A Note on the Text - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 385

commendations, and this is more or less the position taken by a recent translation and
biographers. 3 Also, much of the oeuvre seems disconnected if it is disembodied text.
I was greatly helped by insights on translation from my UCLA colleague Efraim
Kristal's commentary on Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean writer who also had an il-
lustrious career as a translator. 4 I have taken some of my inspiration from him. First,
Borges tended to treat texts, even final texts, as drafts; he points out that just as there
are no perfect translations, there are no perfect texts. Since for him texts are not sacred,
Borges's ambition in translation was to create a convincing work of literature, through
several strategies. First, remove the padding—writers can fall in love with their words
and include passages that are redundant and superfluous. This is the case with many of
da Cunha's Amazon writings. He reworked short pieces for introductions and speeches,
recycled newspaper articles, sent them off in letters to friends, and reworked structures
and images from the Os Sertões into a humid tropical counterpart. Compilers of his
Amazon work often included everything or concentrated on one collection. There is
certainly a justification for this. Borges also removed textual distractions—he chose to
smooth or change the text if he felt the literary effect would be more convincing, and he
was bold when it came to creative translations. I have followed his lead and taken liber-
ties with the fragments in an attempt to mold them into a narrative, yet I seek to frame
them within the debates they were addressing, events of the time, and places where they
were transpiring.
Borges often restructured a translation in light of another work. He thought that since
an author's output is a totality, sometimes a more effective structure can be partially
transposed to make the narrative stronger. Da Cunha used the campaigns of the war at
Canudos as a framework on which to hang his reflections on place, history, and human
progress. I have used his own Amazon odyssey as the apparatus for connecting various
fragments that, of course, are also meditations on place, race, history, Brazilian nation-
alism, and human progress. In this I have used themes to link the various fragments to-
gether.Asheputsit:“I'llwriteakindof'LostParadise,'forexample,orsomethingelse
whose amplitude frees me from the precise definitions.” 5 But his thought was evolving,
and his analyses had to be focused on very specific products—articles, reports—in the
short term. These were less literary but deeply connected to the territorial and narrative
construction of Brazil's nationalist/imperial claims, phrased in historical, national, and
moral languages and in the idea of “moral landscapes.”
IpartwayswithBorgestoo.Hefeltthatgreatartstandsonitsown.Hesaidthatwhen
younger, he believed context was necessary, but in his later years he concluded that it
makesnodifference:theworkisgoodoritisn't.NotalldaCunha'sAmazonianwritings
can be considered “magisterial.” When he was called upon to contribute to an imperial
venture and political agenda, his goal was not purely artistic, and our understanding of