Marks of a journey: aspects of selection, translation and publication of Machado de Assis’ short stories in English

Abstract

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ (1839-1908) literary production includes about two hundred short stories and a number of them have already been translated and published in Anglophone countries since the beginning of the 20^th century. This study examines the following four collections of short stories: Brazilian tales (1921); The psychiatrist and other stories (1963);The devil´s church and other stories (1977), and A chapter of hats and other stories (2008). This study will consider issues related to selection, translators, paratexts and publishers which published those works during the last nine decades in English. The detailed comparative reading of those collections reveals that they are composed by the most well-known short stories, are translated and retranslated almost always by scholars and are published mainly by university publishers.