If ever a text challenged the notion that translation can be a systematic undertaking, this collection of seven short essays by the Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha constitutes such a text. It includes a mixture of multiple discourses, including public policy, the discourses of several fields of applied science including multiple branches of engineering, and a rhetoric with paragraph-long sentences that at times seems fetched directly from the seventeenth century. The Amazon: Land Without History virtually imposes a translation strategy grounded in practical goals and tactical-decision making rather than any overall theory. In translating, I found myself making a choice that I felt appropriate for the specific passage on which I was working but contradicted the logic of choices made elsewhere in the text using the same criterion of appropriateness. As a result, I find it incumbent on myself to advise the reader of some of the practical goals I set and the tactics I used to carry them out.
First and foremost, I sought to render the basic content of the original and, second, to present it in a form as much like the original as possible. While those twin goals may seem straightforward and mutually compatible—and susceptible to overall theorization—the contrary is in fact the case. The first goal is made complex by the fact that English is unable to render the subordinate-clause-within-subordinate-clause structure that Portuguese can sustain (albeit with much strain). Euclides da Cunha is capable of introducing a subordinate clause or even an adjective that initiates a line of argument digressive from, and sometimes even contradictory to, the main argument of the sentence in which it appears. Consequently while I try, sometimes to the point of producing tortured English, to reproduce wherever I can the overall lineaments of the author’s argument and something of his manner of presenting that argument—long subordinate structures, strings of adjectives or adjectival phrases—more often than not I find myself limited to mere recapitulation of the general import in sentences quite unlike his. (The editor, Lúcia Sá, generously refers to the result as “Victorian English.” Would that it had that degree of consistency!) At times I am constrained to recapture parts of the original argument by means and in locations quite different from those of the target text. In short, much as Putnam did in his celebrated rendering of Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands, 1944), I engage in what at times is almost a “writing about” Euclides da Cunha’s texts. Given the great difference between the two originals, however, this “writing about” is quite different from Putnam’s—and I fear much less cohesive.
The second of my goals seeks to compensate for the way I carry out the first. With a few exceptions having to do with what is acceptable in current English prose writing, I faithfully reproduce the highly idiosyncratic paragraphing and section divisions of the original. In the English, then, the reader will be able to follow the author’s overall argumentative sequence, even though the specific argumentation within that sequence will vary considerably from that of the original.
I have consulted two editions of the original to create my target text: À margem da história ([São Paulo]: Editora Lello Brasileira, 1967), and Um paraíso perdido: Reunião dos ensaios amazônicos (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1976). Unfortunately they do not always agree in their readings. One sometimes functions as corrective for an obviously corrupt reading in the other. On this point, I have simply followed the logic of coherence rather than taking either text as master. On the issue of paragraphing and section division, which also varies between the two, I have followed À margem da historia.
Two of the essays, “Rivers in Abandon” and “Brazilians,” were published by the author in Brazilian periodicals. Internal evidence—which does not show through in my translation—suggests that the latter was edited from a longer version. I have no idea about the current status of that longer version.
My goals in translating have been challenged in other ways as well. While written in Portuguese, the original contains extended passages in English and Spanish as well as phrases in French, German, Latin, and Italian, and mentions in several Amerindian languages rendered in Portuguese. I have found it impossible to simultaneously maintain a sense that the reader is being presented an English version of Euclides da Cunha’s original and signal in any consistent way the presence of those other languages in the text. To attempt that task would have required either intrusive editorial parentheses or extensive footnotes, neither of which would have contributed to realization of my second goal. The latter measure, moreover, would have competed with the footnotes that are one dimension of the original. Consequently the reader must understand that at times she or he may be reading, for example, English that is the direct presentation of an English original; however, there is no way to know for certain without consulting the original text. Since the author is not always scrupulous in attribution, the English may be a translation from a Portuguese translation of an English original that was not given citation and I was unable to track down.
Conversely, when I find it tactically effective and the meaning generally clear, I leave short phrases in the original language, since that practice is allowed in current English expository writing and imparts a sense of the texture of the original.
The presence of Spanish in the text deserves mention. Especially in “The Caucheros” and “Brazilians,” whose very subject matter centrally involves the interpenetration of Spanish- and Portuguese-language cultures in Amazonia, a great deal of Spanish appears—or sometimes merely what Euclides da Cunha thinks the Spanish should be based on his Portuguese. Since some of that Spanish has to do with terminology attendant on the issues being presented, I have attempted to set up Spanish-language terms, lightly glossed in context so the meaning is made clear, for repeated use. Also, when the same word is written differently in Spanish and Portuguese, I settle on one or the other according to my sense of the focus of the text. For instance, I use the Spanish form “Ucayali” to refer to the river that Euclides da Cunha names “Ucaiali” because references to it in his text have to do with Peruvian terrain more than with Brazilian.
The practice of setting up terms for reuse with a light contextual glossing on first mention is not limited to Spanish. I use it with Portuguese terms as well—following Euclides da Cunha’s own practice for the benefit of his own, principally southern Brazilian readership. My glosses, which are at times decidedly more intrusive than the author’s, represent the only additions I make to the text proper. The editor’s appended glossary provides general definition of repeated and important terms.
As for the footnotes, in concert with the second of my goals in translating, the reader can be assured that they all come from the original and are faithfully reproduced. I have, however, improved the bibliographical information in them in those places where I could. The improvements in the footnotes represent the only other addition on my part to the original text.
The footnotes present a curious inverse problem in that the author alludes to many works that he does not footnote. Some of those works are one-time mentions and the reader, should he or she wish, can ferret them out. I leave those as they are in the original. Let me give a short list of titles that clarify what I consider important or repeated references that go undocumented in the original.
First, several references early in the original to the work of “Wallace” are made to Alfred Russel Wallace, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (London: 1853). The title was multiply reedited.
Second, Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira’s “philosophical voyage” refers to the writing of the explorer by that name who in the 1780s and early 1790s made a number of trips through Amazonia. His writings about those trips, which include literally hundreds of companion drawings, were generally entitled “Viagem filosófica pelas capitanias do Grão Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá” (Philosophical Voyage through the Captaincies of Grão Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso, and Cuiabá).
Third, despite the author’s assertion in the second essay, William Morris Davis, “The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania,” which he does not document, was not a book but rather an article in the National Geographic 1, no. 3 (1889): 183-253. It may, of course, have been extracted and bound after publication.
Fourth, as Lúcia Sá explains in her excellent introduction, Euclides da Cunha was the Brazilian commissioner on the joint Peruvian-Brazilian commission that traveled and mapped the Upper Purus river in 1904 and 1905 to establish information for fixing the boundary between the two countries. The essays in this volume result from that undertaking, and the author reflects his experience in many ways, overt and subtle, in these pages. The Peruvian commission produced a volume of documents about the undertaking. It is Reconocimiento de los ríos alto purus i alto yuruá (Lima, 1906). That volume includes a detailed foldout map made by the commission, which can serve as a virtual companion to parts of the second essay in this book. To a lesser extent, the entire volume serves in that relationship to the entirety of what follows. The map bears the coauthorial name “el Ingeniero Brasileño Sr. Euclides da Cunha.” The map is done in Spanish and as a consequence presents some place-names that are known today in Portuguese, or by Amerindian names rendered in Portuguese, in Spanish-based forms.
Finally, I offer three notes that I think some readers will find useful. First, the Amerindian group that the author refers to as “Campas” is usually referred to today as the Asháninka. Over the past quarter century a considerable literature has been written about it.
Second, in contrast with Putnam’s precedent, I leave the words sertão (pl. sertões) and sertanejo in the original Portuguese in order to point out their geographical specificity: the drought-plagued northeastern interior of Brazil and dwellers in, or refugees from, that region. (See Lúcia Sá’s introduction for further development of the role of the sertão in these essays.)
Last, the word that I, following others before me, translate as “paths” (the Portuguese is estradas) is a key term in the text. Literally it refers to the looping, circular paths that the rubber tapper walked to gather the accumulated raw latex, as well as to the stand of rubber-producing trees assigned to an individual tapper. That number usually ranged in the area of 100 to 130. Euclides da Cunha uses the term metaphorically in a number of different ways to the extent that it comes to characterize early-twentieth-century Amazonian life as he analyzes it. However, it could just as easily characterize the text in which he presents that analysis—in which case this is the starting point from which the reader and I shall set out to walk Euclides da Cunha’s “paths.”
—RS
2006