Em busca da Província Perdida:

Marcel Proust and the Nordeste Magazine

Abstract

In 1948, the Livraria do Globo released No caminho de Swann and began publishing what would become the first version in Brazil of Marcel Proust's voluminous novel, then translated as Em busca do tempo perdido. The publication of the seven volumes took a few years, but the beginning of this endeavor was very important for one of the French novelist's greatest repercussions in Brazilian culture. In fact, it seemed that Proust had become an obligatory passage for Brazilian intellectuals, which consequently generated an extremely wide and varied critical fortune at this context of the second half of the 40s and early 1950s. Spatially, this meant that the lost time analyst was appropriated through issues that can be called regional for now, which applies not only to supposed peripheral urban centers, but also to the federal capital itself. This article therefore focuses on an example of this reception, the 1949 edition of Nordeste Magazine entitled Em busca da Província Perdida. Its objective is to understand how this reading of Proust's work was possible, and how it was positioned within the Brazilian cultural scene at the time, mainly to infer what such appropriation meant for the group of this magazine from Recife. The hypothesis is that the emphasis on the provincial dimension of Proust's work did not only imply an attachment to local things, as seems more obvious, but functioned mainly as a possibility of articulating between regional and the universal.