Rosa Freire d'Aguiar

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Rosa Freire d'Aguiar (born August 28, 1948, in Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian journalist, editor and translator. She graduated in journalism from PUC-Rio in 1971. From 1971 to 1973 she worked as a reporter for Manchete, Fatos & Fotos and the Encyclopedia Bloch.

In 1973 she moved to Paris and spent three years as an international correspondent for Bloch's French branch. From 1977 to 1985, still in Paris, she was a correspondent for the newsmagazine Isto É, for Jornal da República, and a contributor to ArteHoje. She produced many special reports from Europe, the Middle East and China, including Spain’s transition after Franco, the exile of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution, the trial of the Gang of Four in Beijing, the return of the Sinai desert to Egypt, the Lebanon War, and the German peace movement. She also interviewed many writers, scientists and artists, such as Elisabeth Badinter, Ernesto Sabato, Eugène Ionesco, Fernand Braudel, Georges Simenon, Jorge Semprún, Julio Cortázar, Michel Serres, Peter Brook, Roland Barthes, Simone Veil, and others.

Rosa left journalism to become a translator and editor for publishing houses. Since 1991 she has translated and edited more than a hundred books, mainly for Companhia das Letras and Editora Todavia, working with authors including Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Italo Calvino, Michel de Montaigne, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, the Marquis de Sade, Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust. She has won several awards, such as the Latin Union of Scientific and Technical Translation (2001) for translating Jean-Pierre Vernant’s L'univers, les dieux, les hommes; the Jabuti Prize (2009) for Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog; and the Paulo Rónai Translation Prize (2019) for Mathias Énard’s Bússola.

She is the author of Memória de tradutora (2004); Palavra puxa palavra: uma homenagem aos 70 anos da saga O tempo e o vento (e-book, 2019), containing a long interview with Érico Veríssimo; Sempre Paris – crônica de uma cidade, seus escritores, seus artistas (2023), which won the Jabuti Award for Best Chronicle Book (2024) and Book of the Year (2024). Her translation of Manet: A Symbolic Revolution won First Place in the Translation category of the ABEU Award (2024).

In 1979 she married Brazilian economist Celso Furtado, who had been living in exile in France since 1964 and taught at the Sorbonne. In 1986 the couple returned to Brazil and settled in Brasilia, where Celso Furtado served as Minister of Culture. Rosa founded the International Celso Furtado Centre for Development Policies (CICEF) in November 2005; she was its first Cultural President (2005–2009) and later served on the Deliberative Board until 2012. In 2019 she donated Celso Furtado’s private library and archives to the Institute of Brazilian Studies (IEB) at the University of São Paulo.