Translating Oral Traditions
March 17, 5 - 7 p.m.
Spanish & Portuguese Library - 5125 Dwinelle Hall
This event is a public conversation on the topic of oral traditions and translation between translator Katrina Dodson (Visiting Professor, Spanish and Portuguese) and anthropologist and fiction author Pedro Cesarino ( Spanish and Portuguese’s 2025 Brazilian Writer-in-Resident). It is moderated by Natalia Brizuela and organized by Nathaniel Wolfson.
Katrina Dodson is the translator of The Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector (New Directions, 2015), winner of the PEN Translation Prize and other awards. Her translation of Mário de Andrade’s 1928 Brazilian modernist classic, Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character was published by New Directions in 2023. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Dodson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an affiliated scholar of the Brazil LAB at Princeton University and teaches translation in the MFA in Writing Program at Columbia University.
Pedro Cesarino is Professor of the Department of Anthropology at the University of São Paulo. He is specialized in shamanism, oral traditions and cosmology of Amazonian native peoples and has published several articles and books such as Oniska - poética do xamanismo na Amazônia (Perspectiva, 2011) and “Amazonian shamanic enquiry: formulaic composition and specialized discourse” (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2023). As a novelist he published Rio Acima (Companhia das Letras, 2016, translated to French as L’atrrapeur d’oiseaux (Rivages, 2022) and A repetição (Todavia, 2023). In 2023, he was resident at the Fondation Jan Michalski pour l’écriture et la littérature. His third novel will be published in 2025 in Brazil by Todavia as Os urubus não esquecem and by Rivages as Les vautours n’oubient pas.
