Volume 5, Number 6 · October 28, 1965
Big Winner
By Bernard Bergonzi
Esau and Jacob
by Machado de Assis
California, 287 pp., $5.00
The Garden Where the Brass Band Played
by Simon Vestdijk
London House & Maxwell, 312 pp., $4.75
Not all great literature is written in the major European languages; but when it isn't, we stand a very good chance of never hearing about it. Only chance and the dedication of unusually equipped translators can make available to the English-speaking reader languages, even such venerable ones as Portuguese and Dutch, in which these two novels were written. Joaquim Machado de Assis died in 1908 and has long been regarded as Brazil's greatest novelist, but it was only in the 1950s that his books began to be translated into English. Simon Vestdijk, who was born in 1898 and is a prominent Dutch man of letters, has fared rather better. The Garden Where the Brass Band Played appeared in Holland in 1950, and this translation is part of the Bibliotheca Neerlandica series, which aims to present the classics of Dutch and Flemish literature to the English-speaking world. Both his novel and Esau and Jacob are well worth having, though Machado seems to me the finer and more interesting writer.
Review, 1845 words
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