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“In 1956, João Guimarães Rosa published his masterpiece, Grande Sertão: Veredas, in his native Brazil. In 1963, an English translation was published in the United States as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. Due to the highly intricate and complex nature of Guimarães Rosa’s linguistic ingenuity, as well as to an inexperience with the source language on the part of the English translator, the translation was deemed unsuccessful by Brazilianists, and failed to gain any ground with general readers, even in the midst of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands never saw a second printing and was virtually forgotten for more than fifty years, with not a single English translator able or willing to undertake the challenge. ” [out of nothing / 5 / “out of a system declaring nothing out of relevance” / aestas 2011]

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