thought is the resemblance of the tone of Barbosa's florid speech to that of the burlesque funeral oration in Chapter 1 of the present book.
In all this, there is little to guide one to a solution of the basic problems about Machado. His poor health may have been in part responsible for the Machadian irony, but it cannot account for-rather it makes all the more unaccountable his rejection of the superman; there are surely Nietzschean elements in Quincas Borba's philosophy, which Machado ridicules in the latter part of this book? As for the source of Machado's classic taste, implicit in his rejection of false models and explicit in some of his critical writings, we are even more at sea and can hardly avoid reliance upon undiscovered, possibly undiscoverable, subjective factors. Some of Machado's works have been translated into German, French, Italian, and Spanish. In English there are only three short stories, in an anthology, long out of print, by Isaac Goldberg; however, future publication of a translation of Dom Casmurro has been announced. Without denying the tragic power of Dom Casmurro, the present translator chose Epitaph of a Small Winner because the creative release of Machado's inhibited (by compliance with romantic conventions) sentiments makes it the liveliest and most inventive of his novels and because, as a cogent and nearly complete statement of Machado's attitude, it provides a suitable introduction to his work.
A few words at this point about the text will avoid a superfluity of editorial intrusions. Those that cannot be avoided are in every case the translator's. With respect to monetary units, if the reader will think of a conto (one thousand milreis, i.e., one million reis), in the period covered by the narrative, as the equivalent of about five hundred dollars, he will be near enough to the truth for literary purposes. A crusado was four hundred reis. The value of the dobra, a Portuguese coin, varied consider-
