Edgar Allan Poe’s The Angel of the Odd, an Extravaganza

Abstract

First published in 1844, The Angel of The Odd, an Extravaganza, is a burlesque short-story that reveals the comic side of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the American master of horror and mystery stories, author of one of the most well-known poems in the world, The Raven, and also considered one of the creators of the detective fiction genre. Upon reading, in a newspaper, a piece of news that he considers unusual, and expressing doubts about its veracity, the narrator faces an unexpected encounter with a very odd figure who calls himself the Angel of the Odd. After this meeting, the narrator gets involved in several situations that seem casual works of chance, but that lead us to suspect that they are influenced by the mysterious angel – who has no resemblance whatsoever with conventional angels –, all of which aimed at proving that “odd accidents”, whose existence the narrator doubted, do happen and are not just inventions of journalists. This new translation into Portuguese, preceded by a brief presentation, seeks to recreate the stylistic elements that mark this short-story – in particular the way of speaking of the Angel with his strong German accent –, as well as to rescue, in footnotes, references perhaps unknown to contemporary Brazilian readers. As this story was originally written almost 180 years ago, there was an effort to maintain a certain “patina of antiquity”, as Paulo Rónai would say, with the use of vocabulary and syntactic resources capable of evoking for nowadays readers the landscape of the tale’s depicted epoch.