Source — Breselor, "According to G.H."
- Title: According to G.H.
- Author: Sara Breselor
- Publication: Idiom Magazine
- Date: 2012-08-31
- URL: https://idiommag.com/2012/08/according-to-g-h/index.html
- Type: secondary / literary essay and book review, functioning also as a translator's-commentary comparison; broadly credulous of the untranslatability claim ("there is no English-language equivalent")
- Accessed: 2026-08-28
Extract
A review of Clarice Lispector's 1964 novel The Passion According to G.H., occasioned by Idra Novey's new 2012 New Directions translation, which the piece compares against Ronald W. Sousa's earlier 1988 translation. The comparison is the project's first concrete evidence for the "how do published translators actually handle these words" thread: saudade appears three times in the novel, and the two translators rendered it three different ways each, neither ever keeping the Portuguese word itself:
- Sousa: "I shall have to bid a nostalgic good-bye to beauty" / Novey: "I'll have to bid farewell with longing to beauty."
- Sousa: "A suffering with a great sense of loss" / Novey: "A suffering of great longing."
- Sousa: "I long to go back to hell" / Novey: "I miss Hell."
None of the six renderings uses "saudade" itself or a single fixed English equivalent — each instance is paraphrased differently even within the same translator's own text (Novey alone uses "longing," "longing" again, then "miss" for the three instances), which the project reads as evidence against any claim that the word forces a translator into a single inadequate compromise; instead, translators reach for whichever ordinary English word (nostalgia, loss, longing, missing) fits the sentence at hand. The piece itself still asserts "there is no English-language equivalent" and describes the feeling as "indulgent, cinematic, a satisfying wallow" — the secondary source's own framing remains credulous of untranslatability even while the primary evidence it quotes shows working translators solving the problem repeatedly with ordinary words.
Gaps
- This project has not read Sousa's 1988 translation or Novey's 2012 translation directly — the three comparisons rest on Breselor's quotations of both, not on the project's own check of the books. Bibliographic detail (publishers, page numbers) is not given in the source and has not been independently confirmed.
- Breselor does not discuss any translator's-note or paratextual commentary by Sousa or Novey explaining their individual choices — it is not known from this source whether either translator explained the saudade renderings themselves.