Dom Casmurro

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was born in Rio de Janeiro and is the groundbreaking author of such works as Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson have translated the work of Lúcio Cardoso, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, and Clarice Lispector, among others. They live in England.

"It is one of the unexpected services of Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson’s new translation of DOM CASMURRO that they have helped me solve the mystery of my first impression. As I was reading their translation, I pulled out the first one I had read, one of the many that came before. I saw that the difficulty of translating Machado is not that his language is so precise and clear: That would seem to make the task easy. The challenge for the translator is that the writer uses precise and clear phrases (“Good morning!”) in a way that turns their precision and clarity against them and suggests something else. Rather than letting these lines stand, slyly winking and furtively smiling, the earlier translator had tried to nudge the reader too firmly toward that something else . . . More than perhaps any book I know, “Dom Casmurro” has to be read more than once. It teaches us to read in much the same way that Vermeer teaches us to see — by looking, and then looking again."