Brazilian Writer Research Articles

"Da boca do povo na língua errada do povo, língua certa do povo"

For Antonio Candido and Afrânio Coutinho, artistic nationalism was a trademark of Brazilian letters, as it corresponded to the search for a national identity. At the linguistic level, Brazilian writers defended “the Brazilian language” as an element of political emancipation and cultural autonomy. This work aims to show, through excerpts from newspapers and literary supplements from the 20th century, how after Brazil's political independence in 1822, literature was used as an instrument to forge linguistic independence. These debates that lasted throughout the 19th century culminated in the Modern Art Week. Brazilian modernism changed the way we see and think about literature and language. In the 19th century, the invention of the “Brazilian language” became a flag, as the Portuguese norm became an obstacle to national affirmation. In the 1950s, in Brazilian and Portuguese literary supplements, such debates still found resonance.

Escrevivência as a Theory of Diasporic Narrative Heritage

Abstract This article studies a theoretical term for diasporic cultural production proposed by the contemporary Black Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo—escrevivência. Evaristo’s first novel, Becos da Memória ([2006] 2017)—semiautobiographical remembrances of a midcentury favela community during its eviction—exemplifies escrevivência as a theory of the transmission of a culture of resistance to imposed dispossession. The term has been cited in a proliferation of antiracist critiques and studies on marginal subjects in Brazil. My argument is that escrevivência is crucial for Brazilian decolonial thought, given the temporally recursive frame it enunciates, which opens the present and future to prior articulations of Black culture in Brazil. I make three approaches to Becos within escrevivência’s temporal frame, examining literary anteriority (the influence of Carolina Maria de Jesus’s works), narrated marginality (polyphony, embodiment, domestic labor, minor literature), and cultural heritage (the instantiation and circulation of Black language).

Alencar e Lamartine, uma correspondência

Transcription and translation of a letter (dated August 27, 1856) from Alphonse de Lamartine to Leonel de Alencar, Brazilian writer José de Alencar’s brother.

Listening and Legibility: Urban Surfaces Against ‘Overarching Meanings’ in Lispector’s The Besieged City

Listening and Legibility: Urban Surfaces Against “Overarching Meanings” in Lispector’s The Besieged City. This paper looks into the literary dismantlement of projections of totality and objectified knowledge in women’s modern writing, focusing on Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s novel The Besieged City. My central claim is that her writing opposes “geographies of reason,” indirectly arguing for an untranslatability of the self inside modernity’s model of legibility and communication. In this novel, Lispector’s alternative to the discoursing, male-dominant, rational public realm is not the introspective inner space of subjectivity, but an innovative world-making poiesis founded on the substitution of the individual self with “the wider life of the world” that remains always a-centric and anti-textual. I investigate the ways in which Lispector opposes opaqueness to legibility, seeking the uncharted territory outside the logic of historical time or the colonial gaze. Reading Lispector’s novel through the notion of “writing by ear” (bearing multiple meanings, mostly in relation to the re-negotiation of the voice-dominant Western perception about writing) will prove useful in understanding the intricate and tangled relation between Euro-American literature and the Global South in terms of complex forms of heritage hybridization and designs of global memory. Keywords: poiesis, totality, Global South, creolization, urban, listening, modernity

Politics of Symbolising Female Characters in Paulo Coelho’s By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s works are generally known for inspiring readers and using literary symbols to narrate complex philosophical concepts. Out of the seventeen works of Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept describes the conflicts faced by two lovers who are brought together by fate after eleven years. Re-joined, they set out for an excursion together as the issues in their relationship emerge again. Though Coelho explicitly uses water as a literary symbol in the novel, this paper closely analyses how the female characters in the same novel are also symbolised, making them symbols of self-submission. It thereby probes the complexity of the connection between female characters and water as literary symbols within the same context.

“El prisionero”: a romance in a story by João Guimarães Rosa

Recorded since the 16th century by oral and written traditions, the romance “El prisionero” was transmitted by different ethnic groups, from the Iberian Peninsula to Spanish and Portuguese colonies of the New World. Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa rephrased this vast repertoire of traditions in his prose fiction. Considering this premise and reference works on the Iberian romance, this study aims to discuss the possible influence of “El prisionero” in “Quadrinho de estória” (1967), examining themes and motives of the tale and the romance.

The eviction room: How Carolina Maria de Jesus can help us analyze migration, segregation, and the politics of citizenship in the city

In this paper, I propose the “eviction room” as an analytical frame for the linked struggles of citizens and noncitizens living at the urban margins. The metaphor of the eviction room was coined by Carolina Maria de Jesus, a late Black Brazilian writer and favela dweller. De Jesus sees the city as a house: the city center is its luxurious living room; the favela, its eviction room, a precarious space to which the racialized urban poor are pushed like disposable objects. Expanding on this metaphor, we can think of those segregated and stigmatized in a city’s eviction rooms as not only physically but also politically cast out. Regardless of their legal citizenship status, eviction room dwellers are constructed as the immanent others of the “good citizens” inhabiting the city’s living rooms. Segregated in space, their presence is transient in time given their “evictability.” While the frame of the eviction room can help us make sense of the urban marginalization of both citizens and noncitizens, it assumes neither their social homogeneity nor a united “politics of the evicted.” I expand on possible strategies within such politics, as well as on the spatial and temporal dimensions of the city as a house with an ever-shifting plan. The eviction room advances a research agenda centered on migration, residential segregation, and the politics of citizenship relevant to urban contexts across the global south and north.

Portugueses em O cortiço e Emigrantes

Este artigo apresenta uma análise comparada dos romances O cortiço (1890), do brasileiro Aluísio Azevedo, e Emigrantes (1928), do português Ferreira de Castro. O objetivo é identificar como portugueses que emigraram para o Brasil foram representados em personagens dessas obras. Constatou-se que a migração em O cortiço aparece como degeneração provocada pelo meio social e natural hostil do Brasil, conforme preceitos da estética naturalista. Sob efeito do sol, da pobreza e da paisagem humana brasileira, os portugueses ou enriquecem pelo roubo e pela exploração da mão de obra, inclusive escrava, ou se submetem a uma vida de vícios. Por outro lado, esse fluxo migratório aparece como miragem em Emigrantes, pois a possibilidade de enriquecimento na América se desvanece no confronto com a experiência concreta dos personagens. No estudo, são mobilizadas contribuições dos críticos Antonio Cândido, Eduardo Lourenço e Miguel Torga, além de estatísticas que contextualizam a imigração portuguesa no Brasil.

Review of “A Vida Secreta das Cidades (The Secret Life of Cities)” by Mateus Soares de Azevedo

“The Secret Life of Cities”, authored by Brazilian writer Mateus Soares de Azevedo, fathoms the unknown spiritual dimensions present in the culture, art and history of emblematic cities around the world. The analytical and contemplative work is carried out by the author in loco in symbolic cities belonging to six religious traditions – Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Christianity. The author's modus operandi is not that of the voyeur, the adventurer, or the collector of novelties, but rather that of the pilgrim in search of knowledge.

O processo antimodernista da revista D. Quixote

In Rio de Janeiro, under the control of Brazilian writer Manuel Bastos Tigre, the D. Quixote magazine (1917-1926) published prejudiced content aimed at critiquing the São Paulo modernist movement between 1920 and 1926. Employing humor along with textual and visual resources, D. Quixote conveyed ableism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, and the stigmatization of musical and popular practices. To qualify the intensity of prejudiced expression in publications of the process, the author defined the category of ‘expressive aggressiveness’. Due to the synchrony and similarity of part of the content, elements of D. Quixote’s process were compared with elements of the anti-modernist campaigns of the São Paulo newspapers A Gazeta (1921-1922) and Folha da Noite (1923). Utilizing keyword searches in the Digital Newspaper Library of the Brazilian National Library relevant publications were found. Likewise, the arguments of researchers in humor and Brazilian history were considered. This report records the names and artworks questioned at the reception of São Paulo modernism in Rio de Janeiro, shedding light about the social construction of prejudice. Notably, journalists, writers, and humorists engaged in producing prejudiced content as means to engage in debate about art.

POSSESSION AND CONSUMPTION: CLARICE LISPECTOR AND THE ETHICS OF MYSTICISM

Abstract Many critics have called Clarice Lispector a mystic. Lispector, however, was not a religious figure, but rather a 20th-century Brazilian writer who was influenced by both her Jewish background and her Catholic Brazilian context. There are various forms of Jewish and Christian mysticism that reject transcendent union with God and, by referencing them, I elucidate the complexity of Lispector’s mystical fiction. By looking at challenges to mystical union in these traditions, I aim to show the ethical complexity of this concept and how that complexity is deepened through Lispector’s writing as she problematises blurred boundaries between self and Other.

Theorising Belle Époque Rio de Janeiro through Opium: João do Rio’s “Visões d’ópio” as a Postcolonial Framework

In 1905, Brazilian writer João do Rio published the crônica “Visões d’ópio” (Visions of opium), an account of his forays into the Chinese opium dens of Rio de Janeiro. While opium is often emblematic of both Parisian cosmopolitanism and exotic Orientalism in fin-de-siècle literature, I argue that the drug is less a replication of these coordinates in Brazil than a method of geopolitical thinking. Drawing from opium’s extractive history in China and its versatility as a material thing – plant, commodity, drug, alkaloid – I argue that opium as theory and praxis not only reconfigures the writer’s experience of Rio, but also makes stark the strategies behind and costs of Brazil’s colonial formation. While opium sustains a desire for modernity through its exotic and cosmopolitan imaginaries, its destabilising effects on the body disrupt fantasies of colonial amalgamation, exposing histories of extraction and racialised labour implicit in the drug’s circulation. Through an analysis that bridges empirical and new materialisms – and from a Chinese geographical axis that puts Brazil into a transnational dialogue beyond Europe – opium becomes a medium for thinking through Brazil’s colonial roots and its place in the world among other nation-states during a period of transition from empire to republic.

Bocatorta, a Brazilian Ghoul: Adaptations and Influence of Anglo Arabic Folklore in Monteiro Lobato

One case of Gothic adaptation of pre-Islamic folklore resides in the figure of the ghoul. This Mesopotamian mythical creature was reinvented by Antoine Galland in the European context around 1718, when he translate and rewrote the collection of Hindi-Persian-Arabic narratives known as the One Thousand and One Nights. This article analyses the influence of this European ghoul on the creation of Bocatorta, protagonist of an eponymous short story published by Monteiro Lobato – an important Brazilian writer – in his Urupês (1918). I examine the influence of Galland’s work on Lobato’s work, alongside that of Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), one of Lobato’s main inspirations for the character of Bocatorta.

The Hour of the Star: Life and Writing of Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector is one of the most important Brazilian writers of the 20th century. In her writings, she explores the limits of the Portuguese language and creates her own literary style. The article will map some of her aesthetic searches that are, at the same time, vital. The article is organized through two moments: a biographical one, in which relevant aspects of her life that will have an echo in her work are indicated; and another focused on her fiction writing, in which the aesthetic commitment of her books is highlighted. The Hour of the Star is the title of her latest novel, a title read by Hélène Cixous as an anticipatory metaphor for her own death. We return to it as a trope, no longer to refer to its finiteness but to celebrate its opportune rereading outside Latin America.

Бразилиа — бразильский Санкт-Петербург?

Based on the concept of “text of the city”, formulated in the works of Yuri Lotman and Vladimir Toporov within the studies undertaken by Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School in the decades of 1970–1980s, the article considers the possibility of tracing some similarities between the Petersburg text of Russian culture and the text of the capital of Brazil — the city of Brasilia — in Brazilian culture. In particular, we are talking about the chronicle “In the early beginnings of Brasilia” (1970) by Clarice Lispector, which reflects the first impressions of the Brazilian writer from the newly built capital. The texts of St. Petersburg and Brasilia seem to us to be similar semiotic structures. One can note the presence of the binary opposition city-nature, the mythologization of the foundation of the city and its creators, the motive of its artificiality and ideal visibility. However, there are significant differences between the texts of both capitals. In the case of the Brazilian capital, this is a relatively recent text, so there are significantly fewer works in which this city is mentioned. The geographical position is also a significant difference: for example, St. Petersburg is a border city, while Brasilia is located in the center of the country. That is why, while eschatological motifs predominate in the Petersburg text, Brasilia’s text clearly expresses the connection between earth and sky, which is characteristic of concentric cities.

Contrastive Analysis of English and Arabic Versions of Coelho’s Novel Eleven Minutes

This exploratory research investigates linguistic and cultural challenges in English and Arabic translations of Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s novel, Eleven Minutes, which was originally written in Portuguese. This study raises the following questions: (1) How does the functional-pragmatic model of House prove to be advantageous to the contrastive analysis of translations of Eleven Minutes? (2) To what extent are the translators whose work is examined in the current research faithful to the ST? (3) How intensely are linguistic-textual elements prioritized over cultural aspects in the conveyance of the ST message in either translation? This work employs Juliane House’s model of translation quality assessment to make a comparative analysis of the source text with both translations and to highlight the relationship of linguistic components with the relevant communication process. Furthermore, the techniques adopted in both translations are examined through excerpts taken from each of the three versions of the book. The registers of the source text and those of the target texts are analyzed and compared based on the register analysis of House’s model. Consequently, the study demonstrates how the conceptual and interpersonal functions of language are affected in the target texts. The outcome of this qualitative analysis leads to the identification of the methods adopted by the translators, mainly referring to overt and covert translation methods. Overall, it is concluded that the English translation is significantly linked to the source text by pragmatic equivalence, in contrast, the Arabic translation is connected to the source text by significant functional equivalence that highlights the cultural filter used in the text.

Ж.М. Феррейра де Кастро и «зеленый ад» Амазонии. К вопросу об истоках литературной традиции

The article is devoted to the origin and formation of the so-called green hell literature — a variety of Latin American tellurism. The origins of this phenomenon are associated with the work of the famous Brazilian writer and journalist Euclides da Cunha. The novels of the Portuguese-Brazilian regionalist writer José Maria Ferreira de Castro The Jungle (A selva, 1930) and the Colombian José Eustasio Rivera The Vortex ( La vorágine, 1925) are considered as a continuation of the tradition laid down by da Cunha. The paper considers typical features and differences in the approach to the material in The Jungle and The Vortex. The genetic memory of the pioneers is analyzed as a means of recreating the image of the rainforest, which allows Ferreira de Castro to demonstrate the inversion of the traditional myth of the American Eden. The analysis allows to bring out some new features in the image of the Amazonian selva, which were subsequently developed and / or rethought by other writers of the green hell literature: overreaching (going beyond limits), a specific sense of closed space, irrational cruelty, chaos of the self-reproducing primordial nature. It is emphasized that not only heaven and hell, but also many other Biblical and Christian images are recoded and desacralized. The Portuguese-Brazilian tradition of understanding the green hell of da Cunha and Ferreira de Castro with its reliance on the personal experience of the writer, the poetics of testemunho, can be viewed as the first contribution to the concept of marvelous Latin American reality.

Translation and political climate: an analysis of the translation of Brazilian writer Jorge Amado’s works in China

Based on China translation history (since 1949), concerning the works of Jorge Amado, a Brazilian writer, this article is intended not only to analyze the background in which the writer and his works were introduced into China, but also to discuss the ties and relationship between translation and power. The translation of Jorge Amado’s works can be mainly divided into three important periods: the 1950s, the 1980s and the 2010s, mainly showing the manipulation of power over translation. This manipulation presents itself in different forms at different historical periods, therefore producing different translation situations. At the same time, translation also has an impact on power, and in general, under the manipulation of power, translation serves power.

Os tradutores de Clarice Lispector nos Estados Unidos

ABSTRACT Clarice Lispector’s entry as an author into the United States happens at different moments, beginning in the 1950s, with the translation of several short stories, carried out among others by Elizabeth Bishop, culminating with a biography of the author written in English by Benjamin Moser in 2009, and a little later, with the publication of the short stories and other pieces, in the emblematic edition entitled The Complete Stories, in 2015, edited by Benjamin Moser and translated by Katrina Dodson. These publications put the translators in the spotlight, as they were responsible for renewing Clarice’s presence on American soil. This paper aims to research the translators of Clarice Lispector’s works in the English-speaking cultural system, considering only the American context. The aim is to highlight these professional figures who contributed to the dissemination of this important Brazilian writer abroad, analyze their profile, and also examine their presence and imprint on some of the translations performed, such as prefaces, postscripts, notes, etc., assessing the degree of visibility and invisibility (Venuti 2021). By considering the relevance of translators as social actors/dialogical bodies (Robinson, 1991, 2012) and as “translating subjects” (Berman, 1995) and the fact that English translations of Clarice’s works have influenced and stimulated the circulation of this author in other literary systems, by examining the biobibliographical profile, verifying its presence or not in the paratexts (Genette, 2009/Batchelor, 2018) of Clarice Lispector’s English-language translators and their translation position, as well as their project and horizon (Berman, 1995), we gain an understanding of the translation policies of a given cultural polysystem.

Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire