The Sun on My Head by Geovani Martins: A Study in Criticism and Translation

• Autor(a) principal: Paganine, Carolina
• Data de Publicação: 2024
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Cadernos de Tradução (Florianópolis. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/traducao/article/view/96393
• topic: Brazilian literature in translation; orality marks; paratext; translation criticism; Geovani Martins; literatura brasileira traduzida; marcas da oralidade; paratexto; crítica de tradução; Geovani Martins

O sol na cabeça (2018) is the first book published by Geovani Martins and it was readily received with critical acclaim, being promoted by Companhia das Letras, its publishing house in Brazil, as “the new Brazilian literary phenomenon sold to 9 countries”. Unlike many Brazilian works in translation, which take time to arrive in other languages, Martins’ book was translated and released just a year later in English, German, French and Spanish. This paper seeks to reflect on the role of dissemination and reception of this book in Brazil and in the English speaking world, in order to analyze the formation of an image of the writer and his work through rewriting, whether this be through critical reviews in Brazil and abroad, or through the English translation, done by Julia Sanches and published in 2019 by Farrar Straus & Giroux (USA) and Faber & Faber (UK). Specifically, the first part of this paper presents an analysis of the book’s paratextual materials, both those present in the work itself and those external to it, in addition to a brief analysis of the reviews published in the first months of the book’s launch. In the second part, a critique of the translation into English of the short story “Travessia” / “The Crossing” is carried out, focusing on the strategies that the translator used to retextualize the orality marks of the source text. The aim is thus to reflect on how a “literary phenomenon” is forged via criticism and translation, aligning itself with new views on Brazilian Portuguese and Brazilian literature.