Mário de Andrade’s novel “Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character” follows a shape-shifting, rule-flouting, race-switching trickster as he roams the vast nation of Brazil, meeting historical characters, folkloric figures, and outrageously satirized stereotypes along the way.

Rich with words and references from Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures, the modernist novel was hailed as a classic upon its publication in 1928, and has long been seen as an allegory for Brazil’s unique cultural blend. Faced with criticism of the book’s uncredited reliance on anthropological research, Andrade offered up, in an open letter, a typically insouciant response: “I copied Brazil.”

Some scholars have deemed the book’s complexity virtually untranslatable — but this week, New Directions published a new translation of “Macunaíma” by Katrina Dodson that aims to transport Andrade’s idiosyncratic prose into English.

Over six years of research, Dodson familiarized herself with every aspect of the novel. She chased down obscure flora and fauna on two trips to the Amazon, waded through reams of critical commentary, immersed herself in Andrade’s archives in São Paulo and discussed the book’s continued relevance with contemporary Brazilians. While she found that for some readers the book continues to represent the “endless and unfinished” national spirit of Brazil, she also met many Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous artists who have set out to reclaim the folkloric roots that Andrade drew on.

Inspired by her research, Dodson hopes that her new translation will emphasize just how deeply personal, and multifaceted, the concept of Brazil was for Andrade.

“Andrade was queer, but very closeted, and also very conflicted about his racial identity,” she said. “He had African heritage on both sides. Once you know more about him and more about the context of how he wrote this book, you understand that there are a lot of very sincere and serious questions at the heart of it.”

The notion that the book and its main character are a stand-in for the country and its “amalgamation of different races and ethnicities” has helped establish “Macunaíma” as a canonical novel, read in every classroom devoted to Brazilian literature, said Pedro Meira Monteiro, chair of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. But it would be a mistake to read it as a nationalist project, he said.

“Mário is so profoundly charmed by the endless and unfinished character of Brazil,” he said, referring to the author by his first name, with the familiarity common to Andrade’s readers in Brazil.

“He is seeing something that he recognizes as his and at the same time not,” he said. “There’s a problematic sense of belonging in his work that is profound.”

A more personal register is on full display in “The Apprentice Tourist,” the first translation of another Andrade book by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux that was also published this week by Penguin Classics. Compiled from notes Andrade made during his first trip to the Amazon shortly before “Macunaíma” was released, “The Apprentice Tourist” shows Andrade’s fascination with Amazonian cultures — and his utter boredom with the government officials and elites who welcomed the group of travelers along the way.

Andrade was born in São Paulo, the country’s industrial capital, in 1893. He enrolled in São Paulo’s Dramatic and Musical Conservatory at age 11 to train as a concert pianist, taught himself French and became enamored with the poetry of the Symbolists. By his mid-20s he was traveling throughout Brazil, publishing poetry and essays on folklore along the way.

Andrade’s fascination with the multiplicities of Brazilian culture placed him at the center of the modernist movements that were sweeping the country in the 1920s. “Macunaíma” was first excerpted in the Revista de Antropofagia, the journal edited by Oswald de Andrade (no relation), whose 1928 manifesto proclaimed that Brazilian thinkers needed to reject European artifice and “cannibalize” native forms of storytelling to produce a new Brazilian art. Antropofagia, or anthropophagy in English, refers to the eating of human flesh.

The book found an admiring readership among the Brazilian intelligentsia, but even they were struck by its incongruities. One critic, João Ribeiro — a prominent folklorist himself — called it “voluntarily barbarous, primeval, an assortment of disconnected fragments put together by a commentator incapable of any coordination.”

Dodson approached the book because she felt the existing English translation, E.A. Goodland’s 1984 version for Random House, had smoothed over the “joy and poetry of the language, and the cultural politics of the particular mix of languages.”

Take the book’s first line, which half a dozen Brazilian artists and scholars interviewed by The New York Times quoted, unprompted, from memory: “No fundo do mato-virgem nasceu Macunaíma, herói da nossa gente.”

Goodland’s translation of the first line ignores Andrade’s sentence structure. It starts: “In a far corner of Northern Brazil” — words that do not exist in the original — then continues, “at an hour when so deep a hush had fallen on the virgin forest….” Goodland, a retired technical director for a sugar company in Guyana, was “well-versed in all of the natural history foundation of the book,” Dodson said, “but he completely missed the spirit of what the book is trying to do. His translation really leans into stereotypes of Brazil being this sexy, wild place where everyone loses their head.”

Dodson decided to essentially transliterate the line, despite the grammatical awkwardness it introduces in English: “In the depths of the virgin-forest was born Macunaíma, hero of our people.” The importance of the line, she said, is not in establishing where the action is taking place, as Goodland had done, but in bringing the reader into the fold of the people at hand. “Macunaíma is our hero,” she said.

As her knowledge of the book deepened, Dodson said, she found herself walking back some of her own interventions to maintain the “music” of the original.

“A lot of the words in the book are not in the regular Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries,” Dodson noted. “Or if they are, the meanings are ambiguous. My goal was to make you feel the joy of language in the book, to be carried along by all the humor and the colloquial ways in which people speak, but also by the beautiful sounds of the Indigenous words.”

For the Brazilian artists behind the book’s many adaptations into film, theater, and art, Andrade’s insistence on maintaining the complex vernacular that he overheard on his travels is precisely what makes the book so vital.

“The book’s difficulty is its genius,” said Iara Rennó, a São Paulo-based musician. Shortly after reading the book for the first time and becoming enamored by its musicality, Rennó began writing her 2008 album, “Macunaíma Ópera Tupi.” “‘Macunaíma’ puts the reader, who is used to so-called ‘well-written’ Portuguese, into a state of transgression,” she said. “And that transgression is so important. It feeds culture.”

Some scholars have compared “Macunaíma” to James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” another totemic modernist novel from the 1920s whose allusive, wide-ranging play with language is as central to its identity as its plot.

“The elites in Brazil love to think of themselves as dislocated Europeans,” said Caetano Galindo, whose innovative 2012 translation of “Ulysses” into Brazilian Portuguese won the prestigious Jabuti prize. Andrade, he added, “had a huge role in facing the fact that this is not a true monolingual country.”

While their new translations offer an important corrective in bringing canonical Brazilian works into English, both Dodson and Thomson-DeVeaux are careful to address the criticisms that Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian artists have raised about the modernists’ central role in Brazilian cultural histories.

As Dodson notes, Andrade’s book is indebted to the work of Theodor Koch-Grünberg, a German ethnologist who transcribed a long saga cycle featuring a trickster figure from Indigenous Pemon-language storytellers on the border shared by Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana in the early 1910s. For the Macuxi and other Indigenous peoples in the Pemon language group today, this figure — Makunaima or Makunaimã — bears only passing resemblance to Andrade’s Macunaíma.

Starting around five years ago, Jaider Esbell, a Macuxi painter and performance artist, fashioned himself into “Makunaima’s grandson,” re-claiming the figure from the modernists and rendering him in dozens of paintings.

Esbell’s friend, the Amazonian painter and curator Denilson Baniwa, said he and Esbell had made a pact shortly after meeting and discussing the art world’s continued mistreatment of Indigenous artists.

“I was going to kill Mário’s Macunaíma,” he said, “and Jaider was going to bring the Macuxi Makunaima back to life.”

Denilson’s 2019 painting, Re-Antropofagia, shows Andrade’s head being served on a platter as an offering to Indigenous artists. The painting is now hung in the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, adjacent to Tarsila do Amaral’s seminal modernist painting, Antropofagia, from 1929.

Dodson met Esbell and Denilson in 2019, and the three spent hours discussing her translation. Esbell, Dodson and Denilson both said, didn’t have a problem with Andrade’s novel itself, but rather with the misconception that the modernists had “discovered” long-running Indigenous cultural practices.

In an essay, Esbell described asking Makunaima why he had allowed Andrade to “steal” his story. “My son,” Makunaima responds in the essay, “I glued myself to that book’s cover. They say I was kidnapped, robbed, betrayed, duped. They say I’m an idiot. No! It was my idea to be on the cover. I wanted to go with those men. I wanted to make our history. I saw our chance to find our eternity.”

Esbell died in 2022, and Dodson requested that New Directions use one of his paintings as the cover art of her translation of “Macunaíma.”

Nearly a century after its publication, many of the novel’s Brazilian admirers are unsure of how it will be received in the United States. “Macunaíma is always on the verge of being canceled,” said Meira Monteiro, the Princeton professor.

Yet Dodson, for one, thinks that the book will resonate with a new American audience attuned to a history haunted by slavery and Indigenous dispossession, marked by the interplay of immigration and xenophobia — and underlain by a long-running strain of “utopian multiculturalism.”

“I think Americans will understand feeling the absurdity of this great variety of people from all over united under one flag,” said Dodson.