2022
SILAS Annual lecture 2022 – Mariana Bolfarine
June 16th 2022, 4pm – University College Cork (online event)
UCC-Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS) Annual Lecture, “The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement: Perspectives on Translation, Literature and Displacement”
Our guest lecturer in 2022 was Mariana Bolfarine (Chair, Brazilian Association of Irish Studies)
Roger Casement was British Consul and later an Irish revolutionary directly involved in revealing the violation of human rights committed against the natives of the Belgian Congo (1903) and of the Peruvian Amazon (1911) during the rubber boom in the early 20th century. The aim of this talk is, firstly, to discuss the translation of the Amazon Journal of Roger Casement into Portuguese, along with some of the challenges and solutions provided by the translators and organizers. Secondly, it will examine Casement’s transatlantic displacement and the role played by the Barbadians, who acted as his English-speaking interpreters in the Amazon, essential for him to be able to build the body of evidence that made his report into a powerful weapon against the perpetrators of those crimes. Finally, I will briefly discuss selected works that explore this moment of history in literary form. The theoretical underpinning for the talk is drawn from translation theory, Anthony Appiah’s idea of “rooted cosmopolitanism”, and Peter Burke’s “History as Social Memory”.
Mariana Bolfarine holds a PhD from the University of São Paulo and was research fellow at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (2013-2014). Dr. Bolfarine teaches at the Federal University of Rondonópolis (UFR), is a researcher at the W.B. Yeats Chair of Irish Studies and head of the Brazilian Association of Irish Studies. She has translated into Portuguese: Roger Casement in Brazil: Rubber, the Amazon and the Atlantic World 1884-1916 (2010) and the Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (2016), and is the author of Between “Angels and Demons”: Trauma in Fictional representations of Roger Casement (2018).