“She was like a family member”: a translation of the short story Baleia (1937), by Graciliano Ramos, from Brazilian Portuguese into English

Abstract

Graciliano Ramos was a writer, journalist, politician and translator from Alagoas who lived between 1892 and 1953 - author of novels such as S. Bernardo (1934) and Angústia (1936) and his most recognized work Vidas Secas (1938). The novel Vidas Secas comes from the short story written by the author in 1937, entitled Baleia, which he wrote as a way of trying to imagine what goes on in the head of a dog as it dies. Graciliano Ramos' work is marked by an objective, almost silent style, in which the author expresses the dissatisfaction of the characters who are marginalized and hardened by reality. In contrast, Baleia, the dog who is aware of and participates in the narrative, observes the world from her perspective as an animal, finding human behaviour strange and revealing complex feelings in her composition presented by the omniscient narrator. The moment of the dog's death is presented in this translation from Brazilian Portuguese into English considering the story as a whole, and not as a part of the book.