Cada vez mais publicados no exterior, libros nacionais impõem desafios aos seus tradutores.
Leia a matéria completa em: http://www.istoe.com.br/reportagens/139022_UMA+LITERATURA+DIFICIL+DE+TRADUZIR

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Almost from its foundations, the Amazonian port of Manausbecame one of those places which has as lively a reality form armchair travellers as for those who have actually managed to make the journey. (…)
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Megan Stephan, Sinclair McKay and Charles Osborne review the latest paperbacks

The Brothers by Milton Hatoum (Bloomsbury, £6.99)

From the start, this novel, a kaleidoscopic work following the lives of a Lebanese family living in the Brazilian port of Manaus in the middle of the 20th century, exerts a curious hold. Halim, a trader, and his wife, Zana, have twin boys, Omar and Yaqub. Temperamentally at odds with one another – Omar grows up to be the charismatic though hard-drinking ladykiller, while Yaqub becomes more austere – their growing conflict powers the narrative.
The book zig-zags back and forth across the years, building a heavily emotional tapestry, for this is the sort of book in which people do not hold back. The lives of the family are one thing, but what also grips is Hatoum’s evocation of this exotic world. From the markets, with their offal and flies, to the lush foliage, rich colours and myriad smells, this is an unusually sensual book. SM

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Imagine the story of Cain and Abel transposed to a town on the banks of the Amazon in the mid-20th century and you will have the flavour of this strange and haunting novel.
Neither of the two brothers of the title ends up in the mortuary, but it is more by good luck than good judgment that they remain alive. Omar and Yaqub, the sons of Lebanese ex-patriots, are born identical twins, which gives extra venom to their rivalry.

As teenagers, they have a ferocious fight over a girl they meet at a party. As young men, they are not on speaking terms. In middle age, they come to physical blows with a savagery that bewilders those around them. Their poor parents long for them to be reconciled; but as a reader, you sense that it is never going to happen. There is something implacable in their hatred.
If the plot has a grim, fatalistic quality, Milton Hatoum introduces enough light and shade to save it from being oppressive. The story is told by the son of the family nanny, an inquisitive child tormented by the knowledge that one of the brothers – he never finds out which one – is his father.
Psychological [...]

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MILTON HATOUM’S second novel arrives in Britain with a substantial reputation. Like his first, The Tree of the Seventh Heaven (1994), The Brothers has already won the leading literary award in Hatoum’s native Brazil, and it seems that none of his considerable narrative gifts have been lost in translation. The story is set in mid-20th century Manaus, Brazil’s multi-ethnic Amazonian rubber capital. The main characters, like the author, are of Arab descent – a merchant trader, his wife and twin sons – the elder of whom, Yaqub, is despatched as a teenager to relatives in Lebanon to discover his roots. The early separation from both parents and his grossly spoilt twin, Omar, leads to a lifelong estrangement. Yaqub returns to Brazil a frosty intellectual; Omar by contrast emerges a feckless pleasure-seeker. Related Articles The next Labour leader could be prime minister within a year David Miliband tops two Labour leadership opinion polls It will take more than Jam and Jerusalem to create David Cameron’s Big Society Ed Miliband raises thousands in Barack Obama style small donation campaign British soldiers killed in Afghanistan named as Jonathan Crookes and David Monkhouse Is Labour a party without a purpose?The book’s appeal is partly [...]

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WITH Milton Hatoum’s second novel, this reviewer did something that is a rare thing nowadays, reflected a while and began at page one again. You simply luxuriate in John Gledson’s translation from the Portuguese (Hatoum was born in Brazil, the setting for the novel) and it makes you wonder what it would read like in the original.
The book teems with the colour of the setting (a supplied glossary explains words such as cupuacu, gazal – erotic poetry – jaraqui, tamtaqui), the exotic language is matched by the wonderfully delineated characters who could only have emerged from such a landscape, or a similar one, in this case the Lebanon.
Yet, despite the colourful cast of characters, the landscape, the themes – smothering mother love, unfulfilled longing, displacement and eventual acceptance, the story never boils over into the surreality of magic realism.
The period is 1945. One war is ended and, inevitably, another about to restart.
Twin brothers, Yaqub and Omar, fight as only some brothers can. In 1938 Yaqub is sent to the Lebanon, where his parents were born before they emigrated to Brazil. Omar stays in Brazil with his parents and is treated like an only child.
Another theme within the main theme is [...]

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A fraternal rivalry exacerbated by incestous passion yields potent melodramatic consequences in this absorbing fourth novel (second in translation) from the Brazilian author of The Tree of the Seventh Heaven (1994). Again, Hatoum focuses on a Lebanese immigrant, a trader named Halim, and his tragically conflicted family: twin sons Yaqub (a successful engineer hamstrung by his “calculating ambition”) and Omar (a drunken wastrel filled with “excessive hostility yoward everyone and everything in the world”), their importunate younger sister Zania, and Halim’s tempestous Brazilian wife Zana, whose love for the brooding Omar surges dangerously beyond the bouns of maternal devotion. Their story – which takes place in and near n economically depressed seaport city in the years following WWII – is sedulously pieced together by an initially unidentified involved narrator whose secondary, though crucial, relationship to Halim’s household is only gradually, and quite artfully, revealed.
A beatifully constructed story, replete with colorful incident and brisk, vivid characterizations, leaving a deeply ironic, bitter aftertaste. One of the better recent novels out of Latin America.

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The Brothers, by Milton Hatoum, translated by John Gledson (Bloomsbury, £6.99)

Brazilian novelist Hatoum creates an archetypal tale of brotherly hate that shakes a family. Twins grow up in a Lebanese family living in the Amazon port of Manaus: Yaqub the quiet engineer, pale as a chameleon on a damp wall; dissolute Omar, with “the whiff of a jaguar’s skin”. One of them is our narrator’s father – the illegitimate son of the family’s indefatigable maid, he spends the novel watching and wondering who spawned him, sobersides or spendthrift. Loping through the middle decades of the past century, the brothers’ enmity becomes epic, Cain and Abel up the Amazon. Hatoum’s singularity is to assemble a world of pungent detail – peppery stuffed fish, pulpy fruits – which is blown by melodramatic gusts of rancour. John Gledson’s absorbing translation keeps its senses on full alert for a slumping hammock or the aniseed tang of arrack, for public brawling and sweaty sexual rivalry.

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There are some places for every reader, faraway places that may have exerted a mysterious compulsion eve since childhood int hte fantasies of a destant geography lesson.
Sometimes, the name of these places are enough, almost by themselves, to draw the imaginaton, almost hypnotically, into an irrational fascination.
For me, such a place is the Amazonian city of Manaus, built on the confluence of immense south American rivers in the depths of the rain forest, which was the centre of the rubber boom in the early 20th century that grew through the steam of Brazil’s tropical heat and the need of the US motor industy to find tyres for its cars.
The Brothes has its setting in Manaus, but, int the years following its precocious prosperity, in the post-war era leading up to and beyond the 1964 military coup in Brazil.
It is a family story, in particular, the story  of a Lebanese immigrant family. Halim is an ex-pedlar, struggling to maintaiin dry goods store in the decaying riverside harbour.
In the pre-war years, in the wake of the city rubber ascendancy, he marries Zana, the daughter of a Brazilian Maronite Christian family.
From the union of these two ardent lovers, from within two communities in tropical [...]

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Set in the great Amazonian port of Manaus during the first half of the twenthieth century, this is the story of identical twin brothers who battle for the love of their mother. It is also a vivid and surprising portrait of a city built over the confluence of two great rivers in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. The novel itself, as it plays out the family drama, is full of eddies, dangerous undertows and shifting surface reflections.
While recounting the fortunes and trials of a Lebanesse immigrant fanily over many decades, The Brothers presents a Levantine Amazonia, a near-magical place at the far reaches of the Brazilian imagination. Foreigners, immigrants and the local population of Manaus share a landscape which delivers a wealth of sensations to the reader: a city full of smells, of sounds and tastes as well as a dazzling array of sights. Tense and richly atmospheric, this is an enthralling novel by one of Brazil’s finest contemporary novelists.
Translated from the Portuguese by John Gledson

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