Jaco Guinsburg, editor and translator: reflections on double agency

Resumo

Recent sociologicalresearch in Translation Studies has addressed the cultural, political, and literary role of agents involved with the practice of translation,which include commissioners, publishers, editors, proofreaders, and the translators themselves (Milton  and Sandia, 2009; Kinnunen and Koskinen, 2010). On occasion,certain agents accumulate more than one role in a translation project, a phenomenon which may reveal individual conflicts regarding the specific demands and constraints of each role,as well as enhanced power struggles with other agents.This article introduces such a "double agent'': Jac6 Guinsburg,a Bessarabia-born Jewish immigrant who arrived in Brazil at the age of three and went on to become one of the country's leading figures in editing,translation, and theatre and literary criticism. The case study here presented offers an overview of Guinsburg's agency in the Perspectiva publishing house and how it introduced many classical works of international scholars to the Brazilian academic community.