Correspondência de Machado de Assis by Sergio Paulo RouanetIrene Moutinho and Sílvia Eleutério

Abstract

Reviews 248 the ambiguity of this Guitá reflect the some of the problems of translating Goa into India? This question is repeated with the publication of the work. Who is it for now? The print run was exceedingly small and no attempt has been made to promote the book in any Portuguese-speaking country. Whatever Shirodkar might have thought of Portugal, he had a great love for Angola and its people. He delayed writing his memoirs for fear that some portion of it might indict friends and acquaintances still languishing under Portuguese rule, for instance. In his autobiography he declares that, if the Indian concept of rebirth be true, and the Almighty not grant him that rebirth in India, he should like to be reincarnated in Angola. While the translator’s south-south sympathies are clear, there is surely little interest in contemporary Angola for any transmigration of the soul of Tilak’s work, which, beneath its theological complexities, is a rather straightforward justification of violent rebellion against forces of injustice. All in all, the afterlife of Shirodkar’s Portuguese-language version of Tilak’s original is likely to be as lonely as each of their authors’ respective stints behind colonial bars. Correspondência de Machado de Assis, edition coordinated by Sergio Paulo Rouanet; collected, organized and annotated by Irene Moutinho and Sílvia Eleutério (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras, 2008–15), 5 vols: I (1860–1869), 334 pages; II (1870–1889), 509 pages; III (1890–1900), 600 pages; IV (1901–1904), 490 pages; V (1905–1908), 546 pages. Print. Reviewed by John Gledson (University of Liverpool) The first of these five volumes was published in the centenary year of Machado de Assis’s death. They are without doubt its most important and lasting product, both a culmination of years of research by various scholars, and an incitement for others in future. We are in debt to all three of the organizers, who have edited and annotated them with a breadth of knowledge, an erudition and evident affection and enthusiasm we can only admire. Each volume has an informative Apresentação by Rouanet, and concludes with a brief (but not too brief) biography of each of Machado’s correspondents, in themselves a source of information useful beyond the limits of these books themselves; and a bibliography. This is an edition both of Machado’s own letters that have survived, and of those he received — ‘correspondência ativa’ and ‘passiva’. He kept many of the letters he received, though probably short of being his own archivist, as Drummond de Andrade was. In 1896, he mentions a ‘bilhetinho de Garrett’, that he has kept ‘entre tantos papéis e cartas que guardo de longos anos’ (iii, 162). As Rouanet tells us, many letters disappeared after his death, but plenty have survived. Certainly we would be the poorer if we didn’t have Eça de Queirós’s generous, genuinely fraternal reaction (‘eu nada valho’) to Machado’s Reviews 249 ‘severe’ review of O primo Basílio (Eça’s word: ‘severo’, not ‘revesso’ as earlier readings have it), or the letters from Miguel de Novais, his Portuguese brotherin -law, with their political scepticism (what a pity Machado’s replies have not survived!), or, more humbly, a letter from Antônio Gonçalves Crespo, from 1871, in which the writer timidly says that he knows Machado ‘De nome e por uma secreta simpatia que para si me levou quando me disseram que era...de cor, como eu’ — Machado’s preservation of this letter tells us almost as much as the letter itself (ii, 22). In the latest number of Machado de Assis em linha, Antonio Dimas contributes an excellent, fascinating review (‘Anotações sobre a correspondência de Machado de Assis’) which, among much else, details the various collections of Machado’s letters that have appeared over the years, beginning with Graça Aranha’s publication of the letters between Machado and Joaquim Nabuco, in 1923. The interested reader will find much useful information about the edition in this (easily accessible) review. The editors’ choice also extends to missives, open letters and so forth, published in the newspapers. These...