Prose (63 page)

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The nineteenth century was, as elsewhere, the romantic century, and Brazilian Romanticism is considered to have started with the publication of a book of poems by Gonçalves Magalhães (1811–1882), called, romantically indeed,
Poetic Sighs and Longings.
The four outstanding romantic poets, however, were: Gonçalves Dias (1823–1864); Álvares de Azevedo (1831–1852); Casimiro de Abreu (1837–1860); and Castro Alves (1847–1871). All four used genuinely Brazilian themes, Gonçalves Dias
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romanticising the Brazilian Indian for the first time, and Castro Alves, in his melodramatic poem “The Slave Ship,” being the first poet to protest against the horrors of the slave trade. They and the other poets of the movement were much influenced, by way of France and Portugal, by the English romantics.
Saudade,
the characteristic Brazilian longing or nostalgia, and plain homesickness appear obsessively in their poems—perhaps because most of these young poets, “of good family,” made the long ocean voyage to study at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, for Brazil had no universities until the late nineteenth century. Several of them died very young, as did Keats and Shelley, usually of tuberculosis. Gonçalves Dias drowned, shipwrecked on his native shore, while returning from Portugal.

The romantic period gave way to a period of realism, called the Parnassian movement (from around 1870 to 1890) and a brief period of Symbolism (1890–1900). The so-called “realists” were strongly influenced by the French Parnassian school of Gauthier, Banville, Lesconte de L'Isle, and Heredia. The most famous poet of this school was Olavo Bilac (1865–1918), three of whose books are
Poesias
(1888),
Poesias Infantis
(1904), and
Tarde
(1919). The Symbolist movement produced one important figure, the black poet Cruz e Souza (1861–1918). German and English romantic poetry were known to the Brazilians, but French literature and philosophy were, and have remained, until very recently, the strongest influences in Brazilian literature and thought. They are still perhaps of primary importance, but English and, even more, American prose and poetry are now rapidly becoming better known. English is now becoming the most important and fashionable foreign language.

From the turn of the century until 1922, Brazilian poetry went through a period of eclecticism, with no one style predominating, reflecting in general the intense nationalism prevalent at the time. In 1912 Oswald de Andrade, later considered the most radical poet of the 1922 movement, returned from Europe with a copy of Marinetti's
Futurist Manifesto.
About that time he created a sensation by publishing a poem without rhyme or meter, entitled “Last Ride of a Tubercular through the City by Streetcar.” The subject-matter and tone of poetry were changing, and in 1917, when Manuel Bandeira published his first book
Ash of the Hours,
the critic João Ribeiro announced that Olavo Bilac, admired for so long, was “now out of date.”

The year 1922 marked the centennial of Brazilian independence. A group of writers and artists, most of whom had lived in Europe, decided to celebrate by holding a festival at which they would present the avant-garde theories they had enthusiastically adopted in Paris and Italy to their artistically backward compatriots. “Modern Art Week” took place in the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo on the 13th, the 15th, and the 17th of February. It has become as much a landmark in Brazilian culture as the New York Armory Show of 1913 is in the culture of the United States.

The night of the 15th was the most dramatic of the three. The poet Menotti del Pichia made a speech presenting the aims of the new artistic movements, summarizing them with these words: “We want light, air, ventilators, airplanes, workers' demands, idealism, motors, factory smokestacks, blood, speed, dream, in our Art. And may the chugging of an automobile, on the track of two lines of verse, frighten away from poetry the last Homeric god who went on sleeping and dreaming of the flutes of Arcadian shepherds and the divine breasts of Helen, an anachronism in the era of the jazz band and the movie.” Poets and prose writers then read excerpts from their works. The audience took offense, and there followed an uproar of booing, whistling, and shouted insults. Mário de Andrade read from his book
Hallucinated City,
and later he confessed in a long essay regarding Modern Art Week that he did not know how he had had the courage to face such an audience.

Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), a mulatto from São Paulo, was one of the most important figures in contemporary Brazilian art and literature. A critic, poet, and novelist, he was also one of the very first intellectuals to discover and to become seriously interested in the great untapped resources of Brazilian folklore and popular music. It is hard to think of any form of contemporary artistic activity in Brazil that does not owe a debt to him. In the year of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, 1970, every newspaper and review printed critical studies, biographical essays, and tributes to him, and loving memoirs were written about him as teacher and friend. The vitality of his personality and the wide range of his interests have been of the utmost importance in helping create a richer artistic self-consciousness in Brazil.

The Modernist poetic movement repudiated French and Portuguese influences, and, as in other countries, it rejected the ideas of the Romantics, Parnassians, and Symbolists. It believed in using the material of everyday life, and attempted a complete honesty, bringing the anguish and conflicts of the period into poetry for the first time. The Modernist group originally included, among other poets, Manuel Bandeira, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade. There were also the painters Anita Malfatti and Di Cavalcanti; the sculptor Victor Brecheret, and the composer Villa-Lobos. Only Villa-Lobos is well-known outside Brazil, but the others all took part in the artistic transition from the outworn forms of the nineteenth century to the forms of the present.

In 1924, in Paris, Oswald de Andrade published an important book of poems called
Brazilwood.
With extreme economy of means, in simple language, he treated Brazilian themes, customs, superstitions, and family life directly, and for the first time in Brazilian poetry humorously. These qualities have marked Brazilian poetry ever since; they represent the real achievement of Modern Art Week and
modernismo.
A word of tribute should also be given to the French poet Blaise Cendrars, who lived in Brazil for several years. His free style, brilliant imagery, and fresh, ironic treatment of the modern world were all important influences on the poets of the Modernist movement.

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Manuel Bandeira, Mário de Andrade, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade have been mentioned; other poets in the Modernist movement are included in this anthology. Carlos Drummond de Andrade is regarded as the most important—and is probably the most popular—poet of the contemporary period. Vinicius de Moraes is also extremely popular, especially with the younger generation, some of whom are ignorant of his early and more serious work, but adore him for his “Bossa Nova” songs (a style now considered out-of-date), and his present constant outpouring of gentle, romantic songs and music, almost invariably about love.

The most recent date marking a shift in poetic styles in Brazil is 1945, the year of the dropping of the first atomic bomb—about which every Brazilian poet seems to have written at least one poem—and the end of World War II. Brazil itself was just coming to the end of a dictatorship that had lasted for fifteen years and was passing through a phase of redemocratization. It was the year of the death of Mário de Andrade, and a new generation of poets was appearing on the scene, the Neo-Modernists, or the generation of '45. As early as 1929 the writer Luis Martins had remarked: “Modernism suffered from the demoralizing influence of its adherents. As in the time of Parnassianism everyone wrote sonnets, in the time of Modernism everyone began to write nonsense in free verse.” The generation of '45 was against the exaggerated use of the free verse that had dominated poetry for more than twenty years; they wanted more concision and less sentimentality (always a danger in Brazilian verse) as well as a more accurate use of words.

João Cabral de Melo Neto, born in 1920, came of age in this generation; today he is considered one of the major poetic voices in Latin America. His first book
Stone of Sleep
(1942) showed the characteristics of his mature style: striking visual imagery and an insistent use of concrete, tactile nouns. He is “difficult”; but at the present time his work displays the highest development and the greatest coherency of style of any Brazilian poet.

The younger poets, many, diverse, and talented, including the Concretionists and others whose work takes the form of song lyrics—and Brazil has produced in recent years some of the best popular songs ever written—are not in this anthology. The editors hope to introduce them in a second volume, in order to give the American reader a more complete picture of the variety, profundity, and originality of Brazilian poetry today.

The Editors

1972

A Brief Reminiscence and a Brief Tribute

I had hoped that this photograph, so unflattering to almost everyone in it, would never be seen again. The occasion was a party for Edith and Osbert Sitwell, given by LIFE Magazine, at the Gotham Bookmart. I hadn't wanted to attend, but Marianne Moore was firm about it. “We must be
polite
to the Sitwells,” she said, and so I went. There were a great many people there. The photographers, as is their custom, were
not
polite. There were difficulties in separating the poets from the non-poets (some of whom wanted to be in the picture, too) and in herding the poets into the back room to be photographed. (In the fray, a few got left out.) Poets tripped over trailing wires and jostled each other to get in the front row, or in the back row, depending. They were arranged, hectored, and re-arranged. Miss Moore's hat was considered to be too big: she refused to remove it. Auden was one of the few who seemed to be enjoying himself. He got into the picture by climbing on a ladder, where he sat making loud, cheerful comments over our heads.

The picture was taken with a sort of semi-circular swoop of the camera, with two hesitations and clicks. The poets at the clicks (I was one) came out looking rather odd. (Seeing the picture in LIFE, one of my best friends told me I looked like a salt-cellar with the top screwed on the wrong way.) I was wearing a small velvet cap and after the party Miss Moore said regretfully, “I wish
I'd
worn a
minimal
hat like that.”

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I met Auden only a few times, and although I wanted to, I was a little afraid of talking to him. I regret this now very much. I find it sad that the young students and poets I have met in the past four years usually seem to know only a few of his anthology pieces, rarely read him at all, and apparently never for pleasure. One reason for this may be that Auden, the most brilliant of imitators himself, has been, or was, so much imitated that his style, his details and vocabulary, the whole atmosphere of his poetry, seems overfamiliar, old hat. But when I was in college, and all through the thirties and forties, I and all my friends who were interested in poetry read him constantly. We hurried to see his latest poem or book, and either wrote as much like him as possible, or tried hard not to. His then leftist politics, his ominous landscape, his intimations of betrayed loves, war on its way, disasters and death, matched exactly the mood of our late-depression and post-depression youth. We admired his apparent toughness, his sexual courage—actually more honest than Ginsberg's, say, is now, while still giving expression to technically dazzling poetry. Even the most hermetic early poems gave us the feeling that here was someone who
knew
—about psychology, geology, birds, love, the evils of capitalism—what have you? They colored our air and made us feel tough, ready, and in the know, too.

I almost always agree with Auden critically, except when he gets bogged down in his categories (and except that I haven't yet been able to read Tolkien), and I admire almost all his poems except the later preachy ones. I'd like to quote some characteristic lines:

Doom is darker and deeper than any sea-dingle.

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Easily my dear, you move, easily your head,

And easily as through the leaves of a photograph album I'm led

Through the night's delights and the day's impressions,

Past the tall tenements and the trees in the wood,

Though sombre the sixteen skies of Europe

    And the Danube flood.

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We made all possible preparations,

Drew up a list of firms,

Constantly revised our calculations

And allotted the farms …

*

For to be held for friend

By an undeveloped mind

To be joke for children is

Death's happiness

Whose anecdotes betray

His favorite color as blue

Colour of distant bells

And boys' overalls.

*

Now the leaves are falling fast,

Nurse's flowers will not last;

Nurses to the graves are gone,

And the prams go rolling on.

*

From SPAIN, 1937

Many have heard it on the remote peninsulas,

On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fisherman's islands,

            In the corrupt heart of the city;

Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch

Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;

            They floated over the oceans;

They walked the passes; they came to present their lives.

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From REFUGEE BLUES