José Bento Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) is one of Brazil’s most influential writers, a prolific translator, and the founder of Brazil’s first major publishing house. His lifelike characters have become an integral part of the Brazilian society, so much so that restaurants, coffee shops, wheat flour, or readymade cake packs in Brazil are named after Dona Benta, an elderly farm owner in Lobato’s fictional works. Despite the largeness of his influence and the progressive ideas he sought to bring in Brazil through his literary endeavors, however, Lobato has been posthumously accused of racism in his literary portrayal of black people. His work, Caçadas de Pedrinho, has especially come under scrutiny for calling Aunt Nastácia as a “coal-coloured monkey,” and he continually makes reference to her “thick lips.”
Professor John Milton’s recently launched book Um país se faz com traduções e tradutores: a importância da tradução e da adaptação na obra de Monteiro Lobato [A Country Made with Translations and Translators: The Importance of Translation and Adaptation in the Works of Monteiro Lobato] (2019) examines how Dona Benta’s character is instrumentalized by Lobato in his stories to express his criticism of the Catholic Church, the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Latin America, and the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, among other socio-political practices of the times. In the following interview, Professor John Milton speaks about Lobato, a household name of Brazil, stemming from his long-term research on the author’s life and works.
Shelly Bhoil (SB): Monteiro Lobato’s famously said, “um país se faz com homens e livros” (a country is made with men and books). Tell us about Brazil’s first important publishing house, which was found by Lobato, and how it mobilized readership in Brazil?
John Milton (JM): Lobato’s first publishing company was Monteiro Lobato & Cia., which he started in 1918, but it went bust from over-investment and economic problems in 1925. Then, together with partner Octalles Ferreira, he founded Companhia Editora Nacional. Both companies reached a huge public. Urupês (1918), stories about rural life in the backlands of the state of São Paulo, was enormously popular, and within two years went into six editions. Lobato quickly became the best-known contemporary author in Brazil. Dissatisfied with available works in Portuguese to read to his four children, he began writing works for children. In A Menina do Narizinho Arrebitado [The Girl with the Turned-up Nose] (1921), Lobato introduced his cast of children and dolls at the Sítio do Picapau Amarelo [Yellow Woodpecker Farm]. The first edition of Narizinho sold over fifty thousand copies, thirty thousand of which were distributed to schools in the state of São Paulo. By 1920, more than half of all the literary works published in Brazil were done so by Monteiro Lobato & Cia. And as late as 1941, a quarter of all books published in Brazil were produced by Companhia Editora Nacional.
One of Lobato’s ingenious techniques was bringing books closer to the Brazilian people. He introduced coloured covers, he marketed, he increased the number of sales points and sold books in all kinds of shops, one of the only exceptions being butcher’s shops. He famously said: “Books are not staples of the diet . . . they are desserts: they must be put under the nose of the customer to excite his gluttony.”
SB: Monteiro Lobato’s portrayal of black people in several of his works is somewhat derogatory. Any comments on this and other accusations against him?
JM: Racism, as we know it, hardly existed at the time he wrote, and his somewhat derogatory remarks about the black maid, Tia [Aunt] Nastácia, were not criticised at the time. However, he was despised by the Catholic Church, and several Catholic schools even burned his books. Among the reasons were his mockery of the sacred institution of marriage as the rag doll Emília “marries” the pig Rabicó, and Lobato’s apparent support for the cannibalistic Indians of Brazil. The children at the Yellow Woodpecker Farm are even encouraged by Dona Benta to read Darwin!
SB: What were the subversive politics in Monteiro Lobato’s translation of Peter Pan that caused him significant trouble, beginning with the confiscation and ban on the distribution of its copies in the state of São Paulo, leading to his arrest?
JM: The second edition of Peter Pan (1935) contained the following section, which clearly insulted the closed economic market of the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship:
“Why, grandma, do toys in Brazil cost so much and are such poor quality?” asked Pedrinho. “That bear that Grandma bought, for example; it cost five thousand réis, and as soon as it came out of the package, its tail fell off and its ear bent.”
“Because of taxes, Pedrinho. In Brazil, there is a plague called the government that puts taxes and stamps on all things that come from abroad, left and right, just for the greed of taking money from the people to fill the belly of the parasites. When you are President of the Republic, try to make a law that puts an end to this shameful behaviour of charging high taxes even on wooden horses, tin trains, celluloid ducklings, blowpipes, dolls, etc. Make sure you don’t forget.”
The use of Dona Benta as Lobato’s mouthpiece to retell the story, with interruptions, comments, and questions from Pedrinho and Narizinho, her grandchildren, and the naughty rag doll, Emília, enabled Lobato to insert his opinions in the story. English children play with excellent toys, have nurseries, good heating systems, and even the English dog, Nana, is clever enough to look after the children. Brazil pales by comparison, and this was considered insulting to the Brazilian nation by many of those around Dictator Getúlio Vargas.
His political troubles were exacerbated when, on December 30, 1940, an interview by Lobato was broadcast on the BBC World Service in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and reproduced by the British, American, and Argentine press. Lobato compared Brazil to Britain; under Nazi attack at the time, Britain was persisting, and had the resources to get through the dark days. Brazil also owed its industrialisation to Britain, and many of its great men were anglophiles. Lobato read Kipling’s “If . . . ,” at that time enormously popular in Brazil. The following lines clearly show Lobato’s view of contemporary Brazil:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same,
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools
In March of 1941, Lobato was sentenced to six months imprisonment, of which he served three.
SB: What is one work that has influenced Lobato profoundly as a translator and writer?
JM: Lobato was always an internationalist, always open to the foreign. Those who only knew Portuguese only had access to stultifying Portuguese works and the rocambolesque works of translated French authors like Ponson du Terrial. One author Lobato loved was Kipling, and The Jungle Book, and Kim, which he translated while in prison for three months in 1941, would bring in this much needed fresh air.
SB: Please throw some light on Monteiro Lobato’s politics of language?
JM: Lobato was very much against the dominance of Portuguese from Portugal in Brazil and believed that Brazilian Portuguese should be declared a separate language, Brasilina, as he called it, which, in its spoken form was now quite distant from metropolitan Portuguese. Indeed, Brazilian Portuguese is nowhere near as close to Portuguese from Portugal as British English is from American English, and books are always rewritten for the other market. Indeed, Brazilian Portuguese seems much closer to Galician, spoken in the northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula than Portuguese from Portugal. Lobato believed writers and translators should use Brazilian colloquial forms rather than the flowery antiquated literary forms used by most writers. In a 1943 letter, Lobato describes the difficulties he had to take out the “literature from my children’s works. With every new revision I kill, as if I were killing fleas, all the literatures which spoil it. The last work submitted to this treatment was Fables. How pedantic and formal it was!! So I shaved off almost a kilo of ‘literature’, and there was still some left. . . ” So, “literary” qualities have no place in a work for children, and the imagination should be stimulated by stories in fluent and easy-to-understand colloquial Portuguese.
SB: In his 1923 essay “Traduções” (Translations), Monteiro Lobato emphasized on the “spiritual enrichment that translation provides.” Can you explain what that means?
JM: Lobato hated the stuffy French culture that dominated pre-World War II Brazilian translations—which, especially from the English, were a way of bringing some light into the prison cell of Brazilian culture.
SB: As a translator and academic on translation studies, what do you reckon is Monteiro Lobato’s most significant contribution to the theory and the art of translation?
JM: I have written elsewhere about Lobato’s enormous contribution to Adaptation Studies. Julia Kristeva introduced the term “intertext,” and Lobato’s adaptations of Peter Pan, Don Quixote, Adventures of Hans Staden, and Fables have become more so the works of Lobato than those of Barrie, Cervantes, Hans Staden, and Aesop and La Fontaine. I have already mentioned the critiques of the regime of dictator Getúlio Vargas in Peter Pan. In Lobato’s children’s adaptation of Don Quixote, he proposes that writing for children should lose all forms of “literariness,” and introduces a sub-plot in which Emília also becomes crazy, paralleling the madness of Don Quixote. In Hans Staden, Dona Benta criticises the cruelty of the colonisation of South America of the Spanish and Portuguese. By comparison, the cannibalism of the Brazilian Indians seems quite mild as, before they are eaten, their prisoners are treated well and even given wives. And the comments on the Fables show that you have to be smart in order to survive in the world.
SB: While Lobato was a prolific translator and publisher of English works into Brazilian Portuguese, very few of his works were translated and published in English during his lifetime. What could have been the reason for this? Could you also tell, especially since you are British, about the reception of the English translations of Monteiro Lobato’s works outside Brazil in the recent decades?
JM: Lobato is an almost unknown figure outside Brazil and Argentina. A number of his short stories were published in various languages, and two of his works for children were published in the Soviet Bloc and China. Together with Marina Darmaros, I wrote an article on what changes were made in these translations: the Yellow Woodpecker Farm (private property) became a club; the naughty rag doll, Emília, became a model Soviet citizen; the black maid, Tia Nastácia, became an educator; references to characters from Hollywood were cut; and so was Emília’s insulting philosophers and historians (the intelligentsia was, and is, highly respected in the USSR/Russia).
In 1926, Lobato published O Presidente Negro [The Black President], a science fiction work on a USA of the future that, as part of an electoral ploy, initiates a plan to sterilise all black people. It was something of a flop in Brazil, much less popular in Brazil than his naturalistic stories. From 1926 to 1930, Lobato was a commercial attaché of the Brazilian government in New York and attempted to get this work published in the US, believing that he could be another H.G. Wells and make his fortune. However, he failed miserably, and no publisher would touch it because of its racist content. However, it was published soon after in Italy, France, and Argentina, and in 2008 in Italy, with the election of Barack Obama, when it was also reprinted in Brazil. I believe Lobato made an enormous mistake. Instead of The Black President, he should have presented his children’s stories. If he had done so, who knows—Dona Benta, her grandchildren Pedrinho and Narizinho, and the rag doll Emília may have become even more famous than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck!
Alison Entrekin, currently translating João Guimarães Rosa’s masterpiece, Grande Sertão: Veredas, told me she is interested in translating Lobato into English. We’ll see . . .
John Milton, born Birmingham, UK, 1956, is Titular Professor, University of São Paulo, Brazil, teaching English Literature at the undergraduate level and Translation Studies at the M.A. and Ph. D. level. He helped to start the M.A. and Ph.D. Postgraduate Programme in Translation Studies, and was Coordinator of the Programme from 2012-2016. His main interest is in the theory, history, sociology, and politics of translation, and has published several books in Brazil and edited (with Paul Bandia) Agents of Translation (Amsterdam. John Benjamins, 2009) and Tradition, Tension and Translation (Turkey, com Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar and Saliha Paker, 2015). He has also published many articles in Brazil, in Target and The Translator, and has also translated poetry from Portuguese into English.
Shelly Bhoil, Asymptote‘s Editor-at-Large (Tibet), is an Indian poet and scholar in Tibetan studies. Her forthcoming books include her poetry book in Brazilian Portuguese Preposição de entendimento (Editora Urutau, Brazil) and a reference book of edited essays Resistant Hybridities: New Narratives of Exile Tibet (Lexington Books, US).
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