process of unraveling them word by word, of excavating them to their etymological root, has won a book of essays, with the title, for now, When I was Riobaldo.

Alison refused to tame Rosa's language; nor did he limit himself to rebuilding it. He gave the book's landscape and linguistic sound an equally inventive English version. His reflection on the very act of translation - or, more precisely, transcreation - was explored and published in Revista Pessoa at the beginning of the project. The transition from the Rosean language to English took a decade. 

It is about this crossing that Alison, in artistic residency at KEF, talks with Portuguese writer José Gardeazabal, in Lisbon. Sharing the challenges that the translator-author faced, as well as the experience of delving into Rosa's imagination, allows access to unexplored particularities of the work, both in the source and target language.

 

João Guimarães Rosa

 

Alison Entrekin is an award-winning Australian literary translator from Portuguese to English. He translated many of the most emblematic works of Brazilian literature, such as Grande Sertão: Veredas, by João Guimarães Rosa, the debut novel by Clarice Lispector, Perto do Coração Selvagem, Cidade de Deus, by Paulo Lins, and Meu pé de Laranja Lima, by José Mauro de Vasconcelos. In 2019, he received the New South Wales Prime Minister's Translation Award and, in 2022, the Australasian Association of Writing Programs Translation Award. Entrekin regularly speaks about translation at conferences and literary events and his texts on translation can be found in Revista Pessoa, which is now part of the collection of the University of São Paulo. 

José Gardeazabalwas born in Lisbon, in 1966. His first book of poetry, História do Centurio Twentieth (2015), was distinguished with the INCM/Vasco Graça Moura Prize. He published, at Companhia das Letras, the novels Half Man Half Whale (2018, finalist for the Oceanos Prize), A Melhor Máquina Viva (2020, first volume of the «Trilogia dos Pares»; finalist for the Fernando Namora, Correntes d’Escritas and Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores awards; one of the books of the year for newspapers Expresso and Público), Quarantena — A love story (2021, finalist for the Oceanos Prize), When we were fish (2022, second volume of the «Trilogy of Pairs»; finalist for the Correntes d’Escritas Prize), The mother and the crocodile (2023) and Origami (2024).

 

Read, listen, transcreate
September 17th, at 7pm
Verride Cultural Center: Rua de Santa Catarina, 9, ground floor
Subject to capacity