Translation is done by people. However, translators are never just that: translators. In modern global world, new labels for new profiles testify the vast array of overlapping activities that are covered by new agent roles in new professions. We speak not only about translators or interpreters, but also of mediators, localizers, terminologists, technical writers, product engineers, project managers, crowdsourcers, fansubbers, transeditors, copywriters etc. These new and complex, partly overlapping agent roles are the object of a new and interesting research, by definition, interdisciplinary in nature and leading to new definitions of translation studies’ key concepts, to new expert profiles,

to new needs for training. At first sight, these evolutions seem to remain confined to the contemporary world as well as to non-literary translators. Of course this is only an illusion. In the past, as well as nowadays, literary translators are often developing a large variety of complex and overlapping mediating activities. They were what we would like to call “cultural mediators”.

Mediators, as we understand, develop a broad range of partly overlapping transfer activities through different cultural fields (literature, painting, music, film, theatre…), different languages and spatial frontiers. Firstly, cultural mediators undertake a variety of discursive transfer techniques. They are multilingual authors, self-translators, or translators who translate, adapt, plagiarise, summarize, censor, manipulate in various ways a variety of products of allophone linguistic communities: poems, novels, songs, theatre plays, opera libretto’s, serial novels, so they serve as discursive bridges between these linguistic communities, on an international or intra- national level. Secondly, mediators are often active in a variety of more or less institutionalised intercultural and inter-artistic networking. They may have corresponded with colleagues (informal networking) or may have founded or taken an active part in the editing boards of magazines and periodicals, in salons, in literary and artistic associations, in art and music academies, in artists’ workshops, in reading circles, in web communities etc. That is, they often have a variety of institutional mediating roles. Finally, a mediator can be considered a real migrant, a hybrid person, who develops transfer activities in several geo-cultural spaces which considerably sharpens his intercultural and international consciousness. In sum, much more than the prominent figures canonised by literary studies and traditional national history, mediators are often the true architects of common repertoires and frames of reference. They perform strategic transfer roles, create new mediating practices and institutions.

Mediators complex, partially overlapping roles which transgress linguistic, artistic, and spatial boundaries are important cultural practices but rarely acknowledged as such, or even studied broadly because they transcend traditional disciplinary divisions. In other words, research on cultural mediators also it has a disciplinary surplus value. The study of cultural mediators and their transfer activities should preferably be:

In short, “we need stories that describe the meshing and shifting of different spatial references, narratives in which historical agency is emphasized, and interpretations acknowledging the changing patterns of spatialization are processes fraught with tension” ( MIDDELL & NAUMANN 2010: 161).

In order to meet these needs, the following elements of a mediator’s profile and activities deserve our attention ¹ :

The combination of these approaches within interdisciplinary and collective studies allows us to understand how mediators’ transfer activities create new forms of writing and translating and new actor roles, and what was the function and effect of these transfer activities. It leads to a new historiography of cultural practices that tries to answer the following concrete research questions:

Finally, research on cultural mediators aims to make an original contribution to the historiography of cultural practices from an intercultural perspective. From a theoretical methodological viewpoint, it can enhance our understanding of the effects of transfer activities and contribute to the elaboration of new models of cultural historiography.

Obviously, it is impossible to implement this entire framework in one case-study. This paper will therefore illustrate some of the above mentioned aspects by studying August Willemsen, a Dutch translator whose agent role offers a rich representation of what has been presented here as cultural mediator. Translators as the first agents of exchange can decisively influence different cultural fields through their pluriform discursive products and interference. August Willemsen is one of the most important Dutch translators of Brazilian literature and his intellectual influences as well as translating talents respond for the construction of an important space for the Brazilian literature ² in the Netherlands and Flanders. Two different aspects contributed to maximize his broad influence, both in its macro and micro perspective: 1) in the macro scenario, Willemsen acted as a cultural mediator with enormous prestige in a variety of institutionalised intercultural and inter-artistic networks. As we shall see further in this paper, Willemsen’s transferring role as translator, author, editor, academic, and intellectual created and shaped the reception of the Brazilian Literature in the Netherlands and Flanders in the period when he was most active; 2) in the micro approach, Willemsen’s translations are considered high quality texts due to his ability to temper with the Dutch language according to the creative protocols he perceives in the way Brazilian authors deal with the Portuguese language. The quality of his translation work is due to his singularity and powerful writing; his creative translations or transcreations (see further) blur the boundaries between writing and translating, author and translator, original and translation. Willemsen’s work not only changed the cultural community into which he was translating but modified also the culture of the originals he worked with. The specific case of Willemsen’s translation of Guimarães Rosa, an ongoing translation event, illustrates this alleged modification of the original texts. The Hanser Publishers, prestigious publishing house in Germany, requested Berthold Zilly ³ to produce a new translation of Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão Veredas, already translated by Curt Meyer-Clason in 1964. In May 2013, Berthold Zilly delivered a long lecture at Universidade de São Paulo (USP) ⁴ in São Paulo city where he talked about the experience of producing a new translation for such a difficult work. At a certain point, Zilly explains that while working on the translation of the title of the book, he used some translations to the languages he can read: two in Spanish, one in Italian, two in French, one in English and one in Dutch. And he says:

As one listens to his statement one cannot but admit that if Zilly keeps Willemsen’s translation as a source of reference for analysis and interpretation while producing his own reading and translation of the “same” original text by Guimarães Rosa, he will be influenced by the Dutch translator’s work. Willemsen’s translation, ultimately his own interpretation of the book, will certainly affect Zilly’s interpretation and signification of Rosa’s original. After reading Willemsen’s translation of Grande Sertão Veredas, Zilly will never read it the same way anymore. The meanings he might find in the original in Portuguese will no doubt be forever contaminated by Willemsen’s translation, creation or, as he wanted to say himself, transcreation of the Brazilian book.

Willemsen was born in Amsterdam, in June 16th, 1936. When he was still a young boy he spent a few months in German with his parents and sister and reports his first language experience to Ischa Meijer in an interview:

Willemsen’s involvement with language would have a strong influence in

his career. During his secondary education he started studying French, the first foreign language he could read. Later on he learned Spanish, “from a small book in only a year-time”, after returning from an accidental trip to Spain in 1956. When he finally decided to major in Classical Languages and Literature, Portuguese became his main language of studies. “My choice for Portuguese had to do with my interest in literature and my talent for languages” (1998: 313). When he was 25 years old he started studying Portuguese at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. During this time he earned a one-year scholarship to study language and literature in São Paulo, Brazil. In 1970 he published his first translation Meesters der Portugese vertelkunst, In 1971 he received his PhD diploma, starting to work at the Portuguese Department of the University of Amsterdam, where he taught until 1988. He finally abandoned teaching in 1985 when he decided to dedicate himself fully to translation and writing.

As Willemsen reports, studying Portuguese was perceived as quite uncommon at the time, as a subject without much value or prestige and he would find himself amazed by questions about the reason for choosing Portuguese as his major:

Willemsen’s intercultural habitus was at odds with his environment in the sense that his interest for Portuguese Language and Portuguese/Brazilian literature was perceived as evident by himself but as exceptional and strange by others. Willemsen recalls his first contact with the Brazilian literature, back in the fifties, had a fulminating effect on him: “I read the Dutch translation of Os Sertões [ De Binnenlanden] ⁷ , by Euclides da Cunha, and for months at the end I annoyed my friends with the story of Canudos” (WILLEMSEN 1986: 56). This first encounter and the awaken desire to learn the language and visit the many places described in the book De Binnenlanden transformed Willemsen in the greatest Dutch translator of Brazilian literature. In 1967, he received a scholarship from the Dutch government to study Portuguese and Literature in Brazil. Willemsen stayed in São Paulo for a year where he, indeed, studied Portuguese, fulfilling his early dream of visiting the province where the story of Os Sertões took place, and of course, had the chance to learn about the most important Brazilian authors. Willemsen returned to Brazil on three other occasions, in 1973, 1979 and 1984, and the experiences he had during these four different periods were reported in letters he would send to friends and family. Later these letters became the collection for the book Braziliaanse Brieven [Brazilian letters]. The blurb of the second edition presents Willemsen as one of the most colorful writers of Dutch literature. The book became a real bestseller.

Willemsen was a productive intellectual, personally involved in what we consider a variety of discursive transfer techniques. The books he wrote as an author comprehend a variety of subjects ⁸ , going from academic papers, in which he reflects on his translations, on language and literature to more autobiographical texts such as the book he published in 1991, De Val, which accounts for a difficult period of his life when he ends up in a hospital to care for a broken hip. In December 1990, Willemsen was going home from a liquor shop carrying four bottles of vodka and 1,5 liter of Fanta when he fell down on the street pavement:

In 1998 he published Vrienden, vreemden, vrouwen ( 1998), based on his life experiences between 1956 to 1964, and received by critics as ‘Een uniek document humain, en een schitterend tijdsbeeld van de late jaren vijftig en begin jaren zestig’. He also published a series of travelling books collecting the letters he would write home, to friends and family. One of these books was Braziliaanse brieven ( 1985) (see also below), a compilation of letters narrating his four trips to Brazil, filled with jokes and experiences with the people, the land, the culture and the conservative Dutch expatriates. He was awarded the Lucy B. & C.W. van der Hoogt prize for this book. Willemsen also published some autobiographic books: the above mentioned De val ( 1991a), and Sprekend een brief ( 1998) en Van Tibooburra naar Packsaddle ( 2001) written during the time he was in Australia, for personal love reasons. In 1994, he wrote De goddelijke kanarie, about Brazilian football, one of his passions (see COSTA 2007).

Interestingly, he didn’t want to make a difference between writing and translating but considered them as overlapping, similar activities. In an interview with the Dutch critic Rudie Kagie ⁹ for the newspaper Vrij Nederland about Braziliaanse Brieven Willemsen declared:

In thirty seven years of hard work, he forged and shaped the publication of Lusophone literature in the Netherlands and Flanders ¹⁰ . Willemsen translated 52 volumes of novels, poems and short stories. According to Schreij (2009), from 1970 to 1986 Willemsen published nineteen translations, followed by a short interruption of six years. From 1992 to 2007 thirty three other titles were issued. Twenty eight titles, or more than 50%, were translations of Brazilian novels and poetry. By translating his favorite authors, Willemsen established a special relationship with his publishers, convincing them that those authors were saleable. Willemsen himself in his publications and lectures accounts for the influence he had on the two most important Dutch publishing houses: Meulenhof and Arbeiderspers. Costa confirms, “... at a certain point, being the translator of a work was a guarantee of the commercial success of a book” (2007: 181). Willemsen translated some of the most representative Brazilian authors: Guimarães Rosa (1977, 1983, 1993), Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1980, 1983, 1992, 1998), Manoel Bandeira (1982), Machado de Assis (1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1992), Graciliano Ramos (1995, 1996, 2002, 2007) just to mention a few.

Willemsen not only translated the most important Brazilian and Portuguese writers but also, the most important translators of Portuguese in the eighties and nineties, he did so according to personal preferences in selecting authors and works. This productive intellectual life transforms Willemsen in one of the most important agents in the introduction of Lusophone literature, and particularly Brazilian literature, in the Netherlands and Flanders. This Dutch translator played indeed a key role in the translation scenario of Brazilian literature when compared to all the other literary production in Portuguese (which, of course, includes literary texts from Portugal but also from other Lusophone countries such as Mozambique, Angola, Timor-Leste). Taco Schreij ( 2009) produced an extensive and comprehensive study of the translation of Portuguese literature to the Dutch language. Based on statistical evidence he concludes: “What is remarkable is that during the eighties and nineties far more Brazilian Literature was translated when compared to Portuguese Literature” (2009: 42). As Schreij concludes, since the introduction of Lusophone literature in the Netherlands and Flanders in the beginning of 20th century ¹¹ there has been a sort of balance between the publications of Brazilian and Portuguese literatures. In the seventies and eighties, however, we see the publication of nine titles from Portugal vs. twenty from Brazil, illustrating a massive preference for Brazilian literary production. The explanation for this difference especially in this period is, according to Schreij, to be accounted for “personal preferences of some stakeholders in the field” (2009: 43). Schreij explains that “some people were directly implied in the translation and publication” (2009: 42). Certainly, “some people” means August Willemsen who officially started translating from Portuguese in 1970. Indeed, further in his text Schreij dedicates one complete section to analyzing Willemsen’s translation work and his influence in shaping the translation scenario of Lusophone literature in the Netherlands and Flanders. In his own words:

This quotation confirms Willemsen’s role as a real mediator, combining various agent roles in various languages. Pos ( 1996), who produced an extensive research on the history of the translation of Lusophone Literature in the Netherlands ¹³ , was the first to compare the publications of Portuguese and Brazilian literatures. His explanation for the unbalance in the translating scenario of Lusophone Literature is Willemsen’s personal powerful influence in the two major Dutch publishing houses, De Arbeiderspers and Meulenhoff. While analyzing the publishing scenario, Pos is unable to conceal his disappointment for the influence Willemsen had over the publication of far more Brazilian Literature than literary work produced in Portugal. Pos’s explanation for this power is the lack of other literary critics and he considers Willemsen a solitary voice who had no opponents:

In this extract, Arie Pos regrets the fact that Willemsen did not like the Portuguese books and the Portuguese writers’ style. His evaluation furthermore illustrates how translation and non-translation are two sides of a coin that deserve to be studied conjointly as both inform us about mediators’ activities. Being so critical toward Portuguese literary production of that time, it seems clear that Willemsen would favor his personal preference for Brazilian writers who he considered “typically calvinist” and “whose language can be simple” (1985: 68). In the book Het Hoge Woord. Beschouwingen en Boutades ( 1994), Willemsen explains his preference for what he considered a “Calvinist style”:

In one of his letters published in Braziliaanse Brieven, it is possible to find further information on the reasons why Willemsen enjoyed so many Brazilian writers over the Portuguese ones. While criticizing the Modern Portuguese Literature, Willemsen reports his fascination to the literary works he had discovered in Brazil: “I have just found out that, in this language, you can also write with simplicity” (1985: 68). He goes on listing poets who then fascinated him: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Vinícius de Moraes, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and of course, the novelist Machado de Assis, “a man from last century, but still so close”. Willemsen explains this fascination: “it was as if I was listening instead of reading”, “as something I would write – as if I were a writer” (1985: 68). Again these testimonies illustrate how much Willemsen considered reading, writing, translating as related or sometimes even overlapping activities.

Willemsen never denied this preference and admitted himself that his choices were decisive in shaping the translations of Brazilian Literature. He also acknowledged the importance of his personal networking in reaching his goal. So e.g. in the collective volume Ik wantrouw iedereen boven de 1.67 to celebrate the 75th birthday of Theo Sontrop, the former director of Meulenhof and Arbeiderspers, Willemsen writes an essay in which he confesses his great influence on Theo Sontrop:

Brazilian literature thus mainly owes its prestige in the Netherlands and Flanders to Willemsen’s work. On the one hand, for choosing representative novelists, poets, and short stories’ authors and for using his networking for their publication; on the other, for the superb translation work he used to do ( COSTA 2007: 287). In 1983, his refined style rendered him the Martinus Nijhoff Prize, the most prestigious Dutch translation prize.

Any translator, as he or she receives the archive to translate, takes on the double demands of fidelity that comes naturally with the translating task: one toward the original text and its author and one toward the translation text and its target reader. The translator promises to offer the same meanings he gets from the original author. He engages in the double bind of promises to the author of the original and to the reader of the translation. Even if he is honestly engaged in this commitment, the translator suffers as he acknowledges the constraints of his own language. He realizes the impossibility of repeating faithfully.

The literary text is commonly considered to be charged with a unique load of senses, and precisely because of that, the translator feels deeply involved in let’s say “literary debts”. The literary work is exemplary of the wedlock between signifier and signified – language materiality. Nevertheless, the language itself is literally the first victim of the translation. The signifier is precisely what drops through the hands of the translator, and no best option is at hand than forging a creative translation – namely, a transcreation, to resume Haroldo de Campos’s anthropophagic proposal. This audacity can trigger signification mechanisms in the target language similar to the ones the translator tracks back in the source language.

Analyzing Willemsen’s creative translation protocols, it is indispensable to reconsider the binary reductive nature which shapes the relationship between original and translation, authors and translators. Willemsen is a good example of Haroldo de Campos’s creative translating strategy – which he names transcriação [transcreation] – i.e. the anthropophagic translation aesthetics. For Campos the signified is nothing but a semantic parameter working as a landmark for the creative enterprise. According to Campos, we stand on the reverse of literal translation. As he argues, “this is the test of tests for poetry translation. Translations which do not seem translations. Poetry which is poetry” (1970: 13). Haroldo de Campos has always considered the translation of creative texts as “re-creation”, as the reproduction of the creative processes that took place in the original language. In his point of view, “the translation of creative texts will always be recreation, or parallel creation, autonomous, although reciprocal, translating not only the signification but also attempting to transfer the materiality of the literary event” (1970: 13).

In a considerable number of his translations, Willemsen wrote afterwords in which he accounts for his translation choices, the problems and solutions. Strikingly, Het woord als gedicht – het boek als de wereld [The word as a poem – the book as the world] is the title of his afterword to Guimarães Rosa’s “ Diepe Wildernis: de wegen”, revealing the dimension Rosa’s language universe represented to the translator. Guimarães Rosa is considered the greatest Brazilian novelist, whose innovative prose style derived from the oral tradition of the sertão (hinterland of Brazil). In the very first paragraph of this text Willemsen asks:”What does sertão mean?“, and assures:”don’t think that the sertão is less strange to an inhabitant of Rio de Janeiro than it is to the Dutch reader” (1993-2000: 529). In short, the above mentioned afterwords in general, and the one for Guimarães Rosa more in particular, is a clue to Willemsen’s inquietude and uneasiness to translate and to translate Rosa’s language. They testify about the moments when the translation halted, when something prevented Willemsen from fulfilling his promise of fidelity. In these moments of impasse, Willemsen was compelled to forge solutions, as ingenious as his linguistic skills enabled him to do. His inventive solutions are, in fact, a sort of countersignature on the archives he has chosen and which had imposed him a task.

Willemsen was brave enough to translate Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956), a novel that is considered as the start of the “novo romance brasileiro” ( WILLEMSEN 1977: 173) and which was largely considered untranslatable ¹⁷ . Guimarães Rosa is frequently compared to James Joyce while Grande Sertão - Veredas is reputable as the Brazilian equivalent of Ulysses. Rosa is the kind of writer who operates “consciously in this pragmatic post-babelic linguistic confusion” ( VEJMELKA 2002) just as James Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov or Franz Kafka, writers whose relation to language exceeds the national boundaries, allocating itself in frontier territories, in an entre-lugar. Guimarães Rosa dared to weave his text with such unrestrained coined word combinations and syntax as to constitute almost a new language, starting what many consider to be a semantic revolution ¹⁸ . Considering the definition given by Grutman according to which “multilingualism evokes the co-presence of two or more languages in a given society, text or individual” ( GRUTMAN 2009: 182), Guimarães Rosa’s work is a good example of multilingual writing. As summurized by Willemsen (1987: 192-3), Rosa uses “regionalisms from Portugal and Brazil, Latinisms, medievalism, Indianism”; and more than that, as Willemsen describes and appreciates:

Creative texts as Rosa’s, and many others among those translated by Willemsen, are abundant in semantic information, and more yet, in “aesthetic information” (see BENSE 1972). The fragility of this information reaches the ultimate level in the process of translation because it is inseparable of its own performance. In any other language, the text might offer the same semantic information but will certainly present distinct aesthetic information.

Since a detailed study of Willemsen’s translation strategies is not possible here, let us give some concrete examples that are representative for his translation work. While translating Rosa’s A Terceira Margem do Rio – De derde oever van de rivier, 1977, Willemsen encountered the sentence on the left which he translated as followed:

In a lecture at LAC, Latijns Amerika Centrum, in Amsterdam, in 2006, Willemsen explains his creative solution for the above mentioned sentence:

Willemsen’s explanation elucidates his translation choices, neatly seeking to support that his linguistic construction was not random, and that there is a logical justification to unburden his guilt. Willemsen, as he confesses, tries to alleviate his consciousness for not being as faithful as he thinks he should. He knows he says something else, and that the text he offers is not a literal translation. The argument he uses to advocate that “ een zeiken van zegeningen” is a good translation for “ bátegas de bênçãos”, responds to the formal aspects of the source text: “The literal translation did not sound nice and did not preserve the original alliteration” and supports his solution: “why not? It sounds so well”, “After all, [in the dictionary] I found two regional equivalents”. From the perspective of his language choices, there is no strong support to validate his choice, except that, indeed, it sounds nicer. Form is prevalent to content. In spite of being apparently banished from the contemporary debate on translation, the accusation of being unfaithful and deliberately modifying the sense of the original is still the greatest phantom that haunts a translator like Willemsen. Even if we are generous to Willemsen, accepting his arguments, the truth is that “ een zeiken van zegeningen” says something other than “ bátegas de bênçãos”, and Willemsen wouldn’t deny it. On the other hand, considering translating and writing as overlapping activities, Willemsen feels he should take the freedom to transcreate in order to do justice to the author and the original.

In April 2007, Sander de Vaan interviewed Willemsen and reminded him of a remark he had made years before. Willemsen is surprised by ever stating that “(the good) poetry is that which could not have been said with different words” and he explains: “at that level [linguistic], poetry works as a joke: if you explain it, it loses the fun”. Considering such a comment on the nature of poetry it is interesting to remember that what a translation does is precisely use different words belonging to another language. In this sense, as Willemsen translates from Portuguese to Dutch, he does nothing else but use “other words”. As I mentioned previously, the linguistic body is, par excellence, what drops in the translation event. In such translation endeavors, the translator is dealing not only with the signification but also with the signifier, the physicality of the sound and the image, in a nut shell, the aesthetic sign. What is then to be faithful if we take into account another moment when Willemsen has to justify the translation of the title of the poem “ Profundamente” by Manuel Bandeira. This title in Dutch became “ In diepe slaap”. In that same interview with Sander de Vaan Willemsen explains:

Analysing Willemsen’s choices from the linguistic perspective in its semantic stratum, which could support his solutions, one must accept Willemsen’s creative approach to his translation “problems”. Besides, there are semantic developments in the word Profundamente that Willemsen did not take into consideration, paying it the same credits he pays to the 4th syllable: in the word profundamente we have the suffix “ mente”, which transforms the adjective Profundo in an adverb. But mente is also the noun for “mind” and the present simple of the verb mentir – to lie. This semantic chain can be unfolded as one reads the poem Profundamente in its original language. It is precisely this semantic richness that is irremediably lost.

These are two different situations, two different “problems” that Willemsen treats with two different approaches. In translating Guimarães Rosa, he permits himself to abandon the literal strategy for the sake of a solution that “sounds better” and which in fact, strictly speaking, says something else. On the other hand, when considering the title of Bandeira’s poem, one only syllable was considered essential and not neglectful.

One last example of Willemsen’s translation strategies illustrates the creative process he is involved with while translating. While translating Carlos Drummond de Andrade “A música da terra” - “De muziek der aarde”, Willemsen is aware of what he calls, ‘de wet van de compensatie’ (the law of compensation). As he perceives, when for example,

While translating this poem, Willemsen had a brilliant opportunity which could be considered one of those moments when the translation “surpasses the original”. In the original by Drummond de Andrade one reads: “Ó Beethoven, tu nos mostraste o alvorecer” which in English would read as “Oh Beethoven, you have shown us the dawn”. Willemsen’s solution to this verse is “Jij, Beethoven, hebt ons de dageraad getoond”. The reader of the translation will certainly grasp Drummond’s meaning “Oh Beethoven, you have shown us the dawn” but further than that, will also have a precious further meaning not present in the original, that is, “Oh Beethoven, you have put the dawn in tone for us”. This second meaning which connects Beethoven and music by means of the same word “getoond” for “showed” is totally to be accounted to Willemsen’s translation. In Dutch the verb tonen/to show and getoond/showed is similar to the words tom (Portuguese) tone (English) toon (Dutch). It is even more creative when we learn that the wordplay is also new for the Dutch readers as Willemsen uses it as a verb which does not exist in Dutch. The meaning “to put in tone” that one can read in “getoond” is not originally a word. This is Willemsen’s creation considering the perspective of the poem but also considering his mother tongue.

Willemsen’s translations, together with his afterwords and his many articles, were the transfer techniques that made Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Guimarães Rosa and other Brazilian authors known to the Dutch reader. These transfer activities are part of continuous processes and imply a plurality of directions and a multiplicity of effects. As already shown, Willemsen’s translations inspired other translators of Brazilian literature into other languages, his translations acting as an intermediate version or even an original for further translations. Moreover, Willemsen’s translations were also directly responsible for some cultural products that took different shapes after the publication of his translations in the Netherlands. Translating these texts was an open door to many other cultural products, some of which are listed below:

The documentary, in original Portuguese language with Dutch subtitles, portrays Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s life and poems. While talking about the film, she accounts:

August Willemsen developed a broad range of partly overlapping transfer activities through different cultural fields (literature, media, academia), different languages and spatial frontiers (the Netherlands and Flanders, Brazil, Portugal, Australia the English-speaking academic community. The richness of his production is not completely presented here. As a typical cultural mediator, he undertook a variety of discursive transfer techniques: fictional writing,

translation, transcreation, criticism, essays, studies…. In this way he served as the key discursive bridge between Brazil and the Dutch-speaking world, between Brazilian literature and Dutch literature, between Europe and Latin- America, between Brazilian literature and the international academic world. He was also active in a variety of more or less institutionalised intercultural publishing and personal networks. That is, his institutional mediating role was very prestigious. Finally, he also was a real migrant, developing his transfer activities both in the Netherlands and in Brazil, which considerably sharpened his intercultural and international consciousness. As such he was the architect of common repertoires and new frames of reference on Brazilian literature in the Netherlands and Flanders, and beyond. He furthermore performed strategic transfer roles, created new mediating practices, witness the multiple derived products that were initiated by his translations and which explicitly acknowledged his mediating role and activities. As a consequence, Willemsen’s translation and other transfer activities take sense in relation to each other and in relation to the transfer activities they created.

The present case study is obviously just a beginning to understand the forms, aims and effects of Willemsen’s transfer activities and their multiform afterlives. More interdisciplinary and collective research is needed to do justice to this intriguing figure and to contribute to a new type of cultural history. It should also allow us to further question the binary opposition between writing and translating, and to explore the relations between translation and other transfer practices.