Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas
Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas ( The Subsequent Memoirs of Bras Cubas or Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas ) is a novel that was first published in 1880 in Revista Brasileira by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis .
In Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century, it heralded the beginning of a new era - that of realism . The narrative situation in the work breaks radically with the literary traditions of the time. Machado de Assis surprises his readers by making the late Brás Cubas himself the narrator of his life story. So he literally reports from his grave about the personal successes and precipitations, about romantic conquests and disappointments that he made during his lifetime. However, the book is not actually autobiographical. The model is clearly the Tristram Shandy . The stylistic devices are also based on this template. The many delays in particular regulate the flow of emotions; the unsaid stimulates the phantasy. Polemically and exemplarily for a certain irony as well as the sometimes morbid humor that permeates the novel, Brás Cubas dedicates his remarks at the beginning to “The worm that first gnaws the cold meat of my corpse [...]”, on this the quote from the Portuguese Original text: "Ao avoid que primeiro roeu as frias carnes do meu cadáver dedico com saudosa lembrança estas Memórias Póstumas."
With the Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas , Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis not only becomes the initiator of realism in Brazil, but also the harbinger of magical realism .
Translations
There are two translations in German. In 1950 the Manesse Verlag published the subsequent memoirs of Bras Cubas by Wolfgang Kayser (new edition 2004); A translation by Erhard Engler was first published in 1967 by Rütten & Loening in Berlin and then in 1979 by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt am Main under the title Postumeminers des Brás Cubas . While the 1967 edition cites the title Posthumous Memories des Brás Cubas on the cover, the title page reads: Brás Cubas. Addenda to a Missed Life .
Individual evidence
- ^ Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis: Brás Cubas. Addendums to a Missed Life , Berlin 1967, p. 5.
literature
- Gunnar Kaiser: Brazil's Contribution to Modern Literature. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis' "Subsequent Memoirs of Bras Cubas" , Literary Review , No. 9, September 2003.
- Susan Sontag : Epilogue (originally essay 2001) to Wolfgang Kayser (ed.), Subsequent Memoirs of Bras Cubas , Zurich edition 2004, pp. 259–279.
