Cabral de Melo Neto's English Poets

Abstract

By ASHLEY BROWN Since the death of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Joao Cabral de Melo Neto can be considered Brazil's greatest living poet.1 Born in 1920 in Pernambuco, he was already a prominent member of his generation when he published his first book, Pedra do sono, in 1942, and he has been steadliy productive all these years, almost half a century later. In 1947, however, he joined the diplomatic service, and most of the time he has lived outside Brazil, whether in Barcelona or Paris, in Senegal or Paraguay or Ecuador (he was ambassador to these three countries), or finally in Oporto, Portugal, his last post he retired. Most of the time, that is, he has not been a familiar presence on the Brazilian literary scene in the way that Manuel Bandeira and Carlos Drummond used to be to say nothing of Vinicius de Moraes, whose presence was more than literary. I do not think that his detachment has been altogether a matter of diplomatic rectitude. He quite dislikes reading his poetry in public, as he once told an American visitor, Selden Rodman, before a cheering mob that doesn't know the difference between a pentameter and a pitchfork. He has never written poems like Carlos Drummond's Jose or Vinicius's Soneto de fidelidade, poems that are popular as well as distinguished works on the printed page. The major exception in Cabral de Melo Neto's long practice of poetry, the one occasion when he sought an audience, as it were, was the folk play called Morte e vida Severina, which he published in 1956. It was included in a book called Duas aguas. The poet said in an interview twenty years later (in the Folha de Sao Paulo) that the name of the book was intentional. It expressed precisely what he is: a sophisticated person who is attracted to the world's culture but who has not lost his roots. He was pleased to discover that his poetry had something of the mark of the poetry of the northeastern singers. At the same time, he said, there was no possibility of his returning to the idiom of Morte e vida Severina, which he considered uma linha meio facil. He is frankly drawn to that which is difficult. (I translate his remarks in this interview somewhat freely.) So here we have a poet who is strongly associated with one area of Brazil, and especially the coast of Pernambuco, but who has generally remained aloof from any form of literary popularity. As he told Selden Rodman, he is indifferent to being translated and is always surprised that anyone would bother to take him up for that purpose. He is usually placed by literary historians in the generation of 1945, that being the approximate date when several young poets, including Marcos Konder Reis and Osvaldino Marquez (the only names I am familiar with), published their first books. Afranio Coutinho, in his Introduction to Literature in Brazil, puts Cabral de Melo Neto, together with Carlos Drummond and Vinicius, in a rather curious category that he describes as socializing, compromised and dogmatic poetry. Since I think that Cabral de Melo Neto (or Joao Cabral, as he is popularly known) is far and away the best poet in this surviving generation, I would like to place him in a larger international context. Inadvertently of course, Cabral de Melo Neto resembles certain distinguished European poets whose work seemed to be affected by World War II. I refer to such figures as M on tale, Gottfried Benn, and especially the Eliot of the Four Quartets. This is what the British poet-critic Michael Hamburger calls A New Austerity that being the title of a chapter in his brilliant survey of the modern scene in The Truth of Poetry. Hamburger says of this phase of European poetry: