Atrave(s) and fronte(i)ras

The translation of Geny Vilas-Novas' novel Adeus, Rio Doce emphasizes the importance of promoting a literary exchange between Brazil and the Spanish-speaking world. This study analyses contemporary Brazilian literature and situates the author in the post-modern literary movement, stressing two post-colonial fundamental themes: emigration and feminine literature. Millions of undocumented emigrants from Latin America live nowadays in the United States displaced in the American society and leave suffering family members abandoned in their native countries. One of the roles of Latin- American women writers like Vilas-Novas is to reveal and denounce the subaltern conditions of this emigration movement in the globalization process, under the unusual perspective of those left behind. The linguistic and semantic challenges and difficulties faced during translation are a metaphor for the crossing of linguistic, cultural, social, and historical borders by Latin-Americans in search of better life opportunities.