Suhrkamp Verlag and the Mediation of Global Literature from Brazil: In Favour of a Noise-filled Concept of Reception of Literatures of the World

A publishing house for world literatures from Latin America

Suhrkamp Verlag, founded by Peter Suhrkamp in 1950, is one of the most important publishing houses in the history of Germany’s cultural reconstruction, offering a consistent programme for world literatures to the present day. Its foundation and further development are closely related to the history and publishing culture of Samuel Fischer Verlag (1886) and, by extension, to an old tradition of publishing throughout Europe. As the successor to the Samuel Fischer legacy, Peter Suhrkamp is still widely regarded in the history of the German book market not only as a publisher but also as a cultural mediator. One year after founding the publishing house, he conceived of and realised the Bibliothek Suhrkamp, a series of books with world literature titles that would shape the global character of the publishing house. After the death of Suhrkamp in 1959, Siegfried Unseld took on the task of maintaining his legacy while modernising the publishing house; from 1961 onwards he created the Suhrkamp Taschenbuch series, in 1963 he bought the publishing house for “World Literature” classics, Insel Verlag, and in the same year founded the famous edition suhrkamp series. The new Editor of Suhrkamp, Siegfried Unseld, forged an economic path between ‘money and Geist’ and ‘business and culture’ to promote literature that would establish Suhrkamp Verlag as a cultural institution, and consequently exert an unprecedented influence on the publishing culture in West Germany.¹This is how Unseld quotes Peter Meyer-Dohm’s scheme for a typology of publishers in his article ‘Die Aufgaben des literarischen Verlegers’. See Full reference in Zotero Library. In 1973, George Steiner assessed the symbolic significance of the publishing house when he coined the term ‘suhrkamp culture’ Full reference in Zotero Library. With this term, he stressed the fact that the publishing house would have become a benchmark not only for modern philosophy and contemporary debate but also, I would add, modern contemporary “World Literature”. Alongside the series Bibliothek Suhrkamp and Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, edition suhrkamp was a series of particular relevance for the generation of ’68 (see Full reference in Zotero Library), which provided a platform not only for the ongoing debate in theory, philosophy and culture but also for the reception of contemporary world literature, especially the literatures from Latin America.

The special significance of the reception of Latin American literatures at Suhrkamp can be seen in the reorganisation process that this publishing house underwent from 1970 onwards. Almost ten years after the phenomenon of the Latin American literary Boom in the USA, France and Spain, Unseld established an exclusive editorial office for Latin American literature at Suhrkamp Verlag in 1974, in the same way as Peter Suhrkamp did for the Suhrkamp Bibliothek. Together with the Romance scholar Michi Strausfeld, the publisher established a programme which was presented at the 1976 Frankfurt Book Fair and had, for the first time, a regional focus, specifically Latin America. This was the chance for Suhrkamp Verlag to present itself as the ‘discoverer’ of a whole literary continent through a catalogue that included seventeen Latin American authors.²The first and most influential presentation of Latin American authors consisted entirely of male authors; not a single female writer was present or mentioned. These seventeen authors were: Juan Carlos Onetti, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Alejo Carpentier, Osman Lins, César Vallejo, Augusto Roa Bastos, Juan Rulfo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz, Manuel Scorza, Pablo Neruda, Miguel Ángel Asturias und Roberto Arlt. On the occasion of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s focus on Latin America, numerous publishers in West Germany were committed to the Mediation of Latin American literatures, but only Suhrkamp Verlag was able to create a uniform image for literary production from Latin America with its programme and leave a lasting impression through it. The compilation of a catalogue that was as uniform as possible, however, may have generated conflict with the multilingualism and polyphony of these literatures. Nevertheless, according to Unseld, the Suhrkamp programme did succeed in introducing this literature to the German-speaking world, even if its implementation remains controversial to this day.³‘Die Einführung dieser Literatur ist im deutschen Sprachbereich bisher gescheitert. Die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, der deutsche Leser, ließ sich bisher wohl durch die Fremdartigkeit ihres Milieus und vor allem durch Unkenntnis der Geschichte und Gegenwart eines ganzen Kontinents nicht für die Annahme auch der bedeutendsten ins Deutsche übersetzten Werke gewinnen. Umso wesentlicher, herausfordernder und verlockender ist also jetzt der Versuch, diese Literatur bei uns durchzusetzen’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

Under the title ‘7 Authors Write on the Novel of the Latin American Continent’, the publisher’s catalogue⁴Advertising brochure for the 1976 Frankfurt Book Fair, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach/Sigfried-Unseld-Archiv (SUA): Suhrkamp. at the Book Fair presented the first series of authors who had either only been published sporadically or whose works had not yet been published in West Germany at all. Although the publishing house had been publishing Brazilian authors since the 1960s, Osmans Lins was the only Brazilian ‘permitted’ to take part in the writing of the ‘novel of the Latin American continent’ out of the group of seventeen Latin American authors Unseld included in his catalogue and showed at the fair. How can the underrepresentation of literature from Brazil at the Book Fair be interpreted? The publisher promoted the image of a forced unity across the continent not only in the catalogue, but also in the Latin American programme, based on the style of magical realism and on Spanish-language works. Through the artificially created image of a unified Latin American literature, however, the diversity in the public presentation as well as in the bibliography of the Suhrkamp-Lateinamerika-Programm remained little distinguished and difficult to recognise. From the Latin American titles published by Suhrkamp, it is difficult to discern whether this unity was subject, for example, to the criteria of a particular dynamic of reception in the circulation of so-called peripheral literatures, or whether the Latin American programme was opposed to nationally specific criteria of reception when evaluating literary texts.

If one compares the publication figures for Latin American titles in both parts of Germany up until the 1970s, it becomes clear that a consistent and sustained reception was first established in the literary field of the GDR and not in West Germany. According to research by the novelist Hans-Otto Dill, fifty-two titles were published by Volk und Welt between 1945 and 1971, compared to forty-five titles by the leading Western publishers (Hanser published 17; Rowohlt 15; Erdmann 13) in the same period Full reference in Zotero Library. The interest and greater activity in eastern Germany were also independent of the influence of the boom of the 1960s and its successors, which had their publishing centre in Barcelona. The first publications of Latin American titles in the GDR were due to the recommendations and translations of writers who had lived in Latin American exile from the 1930s onwards and later chose to return to the GDR. According to Dill, the difference between the two German states is considerable: from the 1950s to the 1970s, Latin American literature in the GDR was published much more consistently, more intensively and thematically more broadly, even with a higher literary quality than in the FRG at the same time. There, the free forces of the publishing market determined the reception: Latin American literature was presented primarily as something exotic, and as a result it remained on the margins of European literatures (see Full reference in Zotero Library).

Having said this, an analysis of East German publishing archives (such as the archive of Volk und Welt in the Akademie der Künste Berlin), which has yet to be compiled, could refute Dill’s argument to some extent, because East German publishers also had to act according to the logic of the market at times, despite control and censorship measures or ideological guidelines. Quite a few licenses were negotiated between West and East German publishers, as the Siegfried Unseld Archive or the archive of Rowohlt Verlag testify. Nevertheless, Dill’s argument is correct; compared to the GDR publishers, which, since the 1950s, could count on the mediation work of intellectuals returning from Latin American exile, the West German publishers did not have a proper structure for the reception of Latin American literature. The pioneering spirit of publishers such as Rütten & Loening (under Aufbau) or Volk und Welt, which had had an editorial department for Latin American literature since the 1960s, had no counterpart in the publishing houses of the Federal Republic, where the first works from Latin America, such as those by Jorge Amado, were translated from French or English due to a lack of trained editors and suitable translators from Spanish and Portuguese. But despite these limitations and shortcomings, there were West German publishers and agents who made a special effort to publish literature from the subcontinent. In addition to Rowohlt, Hanser and Erdmann, the publishing houses Claassen, Piper, Hanser and Kiepenheuer & Witsch should be mentioned, which published Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez and João Guimarães Rosa in the 1960s; there were also committed intermediaries such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Curt Meyer-Clason and Albert Theile, the organiser of the first Latin America Conference in West Berlin 1962.

The difference between the authors publishing in the GDR and those publishing in the FRG is also remarkable. Jorge Amado’s work, for example, was a bestseller in the GDR with a print run of over 100,000 copies. Pablo Neruda’s poetry, on the other hand, circulated between the two German states and caused controversy: it was first published in the GDR and then in the FRG from the 1960s, but always with the stamp of communism, under which his work was subsumed from the outset (see Full reference in Zotero Library). Both authors were also launched with fervour in West Germany from the 1970s. Jorge Amado and Miguel Ángel Asturias, whose works were published in both German states, exemplify the preference of East German publishers for narratives with a clear socio-political commitment—in contrast to the preference of Western publishers for magical realism, in the case of Asturias, or for the entertaining novel, in the case of Amado.

The reception of Jorge Luis Borges in both German states was more unequivocal. Due to his cultivated universalism and his profound knowledge of European intellectual history, West German publishers were relatively quick to include him in their programmes. As early as the 1950s, several companies were already fighting over his work, while Borges was soon rejected by GDR publishers—who indulged in debates about the formalism of (decadent) Western art—because of his reputation as an intellectual aristocrat, or even a reactionary—an impression that hardly evaporated when reading his work. The German-language reception of Borges began with the first translations in the Deutsche Blätter in 1944 by Paul Zech, an exile in Argentina; it continued in West Germany in 1955 with the publication of his short stories and poems in anthologies, and led to West German book editions from the end of the 1950s. In 1958, Enzensberger wrote to Siegfried Unseld with his explicit recommendation to publish Borges’s Ficciones (1944) in the Suhrkamp library. Unseld, however, did not react quickly enough, spent months checking and finally lost the rights to Carl Hanser Verlag, which published the first Borges volume in 1959 (and in the 1970s, together with Insel and Fischer, published practically all of Borges’s works). Further publishing efforts can be found at Luchterhand-Verlag, which published both Asturias and Julio Cortázar, who would also become a big name in the Suhrkamp programme in the following decade.

The case of Brazil in the Siegfried Unseld archives

The mediation of literature from Brazil by Suhrkamp Verlag began in the 1960s with the following three works: Poesie (1965) by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Corpo Vivo (1966) by Adonias Filho and Ausgewählte Gedichte (1969) by João Cabral de Melo Neto. Drummond de Andrade was published in the Poesie series, which also included poems by Vicente Huidobro (1966) and Fernando Pessoa (1962), and that was organised and curated by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Corpo Vivo and Ausgewählte Gedichte were published in edition suhrkamp. From 1974 onwards, Suhrkamp’s mediation of Brazilian literature intensified considerably. The reason for this was the founding of the editorial office for Latin American literature, as well as the growing interest after the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1976. Ten years later, the programme had ten titles of Brazilian literature, in the 1980s thirty-two titles and by 1997 forty-seven Brazilian titles. It cannot ultimately be inferred from the publisher’s catalogue and public relations alone whether a programmatic reception of Brazilian literature was planned, or only isolated titles were to appear under a unified concept for Latin America. Many Brazilian titles were also not always presented as decidedly ‘Brazilian’. But how do this series of titles and Suhrkamp’s programme as a whole relate to the history of Brazilian literature in its field of production?

The access to the Suhrkamp Verlag Archive, which was acquired by the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach in 2009, provides the opportunity to pursue this question. The Siegfried Unseld Archive (SUA) comprises the archives of Suhrkamp and Insel Verlag from their foundation until 2002. Its inventory includes correspondence between authors, editors, translators, literary scouts, publishers, lists, various manuscript versions, galley proofs, programme planning, contracts, personal documents, press material, Suhrkamp and Insel Verlag notes as well as Unseld’s publishing chronicles, which can be used to trace the criteria, approaches and evaluation of the complete reception process from the manuscripts to their realisation as finished books. A special feature of the publishing archive is that it not only documents business processes, accounts, contracts, etc.—as with any corporate archive—but also contains a large number of important author correspondences, expert opinions and manuscripts of works. Unseld and his staff kept both the letters received and carbon copies of the letters sent. The archive also contains other documents that show a constant shift between written and oral form, revealing the publisher’s archival policy: copies of contracts, file notes, telephone logs and travel reports were also carefully archived. In addition, Unseld kept a chronicle from 1970 until his death in 2002, in which he documented important events, decisions and business, as well as private encounters related from his point of view, which are already available in their published book form (Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library).

Despite the density and a certain unmanageability of the SUA, the reception of Latin American literature can be traced and reconstructed very successfully. Through programme lists, letters between authors, editors and the publisher, or through expert reports and Unseld’s chronicles, it is possible to analyse the criteria, values and evaluation of the reception of Latin American literature in more detail and formulate hypotheses for the dynamics of the publishing house and the mediating role of its actors. Moreover, the beginning of the mediation, as well as its high points and its end, can be analysed so that it is possible to identify specific cycles, programmes or phases. Accessing the SUA and examining the documents of the Latin American Editorial Office enabled me to formulate a main thesis that can identify differences in the programme for Latin American literature: in the first phase of the mediation of Latin American literature at Suhrkamp Verlag, from 1970 to 1990, the inclusion of literature from Brazil draws a particular outline that distinguishes it from Hispanic American literature. While a unified receptive space was created for the forms of Hispano-American magical realism, Brazilian literature continued to drift as a foreign body in the Suhrkamp programme until 1990. The editorial attempts to subordinate titles from Brazil as magical realists or to publish them under this category not only failed, but also emphasised the exclusive margins of the reception. This outline, formed not only by linguistic and cultural but also literary characteristics, traces a process of reception that can only be identified with knowledge of the SUA inventory. The unpublished materials of the reception emphasise the special place of this literature in the literary field of West Germany by tracing a thread through the published and unpublished works from the publishing house. Out of this main thesis, it is possible to write a previously unknown chapter in the reception of Brazilian literature outside Brazil—a chapter beyond national borders, which would problematise the concept of national literature and disrupt the current debate on global, borderless literature Full reference in Zotero Library. As a result, the social and intellectual relations of the actors during this reception come to the surface; their evaluations, decisions and argumentations become visible and reveal a realpolitik of the circulation of literature.

Quite a few elements and actors are involved in the complicated process of mediating Brazilian literature at Suhrkamp Verlag. However, three mediators played a central role in the correspondence between the publishing house and the authors, publishers and readers in Brazil: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Curt Meyer-Clason and Michi Strausfeld. Enzensberger, the co-founder of edition suhrkamp, was responsible for the series of poetry titles (Poesie), in which several Latin American poets were published, and for Kursbuch, one of the most important journals of the 1968 student movement, which was constantly in dialogue with culture and politics in Latin America (see Full reference in Zotero Library and Full reference in Zotero Library). Through his close contact with Unseld, he suggested Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, among others, for the programme as early as the 1960s. In the 1970s and 80s, he also drew Unseld’s attention to important authors from Brazil such as Machado de Assis and Murilo Rubião. Until the publisher’s death, Enzensberger was one of Unseld’s most important advisors regarding Latin America. But besides him, two other mediating figures were responsible for the reception of the literatures of Brazil in West Germany: Curt Meyer-Clason and Michi Strausfeld. Curt Meyer-Clason translated and mediated most of the Latin American literature in the 1970s and 80s. His connection to Brazil was not only a professional but also a personal one.⁵On Curt Meyer-Clason’s role as a mediator in West Germany, see Full reference in Zotero Library. Starting in 1973, Unseld invited Michi Strausfeld to conceive of a Latin American programme with him. Strausfeld, then a recently graduated Doctor in Hispanic Studies, took the job as a literary scout and in a very short time became Unseld’s right hand in the placement of Brazilian authors. From 1974, together with the other editors, she became the most important person for the reception of literature from Latin America and especially Brazilian literature at Suhrkamp Verlag. She was the “discoverer” of great names such as Vargas Llosa and Isabel Allende, as well as João Ubaldo Ribeiro.⁶Michi Strausfeld wrote a series of articles on her work as a mediator of literature from Latin America. For her personal portrait of the history of this reception Full reference in Zotero Library. As part of the first stage of defining the most important actors in the process of reception, the activity of the editorial office can be structured into three generational phases: 1) the 1960s—the phase of the accomplished “explorers”, 2) from 1973 onwards—the phase of programmatic mediation and exclusive editors, and 3) from 1984 onwards—the professionalisation of the editorial office for literatures of Latin America.

Dynamics of mediation in the editorial office

The correspondence and notes between the editors, the publisher and external agents and translators, as well as the numerous expert book reports in the SUA, reveal a consistent structure in the evaluation of the editorial office, which can also be regarded and analysed as literary criticism through written statements. The evaluation of manuscripts in the editorial office is considered a decision of critical pragmatism about the conversion of a manuscript into a book. This decision implies not only a literary but also a transcultural medial translation: in an ordinary reception process of foreign literature, a work published as a book is first converted into a translated manuscript and then into a new book. However, there are also cases where a manuscript in the original language appears directly as a book in the target language without first being published in its original literary field. During both reception processes, nonetheless, various intersections of evaluations occur, whether through initial proposals, expert reports to the publisher or correspondence between translators and editors.

The analysis of the reception dynamics in the editorial office not only enables the reconstruction of an intellectual network but also of an operative critical system in the publishing business. This system has its own evaluation criteria and categories that speak for or against the inclusion of a publication in the publishing programme. Common criteria such as ‘readable’, ‘translatable’, ‘marketable’, ‘universal’, ‘classic’, and ‘relevant’, as well as categories such as ‘readership and authorship’ have to be contextualised and constantly questioned to make the system fully comprehensible. We are dealing, in this case, with unstable criteria determined by economic, symbolic, social and contingent factors. From a historical perspective, the study of literary reception within a publisher’s editorial office provides points of contact with a literary history that is not orientated towards individual authors, genres, language areas or cultures, but towards transnational mediation dynamics and their contingencies.

However, intermediary actors again play an essential role in the analysis of these dynamics. The dynamics of global literary circulation are not only determined by tendencies of the internal and external (i.e. international) book market but also by the agency of various actors within the tensions of the literary field. The roles and relationships of these actors must be determined and differentiated. Publishers and booksellers have a different weight in the book trade than editors, translators and authors. The structure of the field is the result of the unequal distribution of social status and symbolic capital among the actors. Perhaps decisive for this is that the latter are not bookmakers. They work directly with texts and on manuscripts. Books are made, produced and designed as a product to convey text in the most sustainable and attractive way. Since the nineteenth century, producers have been publishers and literary agents who, before the product can be conceived, presented and put into circulation, must inevitably deal with licences and translation rights.

The study of mediation dynamics must not ignore the impact and evaluation of the text in the publisher’s editorial office, precisely because it contains discussions relevant to the book market and literary criticism, translation practice and readership. Not only the source text (the ‘original’) but also the translation manuscripts and the materials left behind after the evaluation of a book or manuscript should be considered as interacting objects with their own agency in the circulation and mediation process. In the sense of a relational approach, they act as boundary objects Full reference in Zotero Library.

Writing a reception history of Brazilian literature would ultimately not be possible without the use of the methodology of histoire croisée Full reference in Zotero Library, which deals with multi-perspectival phenomena at borders, in-between spaces and in movements in a scientifically accurate way. This calls into question epistemological standards of philology and comparative studies: instances such as ‘author’, ‘critic’, ‘translator’ and ‘reader’ are displaced and set in constant motion. The analysis of literary circulation has to take into account that everything is in motion: literature, its actors, and the researchers themselves. Instances like ‘the author’ and concepts like ‘translatability’ and ‘World Literature’ are becoming more fragile and complex. In the history of reception, the central figure of the translator is sometimes considered a transnational author without a signature, and the untranslatable becomes a source of meaning rather than a barrier to the circulation of literature.

The intersection of these different approaches allowed the study an accurate insight into the mediation of Brazilian literature by Suhrkamp Verlag, as well as the reception of this literature in the German literary field. The 1976 Frankfurt Book Fair was considered a major impulse for the reception of Brazilian literature. From that year onwards, the editorial office made [ever] increasing efforts to publish works from Brazil. It can, therefore, be seen as a historical starting point for a systematic reception that covers the period between 1973 and 1994. This point is made clear by the publication in 1982 of five important titles of Brazilian modernist literature: Macunaíma (1928) by Mário de Andrade in the Suhrkamp main programme; Gedichte, an anthology from Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s work, Quincas Borba (1891) by Machado de Assis, Die Nachahmung der Rose: Erzählungen by Clarice Lispector, and Doralda, die weiße Lilie by João Guimarães Rosa, all published by Bibliothek Suhrkamp; aside from the aforementioned works, an essay volume on Brazilian literature was also published and a cultural and literary festival was organised to such ends. In 1984, the volume Brasilianische Literatur in the series suhrkamp taschenbuch materialien offered German readers an important collection of essays about the most significant authors of Brazilian modernism. The three-week cultural festival Horizonte ‘82, the second Festival of World Cultures dedicated to Latin American literature in 1982, not only presented these classic modernist titles but also set the stage for contemporary Latin American literature, where Brazilian Suhrkamp authors such as Darcy Ribeiro, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão and João Ubaldo Ribeiro were among the thirty authors invited. From 1983 onwards, Ubaldo Ribeiro’s work was presented as the new Brazilian ‘discovery’ of the Latin America editorial office, which published five books by the author by 1994.

A topos as a noise-filled concept of reception

Apart from the recognition of a first reception cycle, the analysis of the publisher’s archive shows that the assessment of Brazilian literature was deeply influenced by discursive critical tendencies, which brought with them a paradigmatic change. From 1994 onwards, reception no longer focussed on exoticism but on urban violence, and by 2000 onwards, the evaluation of Brazilian literature in the editorial office lost its scope. This brought to an end a cycle of reception crowned by the 1994 Frankfurt Book Fair which had focussed on Brazilian literature. The analysis of this cycle suggests a framework for the entire reception dynamics of literature from Brazil at Suhrkamp Verlag, which draws a topos with its own margins. These outlines form an isolated structure that is directly and metaphorically linked to the main thesis of this investigation: a framework for a literary island of Brazilian titles and proposals in the Suhrkamp programme. This metaphor stands both for a received literary topos and for the unique position of Brazilian literature in the reception of literature from Latin America.

The characteristics of this standalone literature are diluted by the idea of Latin America as a literary unit, a literary unified continent. The attempt to determine cycles, outlines and topography of reception allows the special characteristics of literature from Brazil to be highlighted anew without complete isolation. In the dynamics of mediation within publishing, texts received by the editorial office are not only related to Latin American literature but to other world literatures through channels that communicate their literary value. Literatures from different regions come into contact with each other through the dynamics of mediation at the publishing house. Criteria for the evaluation of translated manuscripts are not only shaped unilaterally in contrast with canonised World Literature, but they also relativise the standards for the reception of new literatures and create friction within such a framework. Adonias Filho, for example, becomes the William Faulkner, and Clarice Lispector the Virginia Wolf of Brazil. Loyola Brandão’s and Murilo Rubião’s novels were considered for the Phantastische Bibliothek along with works by Stanislaw Lem, whilst Raduan Nassar was compared to Thomas Mann and Walt Whitman simultaneously. In addition to being reduced to Brazilian doppelgangers of canonised authors, the parallelisms in publishers’ reviews place the received works in tension with one another, which is inherent to the global book market.

The extensive archival material requires further research and offers diverse perspectives and foundations for further discussion on the reception of Brazilian literature at Suhrkamp and other publishing houses in both West and East Germany. The research on the mediation and reception of Brazilian literature in the Suhrkamp programme at SUA has not only afforded me an overview of the framework of reception of Brazilian literature, but it has also provided me with a topography of the reception. Through the investigation of the Latin America editorial office at Suhrkamp Verlag, as well as based on the aforementioned hypothesis, a literary topos repeatedly emerged in the reception of literature from Brazil: o sertão. As a geographical space (transl. hinterland, rough uninhabited landscape in inland Brazil), sertão can not only be understood as a place identified with a national founding myth of the primordial source of brasilidade, (transl. ‘Brazilianity’) or epic discovery, but can also be developed into a theoretical concept of reception. When sertão is treated as a term and the development of its meaning is traced since the colonial period in Brazilian literature, it becomes clear how often the word creates the projection of an imaginary place for the translation of the world and sets itself as the locus of translation. Taking the present study as a starting point, it would be a research desideratum to deepen the concept of the sertão as a literary category or as a key concept of untranslatability in the reception process of Brazilian literature in the global literary world. It would be interesting to attribute symbolic capital to an episteme of sertanejo, where untranslatability acts as an epistemological fulcrum, as Barbara Cassin has done with saudade in her dictionary of untranslatables Full reference in Zotero Library.

Already in the first recorded literary document on Brazil, the letter of the chronicler Pêro Vaz de Caminha, preserved in the Torre do Tombo National Museum in Lisbon, which describes the official ‘discovery’ of the Terra da Vera Cruz (Brazil) by Pedro Álvares Cabral between 22 April and 1 May of 1500, sertão emerges as an indeterminate place through which the new mainland is seen from the sea Full reference in Zotero Library. Prefixed with a preposition that, in this case, means ‘to cross’, sertão does not directly describe the land but denotes the perspective from the conqueror’s point of view (along the coast), thus conceptually carrying with it the reception and translation of ‘discovery’.⁷‘Pelo sertão nos pareceu, vista do mar, muito grande, porque, a estender olhos, não podíamos ver senão terra com arvoredos, que nos parecia muito longa’ [The sertão seemed to us, seen from the sea, to be quite vast, because, to our eyes, we could only see land with trees, which seemed to us to be very long] Full reference in Zotero Library.

More than four centuries later, Euclides da Cunha literarily shaped this concept as a mythical domain of Brazilian national identity in Os Sertões (1902). The sociological-literary work of da Cunha presents the sertão as the basis for a future civilised nation. In da Cunha’s work, the sertão is conceived as a dialectical site of convergence where popular cultural tradition is meant to meet modernity. Here, too, sertão can be understood as a category of translation between cultures, which the authors of Brazilian modernism consistently pursued. In 1956, Grande Sertão: Veredas, an epic novel by João Guimarães Rosa was published, in which the place sertão transcends national and geographical borders to be unfolded into a philosophical or metaphysical metaphor that encompasses the whole world as well as the inner existence of the novel’s characters. ‘The sertão is as big as the world’ and ‘Sertão: it is inside us’, Rosa wrote, in one of his many realisations of the meaning of sertão. Explanations of sertão pervade the whole novel, whether to describe a place or to use copulative sentences to relativise and compare sertão.⁸As it is not possible to add here all the sentences that were identified in an initial search, I quote here only the copulative sentences of the novel: ‘O sertão está em toda a parte’; ‘Sertão é o penal, criminal’; ‘Sertão é isto, o senhor sabe: tudo incerto, tudo certo’; ‘Sertão é isto: o senhor empurra para trás, mas de repente ele volta a rodear o senhor dos lados’; ‘Sertão é quando menos se espera; digo’; ‘Sertão é o sozinho’; ‘Sertão: é dentro da gente’; ‘Jagunço é o sertão’; ‘O sertão é sem lugar’; ‘O sertão é bom. Tudo aqui é perdido, tudo aqui é achado […]’; ‘O sertão é confusão em grande demasiado sossego’; ‘O Sertão é a sombra minha e o rei dele é Capitão!’; ‘Em sertão são. Isso, que são lugares’; ‘Sertão não é malino nem caridoso’; ‘o sertão é uma espera enorme’; ‘Você é o Sertão?!’ See Full reference in Zotero Library.

From the perspective of translation, one can also recognise in the core of Rosa’s work a literary search for translation not only for the world as sertão, but also for being sertanejo (Sertanejo-dasein) or ‘so-sehr-sein’ according to Vilém Flusser Full reference in Zotero Library. Throughout Rosa’s philosophical and metaphysical attempts towards explanation, there is a conceptualisation of sertão that directly connects to the intersections and crossings of his sertão world as well as his characters, and which could be fathomed in a concept of reception. Indeed, this would have to be a concept that links to the particularities and untranslatability of literatures of the world in a history of World Literature. The concept would also need to question not only the concept of ‘literature’ but the unitary concept of ‘world’ to reconstruct the history of an asymmetrical and noise-filled reception through the untranslatable. Ottmar Ette also offered a topographical insight into the concept of sertão in his analysis of Guimãraes Rosa’s work Sagarana. In doing so, he drew on his epistemic model of the island to show how sertão in Rosa’s work can be understood as an island. This approach also incorporated the epistemic potentiality of sertão as a world-fractal as well as a way to conceptualise it Full reference in Zotero Library.

This path to conceptualisation appears repeatedly in the analysis of text reviews in the SUA estate papers and is reflected both in the programme’s published titles and in the reviews of rejected manuscripts. Key titles such as Corpo Vivo (Adonias Filho 1966), Angst (Graciliano Ramos 1978), Das Jahr 15 (Rachel de Queiroz 1982), Doralda, die weiße Lilie (Guimarães Rosa 1994) and Krieg im Sertão (Euclides da Cunha 1994) not only represent the literature of the sertão, but also define the landmarks of the reception of Brazilian literature in Suhrkamp’s publishing programme. Even then, titles that are removed from the exotic space and language of the sertão are judged by the concept of the sertão, as in the case of Die Stadt Gottes (2004 Blumenbar Verlag) by Paulo Lins, a novel rejected by Suhrkamp with a main plot in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. I hypothesise that when the sertão is introduced as a concept of literary reception, it becomes epistemic. This is why the sertão acts not only as a thematic or topographical category, but as a term for reception that denotes conceptual properties of an untranslatable that can only be bypassed through asymmetry.

Emily Apter’s Against World Literature Full reference in Zotero Library presents a way out of the reflection of translation studies that seems to enrich the hypothesis that has been put forth; that is, that Suhrkamp Verlag’s reception of Brazilian literature between the years 1970 and 1990 delineated the contours of a literary island in which sertão played a key role in its topography. According to Apter, both philologies and cultural studies have missed the opportunity to revisit literary history with the help of planetary cartographies and their universalist systems. The error, she argued, lies in the typology, which is based exclusively on European examples. To consider translation as a model of literature that is always dispossessed of its authorship, which is also in constant translation because it is deprived of its own signature, would allow us to connect with the constitution of global forms of literatures without becoming distracted by the construction of borders or the privatisation of symbolic goods by corporations.

The starting point is untranslatability. The untranslatable, and not the translatable, should be what makes the absolute difference, which means an act of liberation from this form of romantic absolutes, from the fetish for the “other” and the myth of hermeneutic inaccessibility. Taking Apter’s impulse as a starting point, the idea of a philosophical, existential, ethnological, sociological and literary category of the sertão, while it is still a geographical and cultural space or the pinnacle of a particular literature, could also be used as a way of characterising the mediation of Brazilian literature by Suhrkamp Verlag, and even of turning itself into a critical concept in the reception of other literatures on the periphery of the république mondiale des lettres. This could make it possible to escape the universalist principle of “World Literature” according to Eurocentric criteria of polarisation between centre and periphery, north and south, and to see this history not as a history of more or less success in the German readership—more or less appropriation of foreign culture and literature—but as a history of reception through untranslatable asymmetries of literature itself, which further disrupts and provokes production in the field of reception.

Editorial text reviews based on concepts such as ‘readable’, ‘translatable’ and ‘marketable’, however, remain decisive categories in the process of literary circulation. For the editor, the unreadable means something which cannot be translated and therefore cannot eventually become a book in a material sense. It remains a manuscript and, as such, is confined to a state of the writing process that rarely reaches the reader. Yet it is not always the case that editors and translators prevent the manuscript from becoming a book on the grounds of untranslatability or unsalability. If one summarises Suhrkamp’s reception of Latin American literature, especially Brazilian literature, it tends to consist largely of untranslatable titles without great commercial success, even though there is agreement among their mediators about their literary value. There is no doubt that they are literature in the strict sense of the word and this judgement prevails over their condition as Latin American or Brazilian. This observation should not be underestimated because, if carefully observed, it can prove to be a way of destabilising the criteria to define universal from a European intellectual field.

From an institutional and cultural-political point of view, Suhrkamp Verlag’s mediation work in West German post-war intellectual formation can be seen as highly efficient, when it is understood as a humanist project for the reconstruction of Europe based on an economic and symbolic exchange between publishers and international actors. This efficiency is observed further in state institutions of mediation (such as the German Foreign Office, embassies, ministries). However, it is rather symptomatic that the cartography of literary history in the academic world is not always in line with one of the publishing houses. In recent years, literary studies have found themselves still dominated by the national habitus and the unifying philological rubric of “World Literature”, offering very little space for the analysis of reception processes of manuscripts where actors such as editors, translators and publishers are the main figures. Although Suhrkamp Verlag transmitted a cultural and political programme of the partially standardised and nationalised Brazilian modernismo, it was largely instrumental in introducing ‘foreign bodies’ into German literature, which will continue to escape the studies of German comparative literature if they do not actively participate in the conflict of the realpolitik of literary languages.