I found yesterday "Better than Food" channel on YouTube where Clifford Lee Sargent talks about books, an audio review.
I'm feeling revenged. I can read the original and you English native speakers, and readers, have to read the translation or translations for some books need at least two translations because there are particularities that is not possible to achieve in one translation. Another translator do another version and if we are a huge admirer of the book we end up reading both. James Joyce's Ulysses have two Brazilian/Portuguese translations.
Machado de Assis is among the greatest Brazilian writers. But he has many competitors. The best produced in Latin American?
I love Susan Sontag but I have to disagree since the continent have produced numerous great writers. Actually I don't like "the best" concept.
"The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" is one of my favorites of the diverse work of Machado de Assis. He wrote short novels, poems, screenplays, chronicles, was a translator and had his work divided in two phases: a romantic and a realistic.
The experiment with typographic notation is something that surprised me and I remember the first time I saw it. On chapter 55 there is "The old dialogue between Adam and Eve" (image is below) where the conversation is given by lines and dots punctuated with question marks and exclamations.
I hope that after listening to Clifford "audio review" you feel like reading the book.
