Brazilian literature is the same magnificent and diverse as this huge country with more than 200 million inhabitants. And the same little -known among our readers, like Brazil, the knowledge of which is limited to a number of common stamps: white beaches, luxurious carnivals, terrible city slums, dying green villages....

Randomly found on the Internet (or in the book), an article about Brazilian literature will surprise the unprepared reader with many names unknown to him. Who is hearing?

Of the modern, the first, of course, Paulo Coelho, whose peak of popularity in our territories came in the early 2000s, came to mind. A number of translations of his works were published in Ukrainian since 2002, and in 2004 the writer visited Ukraine, visiting Kyiv and Lviv, representing the translation of one of his most famous books-“Eleven minutes”.

[see_also ids \u003d "

However, the mass passion of the Brazilian fiction writer with a bias in philosophy subsided somewhat after 2014, when the former rebel against the military junta from his Twitter page spoke negatively about the Maidan, calling it a revolution organized by the West. Finally, Coelho disappointed Ukrainian readers in the spring of 2022, calling a full -scale war “crisis” and “convenient justification of Russophobia”. After that, to hope for further translations of his many, very compact novels with often pretentious names (like the book already published by us “Veronik Virishysh” or not yet published “I did not cry on the shores of the Rio Pedera”) in the coming years is not worth.

But the glory of another modern author, August Kuri, somehow went around the Ukrainian reader. And this despite the fact that in the annotations to his books the following is written: “[This is a literary phenomenon of Brazil, a psychotherapist, a scientist and writer. His works are published in 50 countries and occupy the upper steps of many book ratings. ... Each of his book contains an important message. Even the players of the Brazil team read Augusta Kuri's books ”(from the text on the back of one of the most famous works -“ Dream Trades ”). Sales statistics on the author are solid - out of 25 of his books, mixtures from psychology, philosophy, science fiction and motivational literature, more than 25 million copies were published by a total circulation. However, the Ukrainian book market has so far without this Brazilian phenomenon - unlike 50, and already more than 70 other countries. On the secondary, you can only purchase his two publications in Russian - “Dream Trades” and “Dream Buyers” a decade ago.

[see_also ids \u003d "

Readers of the older generation, undoubtedly, remember another Brazilian author - Georges Amadu (1912-2001). First of all, he is associated with the novel “Captains of the Sand”, or rather, its low -budget American film adaptation “Generals of Sand Careers” (1971), a film almost unknown in their homeland, but popular among Soviet spectators who are not spoiled by foreign cinema.

From the translations of the fascinating novel about the homeless teenagers of the 1930s, which has not lost relevance today, then censorship removed several points of homosexual subjects. The current reader, if suddenly some publishing house decided to reprint a romance without bills, would rather upset frank communist propaganda at the end of the work. However, to expect that Amadu’s books will return to the Ukrainian market is difficult. If from 1960 to 1987 six of his novels were transferred to Ukrainian, then at the time of independence there are only two-“Big Trap” (in a number of numbers “Vsesvit” for 1995) and the thick volume of “Don Flor and its two husbands” (Old Leva, 2018).

“If you are attracted by the mysterious and diverse culture of Latin America with its carnivals, costumes, music, dishes and mysterious beliefs, then this book is for you. Roman... written in the genre of magical realism. Along with fictional, but quite believable and living characters, real representatives of the Brazilian culture of the 30s and 40s of the twentieth century-musicians, singers, actors, as well as deities and perfumes of Afro-Brazilian religious cults appear in the work. And in the first place, of course, the story of Don Flor, beauties, unsurpassed culinary specialists, owners of the school “Taste and Art”, which should choose what is more important for her in life: public opinion or personal happiness, ”the publisher represents the publisher..

[see_also ids \u003d "

It is impossible not to recall Clarissa (or Clarisi) Lector (1920–1977), a writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin, who was born in the Podolsk Chechelnik during the flight of her Jewish parents from horrors and pogroms of civil war. The family of the future writer settled in Brazil. The girl began to write in her school years, and at a young age she took up journalism. The first novel - “Near the Wild Heart” - published at 19. In the heritage of the writer - eight novels and eight collections of stories. Several of her works translated from Portuguese are published in us. The first were the stories in Vsesvit (in the same 1995, when the work of Georges Amadu was published there), and then four books of different works, which during 2016–2023 have been launched by the Lviv Antonenko Vidavnitsy.

I want to complete a retrospective and very abbreviated overview of the literature of the distant Brazil with a book that almost everyone knows by name and few read. This book is " Yes, it exists, and this is not a published post -fact on the tearful television tapeman Kinoroman, but the real classic of Brazilian romanticism. This year a small novel will celebrate a solid anniversary - 150 years. It was written in 1875 by the writer Bernardo Gimarans. Created in a naive manner of high romanticism, a one hundred pages are a novel (the famous series for his motives pulled into a hundred half -hour episodes, but there was a little left of the original). So much so that the plots of the “slaves” were put throughout Brazil in numerous circuses, replacing people and cinema and television a century and a half ago, and most of the theater.

[see_also ids \u003d "

But to evaluate the book now, and even the reader, saturated with world literature, she needs good comments that would be introduced into the context of events. Well, at least the first line - " Thus, we are talking about the 30s of the 19th century. The country, which still included the current Uruguay, is ruled by the emperor. And this empire, which gained independence of some ten years ago, retained slavery as the basis of its economic system and cancel it after a long row of unrest only in 1888. Against such a background, the story of a white -skinned slave, an illegitimate daughter of a free citizen of Portugal and a slave from a phase, where he was a hired manager, becomes an excursion into the past of a country not known to us. Interesting allusions can be spent between the heroes of Izaura and the then classic of French literature. So, one of the secondary heroes is a good, but ugly hunchback Belshior (for which she had to be forcibly married - such was the sophisticated revenge of the owner). And her noble liberator Senor Alvaro uses against the insidious lord Leonsio methods similar to the techniques of Count Monte Cristo....

Of course, without the first film adaptation of 1976-1977 (there is also the second, 2004, as well as the prequel of 2017-about the mother of the main character), shown by the Soviet viewer by excerpts in 1988, and completely-in 1990, interest in the literary source would be in vain in vain. By the way, to put it mildly, the simple series has become a phenomenon not only in the USSR, which lived in recent years. The “slave of Isaur” caused no less stiring in China. The film was accepted to heart in the states of the former Yugoslavia, in general it was shown in more than 70 countries. And after the success of the series, the post -Soviet market filled different editions of the “slaves of Izaura” in different translations, with circulations of at least one hundred thousand each, that is, a total of a tragic story with a happy ending from published no less than a million books in soft covers.

[see_also ids \u003d "

In one of these issues, publishers supplemented the novel with a lengthy afterword of the then famous art and film expert Vasily Kisunko entitled “Fazenda with a view of perestroika, or the fourth hypostasis of the slave of Izaura”. In it, he dissected the history of Brazil from the times of the Events of the novel, and the biography of Bernardo Himaraens (1825–1884), and the ideological connection of the novel with such a work as the “Uncle Tom’s hut”, and its influence on the Brazilian culture.

And at the end, the author of the afterword reflects on the difference between the words “slave” and “slave”, proving the feasibility of using the second (using the arguments of religious content).

Is it necessary in the 150th year to translate the “slave (or slave) Isaur” to Ukrainian? Maybe. Of course, accompanied by a good commentator. With high-quality illustrations (releases of the early 1990s in the interests of maximum savings were limited to a minimum of printing delights). A good gift option could come out, focused on people who still use the word “phase”....

[votes id \u003d "