Abstract
As the most translated Portuguese language writer in China, Jorge Amado has 18 of his titles translated into Chinese and was the first Brazilian writer to be published in Chinese after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. The Brazilian writer’s membership in the Communist Party of Brazil and active militancy in politics were applauded by the young Chinese government, which first introduced Jorge Amado to Chinese readers in 1951, when he received the Stalin Prize for Peace Among Peoples, whose prevailing criteria were political and ideological. In the dual identity assigned to him, the “peace fighter” was more prominent than the “poet”. The first four translations of Jorge Amado’s works from the founding of the PRC until the end of the Cultural Revolution in China in 1976 will be presented in historiographical form in this paper, with the aim of showing how translation is part of the typical institutionalization of literary translation in China, in which factors such as power and ideology exercised full manipulation over this cultural communication that occurred in the Chinese context.
Keywords
Power; Translation; Jorge Amado; China