Introduction

Abstract

Portuguese Studies vol. 30 no. 2 (2014), 124–27© Modern Humanities Research Association 2014 Introduction This special issue of Portuguese Studies is devoted to João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920–1999), one of Brazil’s most innovative and influential literary and cultural figures. Cabral ranks among the country’s giants of twentieth-century literature, alongside such trailblazing authors as João Guimarães Rosa (1908– 1967) and Clarice Lispector (1920–1977). His standing as one of the most original voices within the Brazilian Modernist poetry movement, alongside fellow Modernists such as Manuel Bandeira (1886–1968) and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987), is undisputed. Indeed, in his lifetime, the wide recognition of his standing included his election as a member of the prestigious Academia Brasileira de Letras [Brazilian Academy of Letters], in 1969.1 Thus, Cabral features prominently in syllabi of Brazilian literature courses at home and abroad, and the bibliography on his work is extensive. That said, recent studies in English are relatively limited, and this selection of essays aims to help to plug this gap. The project stems from a symposium organized jointly by Professor David Treece and Dr Sara Brandellero entitled ‘João Cabral de Melo Neto and His Trans­ national Legacy: Dialogues and Confluences’, held at Canning House in London in 2009, to mark the tenth anniversary of João Cabral’s death. Generously supported by King’s College London and the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs via its Embassy in London, the event provided a forum to reflect on Cabral’s work and to seek out fresh perspectives on his writing. Most of the articles included here, all authored by experts in Brazilian literature, were first presented at that symposium or emerged from discussions around it. Born into a wealthy landowning family from the North-Eastern state of Pernambuco, Cabral was raised on the family’s rural estates on the outskirts of the Pernambucan capital city of Recife and later lived in Recife itself, where he went to further his studies. The experience of life in both the rural outback and the city exposed Cabral to the historic social inequalities and injustice of the deeply fractured North-Eastern society, a reality which was to become a recurring topos in his poetry. His earliest writings, among them his first 1 Alongside this recognition, it is pertinent to recall some of the many translations of his work. Translations into English include An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, ed. by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972); Two Parliaments and Poems, trans. by Richard Spock, in Brazilian Painting and Poetry (Rio de Janeiro: Spala, 1979); A Knife all Blade: or Usefulness of Fixed Ideas, trans. by Kerry Shawn Keys (Camp Hill, PA: Pine Press, 1980); Selected Poetry, 1937–1990, ed. by Djelal Kadir and trans. by Elizabeth Bishop and others (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan Press, 1994); Death and Life of Severino, trans. by John Milton (São Paulo: Plêiade, 2003); Education by Stone. Selected Poems, trans. by Richard Zenith (New York: Archipelago Books, 2005). introduction 125 published collection, Pedra do sono (1942), which was markedly dreamlike in tone and imagery, gave little indication of the deeply committed social writing which he would produce from the 1950s onwards and with which he would become widely associated. Cabral entered the diplomatic service in 1946, and his first posting abroad, as Brazilian Vice-Consul in Barcelona in 1947, would have a profound impact on his writing. Away from his native North-East, it was in Spain that Cabral found the clarity and distance to reflect critically on the reality he had left behind, and the works produced during and soon after his first period abroad are amongst his most well-known. O cão sem plumas (1950), followed by O rio (1954), both have as their central themes the hunger, poverty, the harsh climate, and the lack of land reform and social exclusion that constituted daily struggles for a large majority of the population in the region when these works were published, as they continue to be to this day. These works would be followed by his first auto (or one-act play), Morte e...