Alan R. Clarke

Alan R. Clarke is a translator who works from Portuguese and Spanish into English. A Library of Congress authority record, drawing on his own professional page as it stood in 2013, says he holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and does both commercial and literary translation.

He did not write The Alchemist. Paulo Coelho did, in Portuguese, and it appeared in Brazil in 1988 as O Alquimista. Clarke produced the English text that HarperSanFrancisco published in 1993 under the title The Alchemist: A Fable about Following Your Dream. For most English-language readers, the story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd who sets out toward the Egyptian pyramids after a recurring dream, is Clarke's version. His name sits on the title page of editions that have been reissued for decades.

The same Library of Congress record points to his translation of Coelho's The Pilgrimage, which appeared in 1995. Outside Coelho's work, Audible lists his English version of Cristovão Tezza's Brief Space Between Color and Shade. It follows a young painter in Curitiba who gets pulled into the theft of Modigliani's tombstone. The Portuguese original won the Machado de Assis prize for best novel from Brazil's National Library.

If you are arriving from The Alchemist, you have already started in the right place. Read it for the clean, fable-like English of that first edition. Then try The Pilgrimage for Coelho's nonfiction-flavoured journey, or Tezza if you want to see Clarke's work on a very different Brazilian novel.