O tradutor, rebaixado funcionário da palavra escrita

Abstract

The novel by João Reis A Noiva do Tradutor (2015) narrates in a disorderly flow in the head of an unnamed translator, in a city without explicit reference, somewhere in the interwar period of the 20th century. He presents himself between the precarious and subaltern situation of his writing work and the mocking anger with which he observes the inhabitants and social webs of the city where he lives. It is in this condition that such a character leads us to possible parallels with well-known characters of literary modernity – Bartleby, Wakefield, Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Hunger, by Knut Hamsun, Gregor Samsa – but also to the legacy of several ‘tired functionaries’ of twentieth-century Portuguese literature, such as Pessoa's semi-heteronym in The Book of Disquiet (1982).