JOSÉ DE ALENCAR'S GUARANI IN ARGENTINA: PROJECT OF DIPLOMATIC NETWORK AND DISCOURSE OF NATIONAL CULTURAL IDENTITY
Cultural Transfers. José de Alencar. Diplomacy. Biblioteca de la Nación.
The Indianist novel O Guarani by José de Alencar stands out by critics for being considered one of the important Brazilian novels at the moment of the formation of Brazilian national literature and in the search for a national cultural identity. The subject of the present research is the Alencarian presence in the foreign cultural memory of Argentinean literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, an essential phase also in the formation of the Argentinean cultural identity and national literature. Based on the Argentinean translation of O Guarani of 1910, by Arturo Costa Álvarez and published by the Biblioteca de la Nación, the contextual focus is the dynamics of intellectual and symbolic exchanges between Brazil and Argentina at the time, also involving France, based on the network of contacts composed of cultural agents (translators, writers, and diplomats), institutions (publishing house and the newspaper La Nación), and the Argentinean and Brazilian literary critics of the time. Therefore, this is a bibliographic and analytical study, of the contextual and the (para-) textual using as corpus the novel El Guarani (1910), as well as archives of the newspaper La Nación, the speeches of the diplomat Oliveira Lima (2012) and the letters of the writer Aluizio Azevedo (1938). Theoretically and methodologically, the work is based for the contextual on the concept of cultural transfers (Espagne, 2012, 2017; Lüsebrink, Mix 2017; Rodrigues, 2010) and on the sociology of translation (Casanova, 2002; Bourdieu 2003, 2004; Heilbron, Sapiro, 2009), taking into consideration in the part of the (para-) textual analysis equally Franco-Aixelá's (2013) specific cultural-item analysis and Venuti's (2002; 2021) theory. This 1910 translation resulted in printed book circulation at two other times, in 1947 in Argentina and in 1984 in Spain. It is shown in the Brazilian-Argentinian context the decisive role of the diplomatic network in the dissemination of Brazilian literature in Spanish translation abroad and in the discourse on national cultural identities. In the network, the diplomat, journalist and writer Aluizio Azevedo stands out as the financier of these translations, including the novel O Guarani by José de Alencar.