Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

edited by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil

Poets and poetry are highly thought of in Brazil. Among men, the name of “poet” is sometimes used as a compliment or term of affection, even if the person referred to is a businessman or politician, not a poet at all. One of the most famous twentieth-century Brazilian poets, Manuel Bandeira, was presented with a permanent parking space in front of his apartment house in Rio de Janeiro, with an enamelled sign POETA — although he never owned a car and didn’t know how to drive. When he was quite old, Bandeira taught for a few years at the University of Brazil, reaching retirement age long before he had taught the number of years necessary for a pension. Nevertheless, the Chamber of Deputies, to great applause, unanimously voted to grant him a full pension.

Almost anyone — (any man, that is, for until very recently poetry has been exclusively a masculine art in Brazil) — with literary interests has published at least one book of poems, “anyone” including doctors, lawyers, engineers, and followers of other arts. Jorge de Lima was a painter and a well-known Rio doctor as well as a poet. Candido Portinari, the painter best known outside Brazil, wrote autobiographical poems and published a book of them shortly before he died. The doings and sayings of popular poets like Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Vinicius de Moraes are constantly and affectionately reported in the newspapers. In the United States only a Pound or a Ginsberg receives as much attention from the press, but for different reasons and in different tones. Poets who produce volumes after long intervals of silence are called “Leap Year Poets,” Bissextos; Bandeira edited an anthology of contemporary “Leap Year” poets, showing that although their output may be small, they are esteemed and not forgotten.

It does not follow, of course, that the poetry in the many small volumes is necessarily great or even good, or that poetry is any more welcomed by publishers or sells any better in Brazil than in the United States. Editions are very small, of three hundred copies, for example; books are paperbound, as in France, and so cost comparatively little; and the poet earns very little from them. It may seem to the American visitor that the educated people whom he meets in Brazil read more poetry and know more poetry (often by heart) than people in the same walks of life at home. But it should be remembered that the educated elite is still a very small class, living almost entirely in five or six of the larger coastal cities, and that in a country of widespread illiteracy (forty per cent the figure usually given), the potential book-reading, book-buying public is limited. Partly because of poor communications, literary groups in these larger cities are more isolated from each other than they are in the United States — where so much has been made of the “isolation of the artist.” And if anything, Brazilian poets have a harder time making a living than do poets in the United States. There are few reviews and magazines, and these pay next to nothing. The fellowships, awards, readings, and “poet-in-residence” academic posts that help along poetic careers in North America are almost non-existent there.

Poets work in the civil service: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, usually considered the greatest living Brazilian poet, had worked for the Ministry of Education for more than thirty years when he retired in 1966. A few teach, and more go into journalism, sometimes writing columns for newspapers or picture magazines. Since his retirement, Drummond de Andrade has had a regular column of news comment and trivia in a leading Rio paper; occasionally he uses it to publish a new poem. But no matter how he earns his living, there is respect for the poet, his work, and his opinions, and for the more worldly and better connected there is opportunity in the long Latin tradition of appointing poets to diplomatic posts, even as ambassadors. Like Claudel and St.-John Perse in France, Gabriela Mistral and Neruda in Chile, Vinicius de Moraes and João Cabral de Melo Neto, among others in Brazil, have held diplomatic posts. Vinicius de Moraes (commonly known as just “Vinicius”), famous for his film-script for Black Orpheus and more recently for his popular songs, performs in night-clubs, produces musical shows in Brazil and other countries, and makes recordings in Europe — all ways of augmenting his income.

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This anthology, consisting of selections from the work of fourteen poets of the modern generation and of the post-war generation of 1945, is a modest attempt to present to the American reader examples of the poetry written in Brazil during this century. Inevitably, it is more representative of the editors’ personal tastes than all-inclusive. With a population of some ninety million, Brazil is by far the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world, but Portuguese is a relatively unknown language in the United States. It is understandably hard to find good American poets willing to undertake translation, much of which necessarily has to be done from literal prose translations of the Brazilian poems. The editors feel that the translators have done extremely well, keeping close to the texts and yet managing to produce “poems” preserving many of the characteristics of the originals.

Grammatically, Portuguese is a difficult language. Even well-educated Brazilians worry about writing it, and will ask friends to check their manuscripts for grammatical errors. Brazilians do not speak the way they write; the written language is more formal and somewhat cumbersome. In fact, Portuguese is an older language than Spanish, and still retains in its structure Latin forms dating from the Roman Republic. The tendency in this century has been to get away from the old, correct written style, in both prose and poetry, and to write demotic Portuguese. But this has not been completely realized, and Portuguese is still rarely written as it is spoken. A few novelists come close, in passages of conversation, and some columnists and younger poets use slang, gíria, almost unintelligible and changing constantly. One of the goals of the famous “Modern Art Week” in São Paulo in 1922 was to abandon the dead literary language of the nineteenth century and to write poetry in the spoken language. Much poetry of the ’20s attempted this, using slang, abbreviations, ellipses, and apostrophes to indicate letters or syllables left out in ordinary, rapid speech. Very much the same thing had happened in English poetry about a decade earlier. Perhaps it is a recurring phenomenon, desire, or ideal in modern literature. This style in poetry later declined with “the generation of ’45,” and poetry of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, visually at least, is more conventional than those first, early attempts at modernism.

Like other Latin languages, Portuguese has a high number of perfect rhymes and frequent, inescapable assonances. The ease of rhyming in these languages has been envied, sometimes eyed with suspicion, by poets writing in the more obdurate English. But facile rhyme and inevitable assonance can become liabilities, handicaps to originality. With time familiar sets of rhymes grow tiresome, and free verse must have come as a great relief. Almost all the poems in this volume are in free verse or unrhymed metrical verse, but since assonance is innate, many contemporary poets make deliberate use of it to give effects of near-rhyme, casually or in regular patterns. Brazilian poetry, even free verse, can rarely avoid melodiousness, even when the sense might seem to want to do so.

The rules of versification in traditional Portuguese verse are like those of French verse: short and long syllables determine the number of feet in a line, not stress, as in English; and no irregularities in meter are permitted. When contemporary Brazilian poets write in traditional forms (as does Vinicius de Moraes in most of his Sonnets ) they obey these rules of versification. Punctuation in modern Brazilian poetry is often puzzling. Apparently, the poets are influenced by, or perhaps simply copy, French usage: no punctuation at all except one stop at the end of the poem; sets of dashes where English poetry might use commas or semi-colons; dashes instead of quotation marks, and so on. In fact, anyone reading Brazilian Portuguese, prose or verse, soon becomes aware of its unperturbed inconsistency in both punctuation and spelling; points of style that have become fixed in English have not yet jelled in Brazil. It resembles our own language in its freer, earlier days. In these translations, the original punctuation has been retained when possible, and only tampered with when it, or the lack of it, might confuse the English-reading reader.