AUGUST WILLEMSEN AND THE RECREATION IN DUTCH OF JOÃO GUIMARÃES ROSA'S PRIMEIRAS ESTÓRIAS

Abstract

This article examines the translation of Guimarães Rosa's Primeiras estórias into Dutch by August Willemsen, published in 1977. This translation constitutes a fascinating chapter in the eventful history of the transposition of Rosa's world into other languages. Willemsen follows his own ethnographic method in his translation, which he summarised in the principle that "one should not translate a book, but a writer, even if one translates only one of his works". As with his other translations, Willemsen accompanies his translation of First Stories with an afterword. In this 12-page afterword, Willemsen discusses his translation strategies, which he compares to the then-existing English and German translations. He also presents the work, discusses the criticism existing at that time and exposes his conception of Rosa's literature and the thematic procedures, emphasising the marvellous in animals, children and madmen). For Willemsen, Rosa's attention to words is directly linked to the Rosian conception of things. He recalls that Rosa has been accused of mere linguistic virtuosity but argues that, in most cases, the linguistic experiment is connected to the thematic treatment. The article concludes that Willemsen's approach is characterised by creativity and flexibility since he does not always follow Rosa's innovations. In some contexts, he normalises an idiosyncratic expression of Rosa. Still, he returns to the Rosian tone with his neologisms or with inventive syntactic and morphological combinations, taking advantage of the resources of Dutch. By not automatically following the source text and employing literary intuition and common sense, Willemsen manages to recreate the Rosian tone throughout the text.