Travel Reference
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representation of wealth: the workers, the numerous
pelles
(giant globes of rubber) that
often cram the foreground, the ladies riding sidesaddle on white mules, the portraits of
private steamships. Such photographs were displays of wealth as obvious as the jewelry
and blood stock in the portraiture of European and American elites and their estates.
Iended upwriting more ofa biographical essay than Iintended. Like da Cunha'sown
Amazon fragments, this work is part biography, part social history, part nature writing,
part geographic translation. The last part of my book relies extensively on the court doc-
uments and depositions of the Dilermando de Assis trials, along with Amazonian mater-
ials produced by the police scribe who accompanied Solon da Cunha on his fatal trip.
For this reason my version of the final days of Euclides da Cunha is different from those
found in the biographies of Roberto Ventura and Frederic Amory, who emphasized dif-
ferent sources, including Euclides da Cunha II and Euclides I's close friend Henrique
Coelho Neto.
ThisbookmeanttointroduceEnglish-speakingaswellasBrazilianreaderstoanother
dimension of Euclides da Cunha rather than stranding him and his backlanders forever
onthebloodybanksoftheVassaBarrisRiverwatchingthelastfewvanquisheddwellers
of Canudos stagger through a corpse-filled landscape on their way to Salvador. He had a
far more triumphal history to record for his
sertanejos
.
His own epic goes far beyond that time, one that is actually inscribed in every map of
Brazil, and in his history of a land that is always seen to be without one.
List of Translations
Chapter 3
Selections from “Maréchal de Ferro”
Chapter 11
“Contrastes e confrontos” (Contrasts and Comparisons)
“Conflito inevitable” (Inevitable Conflict)
“Contra os
caucheiros
” (Against the Caucho Hunters)
“Entre o Madeira e o Javari” (Between the Madeira and the Javari)
Chapter 12
“Amazônia: A gestação de um mundo” (Amazonia: A Nascent World)
Chapter 13
“Impressões gerais,” part 1 (Such Is the River)
“Impressões gerais,” part 2 (At the Threshold of a Marvelous World)
Chapter 16
Relatório de Comissão Mixta Brasileiro-Peruana de Reconhecimento do Alto Purús (Report of the
Joint Commission to the Governments of Peru and Brazil)
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