Marella Feltrin-Morris (Modern Languages and Literatures) has published an article in Forum Italicum. The title is "Pereira traduttore e l'etica della visibilità" ("Pereira as Translator and the Ethics of Visibility").
Most of the criticism generated by Antonio Tabucchi’s 1994 novel, Pereira Maintains, has focused on the protagonist’s development from an initial position of non-commitment to one of courageous involvement in the social and political scene. Indeed, Pereira, a journalist and intellectual in the Portugal of the 1930s, chooses to abandon the cowardly safety of a complacent culture, and at last denounces the crimes of Salazar’s regime. The itinerary followed by Pereira also reflects the greater engagement that the author wishes to see in those who create and circulate culture.
What criticism so far seems to have addressed only tangentially, however, is a fundamental detail in the novel, one which is key to a deeper understanding of Pereira’s change: his activity as a translator. Pereira’s potential as an outspoken agent of change emerges already in his selection of the authors and pieces to translate for the periodical he works for, and in his evolving attitude toward the craft of translation. Drawing from existentialist notions of freedom and responsibility, theoretical texts on translation ethics, and a close reading of Pereira Maintains along with Tabucchi’s own statements on translation and the task of the intellectual, this article aims to show not only how Pereira’s choices as a translator testify to his growing maturity as a responsible intellectual and ultimately as a hero, but also how translation itself constitutes the very backbone of this novel as a whole. The full article is available in Italian: https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/XMQ2GU4TMVRDCTFVKWWI/full
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/2019120611202771