Legendary Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa will be reintroduced to the Anglophone world thanks to the sale of a new English version of his epic 1956 novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands). Alison Entrekin’s groundbreaking translation of this literary masterpiece will be published under the title Vastlands: The Crossing by Simon & Schuster in the United States and Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom, with both houses acquiring the right via auction at a combined six-figure total. Seven years in the making, Entrekin’s translation is the first to capture the unique wordplay and invented language long held to be “untranslatable” in what many believe to be one of the greatest works of Latin American literature, a sweeping saga of honor and revenge hailed as the “Brazilian Ulysses” told in the tradition of chivalric tales and set in that country’s high inland plateaus at the turn of the twentieth century.
