Rediscovering a Masterpiece in a New Translation: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis

In the same ceremony in which he was baptized, his parents appeared as godparents at the baptism of a slave girl born to an African woman belonging to a member of the widow's clan. [...]living for years in a prosperous household located on a hill adjacent to downtown Rio, Machado de Assis learned firsthand the hierarchical customs and practices that produced chains of dependent relations involving everyone on the property and prevalent in contemporary Brazilian society at large. In the 1860s he joined a progressive daily newspaper that defended the expansion of citizenship rights, criticized the concentration of power in the hands of the emperor, and often seemed to hold republican ideals. When recounting his first love, at seventeen years of age, Brás says that he was then a handsome and daring lad, "in boots and spurs, whip in hand," riding a nice horse, apparently, "from the old ballads that the Romantics went looking for in medieval castles, only to light upon [that horse] along the streets of our century. [...]his rendering of his experiences revolves around the idea that he controlled peoples and actions around him, as if whatever happened eventuated the way they did because he wished them to be so.