Thursday, September 22, 2011

A reading list for Brazil - To the victor, the potatoes!

Brazil today, a shorter list, thank goodness.  To patriotic anonymous Brazilian visitors, be patient, read carefully, and be constructive – thanks in advance!

José de Alencar’s 1865 Iracema is a good place to start.  It is true post-colonial literature, a conscious early attempt to separate  Brazilian literature from Portugal.  Closer to a prose poem than a novel, I think it is more than a curiosity but a long ways from a masterpiece, as I said way back here, in the process offending a touchy, hasty visitor.

A few years later Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis succeeded in creating world-class Brazilian literature by a different path entirely, by adapting European literature to his own genius and locale, which happened to be Brazil.  All I am saying is that he does not rely on local color or artificial exoticism. An amazing proportion of what he wrote has migrated into English.

The Hand and the Glove (1874)
Helena (1876)
Iaiá Garcia (1878)

These books represent the first period in Machado de Assis’s career, when he wrote what I will call “plain ol’ novels.”  I am reading Helena now.  It is – what is the appropriate technical literary term? – it is OK.  I will finish it for research purposes, but then will avoid this phase unless there is special pleading.

In 1880 or so, Machado de Assis experienced some sort of health crisis and became an entirely different writer.  I do not know what happened, but his future fiction would be funnier, stranger, audacious, penetratingly ironic.  Everything changed, or almost everything.  This is the core set:

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881, also translated for some reason as Epitaph for a Small Winner)
The Psychiatrist  (1882, a satirical novella)
Quincas Borbas (1891,  also translated, because it describes the book well, as Philosopher or Dog)
Dom Casmurro (1899)
Esau and Jacob (1904)
Counselor Ayres’ Memorial (1908)

I have read the first two, as well as some excellent short stories, and am eager to read some or all of the last four.  They are all fairly short.  I have Quincas Borbas in front of me – I stole that thing about potatoes from it, Ch. 18.  This novel has 267 pages and 201 (!) chapters, some – I am reverting to The Posthumous Memoirs – digressive or otherwise perplexing, including, and I am again thinking of Bras Cubas, a famous one line chapter.  A short line, I mean.  Machado de Assis works on opposite principles from our great Modernist long sentence wonder workers.  He wants to smash his scenes to pieces, not stretch them out.  His narrators, as you might guess, are less than reliable, his literary allusions many, his approach to the world skeptical.

The Posthumous Memoirs seem to have become the representative Machado de Assis work among English readers, but I have read that this puzzles Brazilians; Dom Casmurro is the one they stuff down the throats of squirming schoolkids. Or perhaps Brazilian students are less neurotic about school reading than Americans.

I do not know if anyone is particularly interested in this, but Machado de Assis is, in the terms we use in the United States, black, a descendant of slaves.  In Brazilian terms, I have no idea, because I do not understand their complex racial classifications.

Some Brazilian non-fiction has been translated.  I doubt I will read Manuel Antonio de Almeida’s 1852 Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant or João Capistrano de Abreu’s 1907 Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History 1500-1800 on my own, but I would be happy to read them with company.  Both are part of the Oxford University Press Library of Latin America series, which also publishes the late Machado de Assis novels as well as Aluísio Azevedo’s 1890 The Slum, an angry, possibly gritty, novel.

The one piece of Brazilian journalistic or historical writing that has caught my eye is Euclides da Cunha’s 1902 Rebellion in the Backlands or Backlands: The Canudo Campaign.  An account of the suppression of a provincial rebellion is turned by Euclides into something more complex, much of the complexity coming from the elaborate language of the book.  The style of the book has become as important as the subject.  Please begin here at Caravanas de Recuerdos for a description and samples.

I was poking around the internet, trying to figure out if Euclides da Cunha should be referred to as “Cunha” or “da Cunha,” only to discover that everyone just calls him Euclides!  All right then.

A final reminder:  any Brazilian poetry is fair game for a shared read, as is Portuguese poetry from Angola or Mozambique or Newark, New Jersey.  I have no list, though; my ignorance is total.

Corrections and additions are, as always, encouraged.

13 comments:

  1. At the risk of being mistaken, I believe I'll write a useless post.

    I plan on getting to more Machado de Assis (the second group, definitely). Choices...

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  2. It was Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto's Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma, translated into English as The Patriot (I hope, otherwise I've bought a different book). Interesting chap: I have 1 short story by him.

    My next Machado de Assis will be Quincas Borba, but it might be a while yet since I've only just finished a short story collection by him.

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  3. Lima Barreto, no kidding. Worldcat tells me that I might be able to get my habds on that book. Too bad the original title got whacked.

    Dwight, that's my secret motto!

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  4. I have Grande Sertão: veredas by João Guimarães Rosa at home (translated into French as Diadorim)
    I haven't read it yet. Have you heard about it?

    Emma

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  5. Oh yes, the Ulysses of Brazilian literature, linguistically and symbolically complex, untranslatable yet essential to translate.

    Sounds like my kind of thing. I'm not so sure it's yours, though - you're skeptical about experimental literature, if I remember correctly.

    Luckily for me, given the commitment the book would require, it was published in 1956 and thus is out of the bounds of the Challenge.

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  6. My hero Dirda recommends both Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro (and, in a sideswipe, Esau and Jacob.) I think I'll read Dom Casmurro, and Bras Cubas if I have time.

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  7. Oh dear! On the French blurb, it is compared to La Chanson de Roland not to Ulysses.

    Good news: the book is on my list for Not a Rat's Chance in Hell's Challenge. Spot on, it seems...

    Emma

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  8. La Chanson de Roland! It seems that some of the story is Roland-like - pitched battles, sieges, heroic deeds in battle - but not the telling of the story.

    Don Casmurro, outstanding, Jenny! Drop me a note somewhere when you get going on it.

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  9. I found this by accident, but I was really impressed with your interest for our literature. I am brazilian, so please forgive my english.
    Machado without any doubt is the greatest brazilian writer, and I am glad to see he is read outside this country. About his race status, he is considered mulato, or mixed race in here, that does mean he suffer a lot of prejudice while starting because slavery was still the social norm, and while he couldnt be a slave, because of his white half, he was considered a "second class citizen" until he proved himself as a great writer.
    There are a lot of other great writer's in Brazil, but most of them are in the modernism phase. the ones from the 18th century used to "copy" the european style, expecially from Portugal and France, which makes the characters do a lot of things that would never fit our culture. So you were completely right in start with José de Alencar, the first to start to break this norm and started putting brazilian things in his writing. Altho, anyone in here could agree that his indigenous characters do present a lot of eurocentrics behaviours that doesnt fit the "real ones".
    Other writers that i would recomend would be Nelson Rodrigues, João Ubaldo Ribeiro and Gilberto Freyre (this one, like Euclides, is very complex and sometimes a bit hard to read).
    Now regarding poetry, Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (non-related, is just a very common last name), were the greatest exponentials of the modernism movement from the Semana de Arte Moderna de 1922, they started to right a true brazilian poetry that first rejected the europeans tendencies, and later embrace everything, art from all around the world including surrealism and freud, a the same time that they were looking at the indigenous arts from brazil and the influences the african cultures brought to here. they releases 3 manifestos about it, Pau-Brasil, Pauliceia Desvairada and Manifesto antropofágico.
    Another great poets are Manuel Bandeira (my favourite without any comparasing), Augusto dos Anjos (that despite only writing one book was the major influence for all of those i mentioned already), Alvares de Azevedo (ultra-romantic, byron-ish style, some horror stories too, the first brazilian to break the old tendencies about how poetry should be, always a great fun to read, died very young but left lots of stuff), Castro Alves (also romantic, with a amazing influence in our politics), Cruz e Souza ( Parnassian, not really my thing, but he is impressive for being the first and most impressive black writer in the country, still during the slavery, by black i mean the brazilian classification that doesnt include machado de assis), Murilo Mendes (he re-wrote the entire brazilian story in poetry using humor and taking less than 100 pages to do so, the funniest one and probably the person that went the farthest to break any accademic influence and dialogue directly with the public and the poor mass).
    Sorry about this being too long, is just that i really got excited to know that people are reading brazilian literature in other countries, and despite brazilian poetry being one of my favourite subjects in the world is very rare for me to talk about this.

    ReplyDelete
  10. I found this by accident, but I was really impressed with your interest for our literature. I am brazilian, so please forgive my english.
    Machado without any doubt is the greatest brazilian writer, and I am glad to see he is read outside this country. About his race status, he is considered mulato, or mixed race in here, that does mean he suffer a lot of prejudice while starting because slavery was still the social norm, and while he couldnt be a slave, because of his white half, he was considered a "second class citizen" until he proved himself as a great writer.
    There are a lot of other great writer's in Brazil, but most of them are in the modernism phase. the ones from the 18th century used to "copy" the european style, expecially from Portugal and France, which makes the characters do a lot of things that would never fit our culture. So you were completely right in start with José de Alencar, the first to start to break this norm and started putting brazilian things in his writing. Altho, anyone in here could agree that his indigenous characters do present a lot of eurocentrics behaviours that doesnt fit the "real ones".
    Other writers that i would recomend would be Nelson Rodrigues, João Ubaldo Ribeiro and Gilberto Freyre (this one, like Euclides, is very complex and sometimes a bit hard to read).
    Now regarding poetry, Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (non-related, is just a very common last name), were the greatest exponentials of the modernism movement from the Semana de Arte Moderna de 1922, they started to right a true brazilian poetry that first rejected the europeans tendencies, and later embrace everything, art from all around the world including surrealism and freud, a the same time that they were looking at the indigenous arts from brazil and the influences the african cultures brought to here. they releases 3 manifestos about it, Pau-Brasil, Pauliceia Desvairada and Manifesto antropofágico.
    Another great poets are Manuel Bandeira (my favourite without any comparasing), Augusto dos Anjos (that despite only writing one book was the major influence for all of those i mentioned already), Alvares de Azevedo (ultra-romantic, byron-ish style, some horror stories too, the first brazilian to break the old tendencies about how poetry should be, always a great fun to read, died very young but left lots of stuff), Castro Alves (also romantic, with a amazing influence in our politics), Cruz e Souza ( Parnassian, not really my thing, but he is impressive for being the first and most impressive black writer in the country, still during the slavery, by black i mean the brazilian classification that doesnt include machado de assis), Murilo Mendes (he re-wrote the entire brazilian story in poetry using humor and taking less than 100 pages to do so, the funniest one and probably the person that went the farthest to break any accademic influence and dialogue directly with the public and the poor mass).
    Sorry about this being too long, is just that i really got excited to know that people are reading brazilian literature in other countries, and despite brazilian poetry being one of my favourite subjects in the world is very rare for me to talk about this.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Marina, thank you so much for your comment - and for all of those poetry recommendations. I have only heard of a couple of them. What a literature.

    Have you taken a look at the St. Orberose blog? Miguel specializes in Portuguese literature, with occasional forays into Brazil. He writes about Portuguese-language poetry with great taste and expertise. His recent series on Eugénio de Andrade was almost hard to believe - a lot of difficult work.

    I don't know any English blog that writes so much (or so well) about poetry in translation, Portuguese or otherwise.

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  12. Thanks so much for recomending the St. Orberose blog, that is amazing. I loved his posts about Ferreira Gullar, and his series on Eugenio de Andrade looks really impressive, i just read one post so far, but i surely will read it all.
    I must congratulate you, I just read some of your others posts about Machado and Pessoa, and i really loved it! This is a really awesome blog, I just bookmarked it.
    About your comment on the post "Some Brazilian Tales" about female writers, I remembered quite a few brazilian poets, but when i went to look at them almost none were ever translated for english, which is very sad considering Cecilia Meireles and Raquel de Queiroz both have a truly remarkable work.
    From those who had been translated, Natália Correia (portuguese) is really good and Zélia Gattai is probably the best biographer of Jorge Amado ever, because she was his wife. Unfortunatelly, all her work that was translated are her memoirs, not any fiction, probably because of the fact that she was married to the most translated writer in brazilian history (if you disregard Paulo Coelho's best-seller, which i certainly do).
    Another great brazilian female writer that was translated for english is Clarice Lispector, one of the most original writers in brazil,Some people consider her overhyped, because every brazilian with internet acess already posted a quote of hers at a social network, most without ever actually reading anything besides loose quotes, but her work really is extraordinary.
    Again, congratulations for your blog, I really loved it.

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  13. Thanks for the additional recommendations. For poets not in English now - someday, maybe someday.

    And thanks for the kind words.

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