Patrick White and the Brazilian academy

Academically speaking, Patrick White does not have any significant representation in the syllabi of the universities across the country, let alone Australian Literature in general (although, in a recent research on the Brazilian Government’s database called Lattes Platform, it was possible to retrieve more results of researchers working with Australian authors, thanks to the initiatives already in effect at UFRGS. It was possible to identify a trend in Brazil in relation to the study of Australian Literature: most academics prefer to work with living and contemporary authors, such as Peter Carey (whose oeuvre deserved recent works in 2006 and 2010 in Sao Paulo) and J.M. Coetzee (whose Australianness is not as straightforward, although his name stands out because of his Nobel Prize and increasing presence in the Southern Hemisphere (as already mentioned in the project in Argentina, Literaturas del Sur).

However, where Patrick White is concerned, his oeuvre has gained more attention at the undergraduate level: at UFRGS, for instance, his novels were studied in two subjects (a whole semester of English Literature IV devoted to White) and English Literature III (working with The Aunt’s Story). At the postgraduate level (Master’s and PhD’s), two scholars, curiously located in the Southern portion of Brazil, need mentioning, for being the precursors in White Studies in the country. In chronological order, the first work (a Master’s Degree) was produced in Curitiba, the capital of the State of Parana, in 1997 by PhD Déborah Scheidt, entitled ‘All the Difference in the World’: Alterity in Three Novels by Patrick White, at the Federal University of the State of Parana (UFPR)¹⁵². The three novels chosen to be analysed were The Aunt’s Story, Riders in the Chariot and A Fringe of Leaves. Definitely, it is a _______________

151 More information on the tool is available at: http://comet.fflch.usp.br/cortrad. There is a brief tutorial on how to use the tool on the website Teorias de Leitura em Tradução, available at:

http://www.ufrgs.br/textecc/traducao/teorias/proposta.php, devised by Monica Stefani, and also a whole description of the tool on the e-book Leitura: um guia sobre teoria(s) e prática(s), authored by Maria José Finatto and others, available for download at http://www.ufrgs.br/textecc/traducao/teorias/leiturasdirigidas.php.

152 Thanks to a search using the term “Literatura Australiana” on the Brazilian Lattes platform, I was able to find her name and contact her, in 2010.

resourceful work for anyone interested in getting to know more about Patrick White’s oeuvre, under the spectrum of Cultural Studies. According to Scheidt:

As a general objective this thesis aims at making a Brazilian contribution to the research in literatures of former British colonies and to the study of Patrick White, introducing some aspects of Australian literature and White’s work, from a post-colonial perspective, to a Brazilian public (SCHEIDT, 1997, p. 2).

The other work (another Master’s Degree) was done in Porto Alegre, the capital of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, in 2006, at PUC (Pontifical Catholic University), entitled Novos continentes: relações coloniais em O continente e Voss by Ian Alexander, which, according to the abstract:

suggests a comparison of literary works from Brazil and Australia in terms of their colonial and post-colonial experiences, using a model of the cultural interactions that characterise colonisation. […] This model is applied in a comparative analysis of the representation of these colonial and post-colonial relationships in two novels that deal with the formation of new societies in the Latin and British worlds: O Continente (1949), by the Brazilian Erico Verissimo, and Voss (1957), by the Australian Patrick White. The study demonstrates the analytical utility of the model and identifies a high level of morphological similarity between the cultural relationships represented in the two works (ALEXANDER, 2006, p. 6).

The most recent work (so far) on Patrick White done in Brazil is the Master’s thesis entitled “You are what you read”: Intertextual Relations in Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala, which analysed the critical fortune of Patrick White and the intertextual references presented in the story, focusing on the implications of the references to the novel The Brothers Karamazov, by Fiodor Dostoyevsky, when the twin brothers confront each other at the Mitchell Library, in Sydney. In addition to enhancing the role Literature plays in our everyday life, The Solid Mandala and the dissertation analyzing it generated a positive reception at the academy among other students of Literature (who do not feel comfortable in reading novels in English), therefore motivating the translation of the novel into Brazilian Portuguese and, hence, this dissertation.

Thus, why is it that there are so few studies on Patrick White in Brazil? Déborah Scheidt comments the following in the introduction of her work:

In what concerns Brazilian scholars, a possible explanation for not having yet

‘discovered’ Patrick White might be the fact that in this country a more far-reaching interest in post-colonial studies is still a very recent – but flourishing – tendency.

[…] However, it is possible to notice that Brazilian scholars, possibly due to shared language, African background and/or geographical proximity, are more closely drawn towards the post-colonial literatures of the Portuguese-speaking African

countries (Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde), Canada and the Caribbean. The contributions of Australian, South African or Indian authors, for instance, are still very little explored in Brazil and that open whole new – and exciting – fields of investigation (SCHEIDT, 1997, p. 2).

New thoughts concerning study possibilities arise: an idea which might yield good results at the academies would be to introduce Patrick White in a comparative point of view, i.e., to start contextualizing his existence and his literary work in relation to our country, located in the same Southern Hemisphere, and through our similarities (and differences), see how revealing the exercise of comparing, say, Patrick White to Guimarães Rosa, would be. This would positively shed light on our own literature, in observing our mechanisms of identification, observation and representation, not only of our fiction, but also of our reality.

Such efforts have been put into practice at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in the subject English Literature, in which Patrick White’s oeuvre was offered in several semesters. Thus, students, by being asked to read and reflect about White novels, can then formalize their thoughts and impressions in essays which can later be published in academic journals in Brazil and abroad.

However, to start that endeavour, it would not be conceivable to introduce titles in English in the syllabi across Brazil without offering translated editions since they are no longer available (or only available through second-hand bookstores in outdated translations).

As for the rights of the translation, the two publishing houses mentioned, Círculo do Livro and Nova Fronteira, might have ownership of the rights, though we do need to get know more about the procedures to be followed in order to acquire them and thus allow new editions of those translations (reeditions of both works) to appear in the market. In the case of Círculo do Livro, it is probable that they had the rights to reproduce the translated content in Brazil, though the rights for the translation most probably belong to the Portuguese publisher Publicações Dom Quixote, which is still in operation. However, when contacted about the The Tree of Man, the publisher stated they no longer had the title on their list of publications¹⁵³.

After this brief analysis, it is evident that Australian Literature in translation is part of the national culture, and it

often aggressively markets the specificity of that national culture, yet paradoxically extends well beyond the borders of the nation, and makes up an integral part of the cultural archive of the nations whose literatures it enters via translation (WEST-PAVLOV; ELZE-VOLLAND, 2010, p. 9).

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153 E-mail sent on 15 Jul. 2015, and reply received on 16 Jul. 2015.

The experience of reading Patrick White in the United States described below by the American critic James Stern is worth citing, as it is a common situation involving Brazilian readers as well:

The author’s name was new to me. Within an hour my whole world has changed... I had never been to Australia, yet here was prose which, by its baroque richness, its plasticity and wealth of strange symbols, made an unknown landscape so real that I felt I could walk into it as into country I had been brought up in. I could see the black volcanic hills, the dead skeleton trees… I could all but touch the rock, scrub, bones, the sheep’s carcass, the ox’s skull, as they lay bleached in Australia’s eternal greyness… under the immense blue of its skies (MARR, 1995, p. 304).

This is this same reaction we would like to instill in the Brazilian readers when they eventually have the book in their hands, or the file open in their reading device, by providing a translation which takes into account the diverse elements of the Australian reality depicted by White, with respect to all the body of knowledge developed on his oeuvre and which has been studied over so many years. When reading Patrick White in the original, the reaction is quite evident, but in translation, the challenge is doubled. The procedures adopted in this meticulous work will be detailed presently.

In the next item, the Australian and Brazilian systems will be described, with the