Nas páginas dos jornais: o caráter diplomático atribuído à tradução literária em meados do século XX

Abstract

During World War II, the difficulty in bringing European translated literuature to the United States and the need to foster political and staregic alliances between the Americas led to an increase in the number of Brazilian books tanslated into English and published in the US. The Office of Inter-American Affairs, headed by Nelson Rockefeller, seeking to disseminate knowledge of U.S. culture in Latin America and cultivate cultural goodwill, sponsored a cultural exchange program, which included grants to Latin American translated literature, which was seen as a means to understand  “the other”. Rockefeller’s program established a patter of behavior among translation agents that lasted for decades. Érico Veríssimo, Gilberto Freyre, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Samuel Putnam and Harriet de Onís were important actors in this process. Even Jorge Amado, depite his leftist background, became an American bestseller, as a consequence of this “diplomatic” translation  program. The aforementioned facts, reported in the American newspapers and magazines, are also presented in this article.