Beyond “Wasps”

Alphonse Karr’s feuilleton novel, at Diário do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting the translation of Uma história inverossímil, a feuilleton novel by the French writer and journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808-1890), published at Diário do Rio de Janeiro, in 1846. For that, I start with a double contextualization: first, my approach is on Karr’s reception by the nineteenth-century Brazilian audience, considering its circulation and presence via national press; then, my focus is on the French literary scene, in light of its dialogue with other writers and the main aesthetical trends from that time. After this overview, I collate the work originally published at the French magazine Le Siècle, in 1844, the edited copy in book format and the translation made for the Brazilian newspaper. This review allows us to observe how the original text was transposed for both the Brazilian press and the book. It also makes the mechanisms of irony construction explicit, as they pervade the entire work, as well as the use of metalinguistic function as a form of criticism of Romanticism.