Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

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Brazilian “formal” or “sophisticated” music — it is hard to know exactly what term to use — is a complex subject in spite of its comparatively small body of work. There are Indian, African (and several different African), and Portuguese influences at work directly, and indirectly in the amazing variety of the folk-music. The music-loving Braganzas had their court composers and performers; the Jesuits their sacred operas and processional music from which many of the still-living folk-forms were derived. Quite recently a large body of late-baroque church-music has been discovered in Minas and is being transcribed and recorded, and undoubtedly much more material remains to be discovered and will help to fill in the long silences in Brazilian musical history.

The one big name in 19th-century music is Carlos Gomes, who was befriended all his life by Dom Pedro II. Unfortunately, his European training is now thought to have spoiled whatever native gifts he had. His most famous opera, The Guarani, based on the highly romantic novel by José de Alencar about a noble Guarani Indian, had a considerable success in 1870, although it has since been cruelly called “Meyerbeer’s best work.” The ballroom of the great semi-abandoned Manaos Opera House is decorated with scenes from The Guarani, and bife-stek Carlos Gomes still figures on the menus of Manaos restaurants.

The best contemporary composer is Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959). He was melodic, prolific, and fluent, if not over-fluent, and made full use of the richness of Brazilian sources (Portuguese, African, Indian, and popular music); his Bachianas and Ciclo Brasileiro are well-known outside Brazil. Villa-Lobos also put together a musical textbook for use in schools (using as examples old songs and singing games), the Guia Practica, which is considered a model of what such books should be.

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The “poet” is a special figure in Brazil, not at all like the unkown, unread figure of the same name in the United States. There has long been a tradition in Latin countries, old world and new, of poets in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, vice-consuls, consuls, or ambassadors. In Brazil the word “poet” is actually a term of endearment. A man will fondly address a friend who may be an engineer or a politician as “my poet.” Perhaps this is a relic of the days when all educated men wrote poetry; certainly writing poetry is still commoner here than with us. But in spite of this fondness for the idea of the poet as a man of special charm and privilege, unless employed in Foreign Affairs, he has, professionally, an even harder time of it than in the United States. Writing is very poorly paid and there are none of the fellowships and prizes, and a mere handful, compared to the thousands, of academic jobs that make life possible for both poets and prose writers in the United States. The writer has to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or professional journalist; journalism takes the place that teaching does in the United States, and with often just as deadening effect. There is a lack of good magazines and reviews. Every newspaper has its literary page, weekly, sometimes even daily, and it is there that one has to search for the good new poem, the original short story or article, half-lost among the endless warmed-over discussions of Baudelaire or Valéry, of Thomas Aquinas or G. K. Chesterton, and translations of Graham Greene or Mauriac.

The Portuguese language itself is a barrier between Brazilian writers and the public they deserve. For most Americans who study Spanish rarely study Portuguese. More translation can remedy this situation for prose, but poetry is fairly impervious to translations and it is a pity that we remain almost totally ignorant of such fine contemporary poets as Manuel Bandeira (the father-figure of Brazilian poetry), Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Cecilia Meireles, Jorge de Lima, Vinicius de Moraes (who wrote the libretto for the opera that was made into the succesful movie BLACK ORPHEUS ), João Cabral de Melo Neto — probably the best of the generation after Bandeira, who has written poems of great feeling about the “flagellados” (“beaten ones”) of the north-east.

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In Brazil someone who has been brought up a Catholic, in the usual way, left the church, and then returned to it again, is called a “convert.” In somewhat the same sense of conversion, Brazil is now re-discovering the values of its earlier provincial, romantic, and humorous literature, just as we have been re-assessing our Hawthornes and Twains, although on nothing like our stupendous and costly scale. Even allowing for the inevitable differences, almost all Brazilian literature is sympathetic to us: one colonial understands another. With all its naïveté, religiosity (sermons and more sermons), and sentimentality, — it has many of the characteristics of the literature of our own first three hundred years. And as American literature has been divided into “paleface” and “redskin,” so can Brazilian be divided roughly, in the same way, into that of the city and that of the country, those who looked to Europe, tradition, and “correctness,” and those who were drawn to the wilderness, the Indian, the regional, and felt that only new forms could be used for the experience of a new country. Sometimes, as our own literature, the two strains are oddly woven together.

The poets of the “Inconfidentes” sang of cupids and swans and such un-Brazilian fauna. Yet here are a few lines from the best of them, Thomas Antônio Gonzaga, that Manuel Bandeira quotes in his Anthology of Brazilian Poets of the Romantic Phase. Gonzaga is addressing his great love, Marília de Dirceu:

“You shall not see the skillful Negro

Separate the heavy emery from the course sand,

And the nuggets of gold already shining

In the bottom of the bateia.

You shall not see the virgin forest destroyed,

Nor the burning of the still green underbrush

To fertilize the ground with ashes,

Nor the seeds being sown in the furrows.

You shall not see them rolling the black packets

Of dry leaves of fragrant tobacco,

Nor pressing out the sweet juice of the cane

Between the cog-wheels…”

This is a rare moment of realism and accuracy, as evocative of rural Brazil today as when it was written. A bateia is the wooden bowl used for panning gold. It is still used, as is the destructive system of slash-and-burn farming. Tobacco, fumo, is still sold in long black ropes in the markets, and sugar cane juice, rather like a watery, grassy, molasses, is still a popular drink.

The two outstanding characteristics of the Brazilian romantic poets are their saudades and their anti-slavery sentiments. The fact that they were all sent to Coimbra to be educated probably has something to do with the former. They missed the easy, indulged life of young Brazilian gentlemen and suffered from homesickness as acutely as Brazilian students seem to do now at Boston “Tech” or the Sorbonne or Heidelberg. Gonçalves Dias (1823–1864), one of the greatest of the romantics, is responsible for the “Exiles Song,” the “My Country ’Tis of Thee” of Brazil.

“My country has palm-trees

Where the sabiá sings.

The birds don’t warble here

The way they do there…”

And Casimiro de Abreu (1839–1860) repeats:

“If I must die in the flower of my youth,

My God, let it not be now!

I want to hear the sabiá sing

In the evening, in the orange tree!..” etc.

The sabiá, a rather fat, brown thrush, is, precisely, to Brazilian poetry what the nightingale is to English poetry. Carlos Gomes uses its song in the interlude of his opera THE SLAVE; Brazilian literature is full of sabiás.