Teresa SERUYA (CECC – Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon / University of Lisbon, Portugal)

Extra-European Literatures in anthology during the New State

The favoured way of organising and disseminating international literature in Portugal during the New State, was mainly through the kind of book based on the principle of collectionism: anthologies, collections, libraries. Collectionism involves a selection followed by an interaction among the chosen titles/authors/books taking place at reader level. The cultural change brought about by the anthologies/collections/libraries reveals at least two facets: the novelty arising from a new author/title/subject becoming available and the guidelines indicating the taste for and/or the canonisation of a particular author /title/ subject.
In this paper, I shall be concentrating on the anthologies containing short prose narratives (mainly short stories), although I shall first attempt to make a distinction between the anthologies and the collection on one hand, and the libraries and collections on the other. The main aim of the study will be to look at the literary anthologies situated outside the European space as they were less visible and therefore were the object of less study (with the exception of Brazil). I shall be examining anthologies composed of African, Chinese, Indian and Japanese short stories that were published in Portugal during the New State. Although to different degrees, this sort of literature represented the Other, the Strange and even the Exotic. Indeed, because translation is a powerful means of shaping relations between cultures, there is a lot to say about our relationship with these states of otherness. Furthermore, we cannot lose sight of the political dimension, for example in the African and Indian case, when taking into account the backdrop of our colonial history. How did our literary system deal with such far-off literatures? What authors were chosen from them? Were the readers already acquainted with them or were they a complete novelty? What image of the respective cultures was reflected in these texts/authors that had been chosen together with the paratexts which almost all the anthologies included? Who were responsible for the selection processes and how were the translators chosen? These are some of the questions this paper will try and answer.