FBM Übersetzungen von Guimarães Rosas "Grande Sertão: Veredas - Querungen" Berthold Zilly und Alison Entrekin im Gespräch | Auf Englisch und Portugiesisch

Renowned translators Alison Entrekin and Berthold Zilly will talk about their experience of translating Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas — Brazil’s most iconic and breathtaking work of twentieth-century literature — into English and German. Hall 3.1, Stand F 123, 9 October at 5.00 pm. English / Portuguese. Interpretation by Marina Waltenberg Mauritz. 

Grande Sertão: Veredas has the spirit and epic reach of the world’s great novels. In a daring, labyrinthine narrative, João Guimarães Rosa depicts fates in a society suspended between good and evil, hope and despair — a world in which violence ist not an aberration but part of its structure.

Born in 1908 in Cordisburgo, Minas Gerais, Rosa was a voracious autodidact, teaching himself in several areas of specialty along with several languages while still young. His professional life was equally varied: he served as a rural and military doctor and as a diplomat from 1934 until his death. Between 1938 and 1942, working as vice-consul in Hamburg, he met his second wife, Aracy de Carvalho Guimarães Rosa, later honoured as Righteous Among the Nations for her role in helping rescue Jews during the Nazi period. Rosa debuted as a writer in 1946 with the publication of Sagarana. In 1956, he published Corpo de Baile and Grande Sertão: Veredas, followed by other novellas and short-story collections that reshaped Brazilian literature. He died in Rio de Janeiro in 1967. The Cultural Institute of Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was renamed the Instituto Guimarães Rosa in tribute to his legacy.

Alison Entrekin is an award-winning literary translator from the Portuguese. She has translated some of Brazil’s most beloved and iconic works of literature into English, including Clarice Lispector’s debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, Paulo Lins’s favela classic City of God, and José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s My Sweet Orange Tree, among others. Her translations have earned her the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize and the AAWP–UWRF Translators’ Prize, and have been finalists for the PEN America Translation Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.  Alison Entrekin’s new translation of João Guimarães Rosa’s modernist masterpiece Grande Sertão: Veredas will be published as Vastlands: The Crossing in January 2027 by Simon & Schuster (US/Canada) and Bloomsbury Publishing (UK/ANZ).  

Berthold Zilly has taught Latin American and Translation Studies at universities in Berlin, Bremen and Florianópolis. Alongside his teaching and research, he has also worked as a translator from Portuguese and Spanish into German. Among other works, he has translated Rebellion in the Backlands by Euclides da Cunha, Memorial de Ayres by Machado de Assis and Ancient Tillage by Raduan Nassar. His activities have earned several awards. In 1995 he received the Wieland Translation Award and, in 2018, he was appointed a corresponding member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras; in 2019 he received the Zug Translation Fellowship for his translation of Guimarães Rosa’s above cited novel, which was then in progress. His new German version of this novel is due to be published in spring 2027 under the title Großer Sertão: Querungen by S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main.

The Government of Brazil appointed both Alison Entrekin and Berthold Zilly Officers of the Order of Rio Branco in recognition of their contributions to the country’s international projection.