A Note on the Text - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 386

his beautiful words is enriched when we grasp something of his context, one unfamiliar
to most readers in English and even to most Latin Americans. He has many interesting
things to say about this period in Amazonia, whether every phrase rose to the pinnacles
of high art or not.
In taking these positions I would not only annoy Borges but really irritate that other
supreme translator, Vladimir Nabokov. 6 In contrast to Borges, Nabokov embraces text
as definitive, and any attempt to impose “what the translator thinks the author wanted”
merits total condemnation, probably involving a purgatory in elevators with the most
emollient Muzak. The problem here is that da Cunha's fragments can be repetitive and
his perfectly honed “text” doesn't exist. So I've decided to take the risk of both giving
him context and, where necessary, editing the text, thereby alienating both Borges and
Nabokov.
I invoke the great translator Gregory Rebassa as my defense. His question: “Can we
ever feel what an author is feeling as he wrote the words we are transforming?” His an-
swer: “Only if we know what the topic is about.” 7 Rebassa's position informs my ap-
proachtothistranslationandsemibiography.Ifeelthebiggeststumblingblockfortrans-
lators who approached da Cunha's Amazon writing has been not really knowing what
it's about—the Amazon: the time, the history, and what else was afoot. While there are
goodtranslationsofsomeofdaCunha'sAmazonworkin Àmargemdahistória ,thelim-
ited textual focus of that volume curbs the understanding of “what it's about.” My trans-
lations of da Cunha could offer something that most literary translators would not have:
decades ofAmazonian field experience inthearea heactually traveled; groundedexper-
ienceofitssocialhistory,daCunha'sterrain,andhisforestdwellers; andanunderstand-
ing of Amazonia from its pre-Columbian history to its modern integration into global
commodity circuits. In the popular mind Amazonia is still “a land without history,” al-
though da Cunha marked out its past in the scattered tribes, in the place-names of little
upriver settlements, and in the archives and maps of the epic, centuries-long Scramble
for Amazonia.
I also thought that da Cunha's world could be understood with photography of the
place, the people, and the expedition itself. The boundary survey of the Purús and Juruá
(1905)isamongtheearliestusesofexpeditionaryphotographyinAmazonia.Therewere
also other roughly contemporaneous sources of appropriate photographs. These include
small book of photos that the Manaus Chamber of Commerce prepared for the 1893
Chicago World's Fair. There were the photographs from expedition reports by experts
on the rubber economy, like Pearson, who photographed as they traveled. There were
the works of commercial photographers: for example, the Paraense studio photograph-
er Emilio Facão produced a volume with photos of all the great seringais in the region,
a kind of Estates of Beverly Hills of its time, showing all the conventions of bourgeois