[LOCUTOR]

Track thirty-six, unit sixteen, a drop of ink may make a million think

[MARILYN WILKES]

I'm Marilyn Wilkes, your host and our guest is David Jackson, a professor of Portuguese at Yale University. His research interests include Portuguese and Brazilian literature's Camões, Machado de Assis, Fernando Pessoa – a modernist, vanguardist, and into art literature, Portuguese culture in Asia and ethnomusicology. Today we'll talk with the professor Jackson about his new book entitled "Machado de Assis a literary life". Welcome professor Jackson,

[DAVID JACKSON]

Thank you very much.

[MARILYN WILKES]

Well, let's start by having you tell us who this man was, who is Machado?

[DAVID JACKSON]

Machado de Assis is Brazil's greatest writer and all of Latin America's greatest writer in the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. He had a very long literary life, a formative period of some twenty-five years, where he wrote, uh journalism, translated plays, he was very active in Rio de Janeiro, and in the last thirty years, where he produced the novels and the short stories for which he's most known. He was a man of letters and ever since he wrote in practically every genre: novel, short story, play, journalism. He did translations of Victor Hugo, of Shakespeare and he became the preeminent man of letters of his time in Brazil. And his novels that are considered now some of the greatest novels of the end of the nineteenth century.

[MARILYN WILKES]

Okay… tell us about your book and what your goal was in writing it.

[DAVID JACKSON]

So, the goal of my book was to promote Machado and present Machado as a great writer of his time.