The Chinese lyre in transit: from Machado de Assis to Antonio Feijó

Abstract

This essay is a work in progress on the transatlantic circulation and dialogue of texts, authors and ideas that fuel literary orientalism in Portuguese language. It focuses specifically on the interrelated movements underlying a nineteenth-century collection of classical Chinese poetry in French translation, i.e. Judith Gautier’s Le Livre de jade (1867), and its translations into Portuguese: Machado de Assis’ “Lyra chineza” as included in Phalenas (1870) and António Feijó’s Cancioneiro chinez (1890, 1903). The main purpose is thus to draw a map of cultural and personal contacts and translation transfers that may help better understand the phenomenon of literary orientalism and exoticism in Portuguese language as an intricate network of texts, authors and aesthetic tendencies.