ANDRADE, Mario (Raul) de (LITERATURE)

Born: Sao Paulo, Brazil, 9 October 1893. Education: Educated at Escola de Nossa Senhora do Carmo, Sao Paulo, 1905-09; Alvares Penteado Commerical School, Sao Paulo, 1910; studied piano at the Musical and Dramatic Conservatory, Sao Paulo, 1911, degree 1917. Career: Involved in avant-garde artistic circles in the 1920s: co-organizer, the Modern Art Week at the Teatro Municipal, Sao Paulo, 1922; professor of the history of music and aesthetics, Sao Paulo Conservatory, 1925; contributor, ”Taxi” column for Diario Nacional, from 1928; worked for the Ministry of Education’s schools’ music reform programme, 1930; co-founder, with Paulo Duarte, and director, Municipal Department of Culture, Sao Paulo, 1934-37: founded the Municipal Library, the Department of National Heritage, the journal Revista do Arquivo Municipal de Sao Paulo, and Sao Paulo’s Ethnography and Folklore Society (and its first president); moved to Rio de Janeiro, 1937; director, Federal University Institute of Arts, Rio de Janeiro, 1938-40, and held the chair of philosophy and history of art; headed the Enciclopedia Brasileira project for the National Book Institute, 1939; made anthropological research trips to northern Brazil, under commission from the Department of National Heritage, 1941. Organizer, first National Language Congress, 1937; co-founder, Brazilian Society of Writers, 1942. Member: Sao Paulo Academy of Letters. Died: 25 February 1945.

Publications

Collections

Obras completas. 24 vols., 1960-91.


1. Obra imatura.

2. Poesias completas.

3. Amar, verbo intransitivo.

4. Macunaima.

5. Os contos de Belazarte.

6. Ensaio sobre a musica brasileira.

7. Musica doce musica.

8. Pequena historia da musica.

9. Namoros com a medicina.

10. Aspectos da literatura brasileira.

11. Aspectos da musica brasileira.

12. Aspectos das artes plasticas no Brasil.

13. Musica de feitigaria no Brasil.

14. O baile das quatro artes.

15. Os filhos da Candinha.

16. O padre Jesuino de Monte Carmelo

17. Contos novos.

18. Dangas dramaticas do Brasil.

19. Modinhas imperiais.

20. O empalhador de Passarinho.

21. Quatro Pessoas.

22. Dicionario musical brasileiro.

23. Vida de cantador.

24. Cartas de Mario de Andrade a Luis da Camara Cascudo. Obras [50th Anniversary of Modern Art Week Edition]. 15 vols.,

1972.

Poesias completas, edited by Dilea Zanotto Manfio. 1987.

Verse

Ha uma gota de sangue em cadapoema (as Mario Sobral). 1917.

Pauliceia desvairada. 1926; as Hallucinated City (bilingual edition),edited and translated by Jack E. Tomlins, 1968.

Cla do Jabuti. 1927.

Remate de Males. 1930.

Lira paulistana. 1946.

Fiction

Primeiro andar (stories). 1926.

Amar, verbo intransitivo. 1927; edited by Tele Porto Ancona Lopez, 1982; as Fraulein, translated by Margaret Richardson Hollingsworth, 1933.

Macunaima. 1928; edited by Tele Porto Ancona Lopez, 1978; as Macunaima, translated by Edward Arthur Goodland, 1984.

Belazarte. 1934.

Contos novos. 1947.

Other

A escrava que nao e isaura. 1925.

Compendio de historia da musica. 1929; revised edition, as Pequena historia da musica, 1942.

Modinhas imperiais. 1930.

Musica, doce musica. 1933.

O Aleijadinho e Alvares de Azevedo. 1935.

A musica e a cangaio populares no Brasil. 1936.

Namoros com a medicina. 1939.

A expressao musical dos Estados Unidos. 1940.

Musica do Brasil. 1941.

O movimento modernista. 1942.

Aspectos de literatura brasileira. 1943.

O baile das quatro artes. 1943.

Os filhos da Candinha. 1943.

O Empalhador de Passarinho. 1944(?).

Cartas de Mario Andrade a Manuel Bandeira. 1958.

Dangas dramaticas do Brasil. 3 vols., 1959.

Musica de feitigaria do Brasil. 1963.

Setenta e uma cartas de Mario de Andrade. 1963.

Aspectos das artes plasticas no Brasil. 1965.

Mario de Andrade escreve a Alceu, Meyer e outros, edited by Lygia Fernandes. 1968.

Itinerario: cartas a Alphonsus de Guimaraens filho. 1974.

Taxi e cronicas no Diario Nacional. 1976.

O turista aprendiz (diaries), edited by Tele Porto Ancona Lopez.1976.

O banquete. 1977.

A ligao do Amigo: cartas de Mario de Andrade a Carlos Drummond de Andrade. 1982.

Correspondente contumaz 1925-1944 (letters to Pedro Naval), edited by Fernando da Rocha Peres. 1982.

Cartas: Mario de Andrade, Oneyda Alvarenga. 1983.

Entrevistas e depoimentos, edited by Tele Porto Ancona Lopez, 1983.

Cartas de Mario de Andrade a Alvaro Lins. 1983.

Os cocos, edited by Oneyda Alvarenga. 1984.

Cartas de Mario de Andrade a Prudente de Moraes, edited by Georgina Koifman. 1985.

Miguel de Andrade por el mismo, edited by Paulo Duarte. 1985.

Dicionario musical brasileiro, edited by Oneyda Alvarenga and Flavia Camargo Toni. 1989.

Cartas de Trabalho: Correspondencia com Rodrigo Mello Franco de Andrade (1936-1945). 1989.

A ligao do guru: cartas a Guilherme Figueiredo, 1937-1945. 1989.

Querida Henriqueta: cartas de Mario de Andrade a Henriqueta Lisboa, edited by Lauro Palu. 1991.

Sera o benedito! Artigos publicados no suplemento em rotogravura de O Estado de S. Paulo, edited by Tele Porto Ancona Lopez. 1992.

Critical Studies:

Ligao de Mario de Andrade by Ledo Ivo, 1952; Mario de Andrade by Fernando Mendes de Almeida, 1962; ”Some Formal Types in the Poetry of Mario de Andrade” by David William Foster, in Luso-Brazilian Review, December 1965; The Modernist Movement in Brazil: A Literary Study by John Nist, 1967; ”The Literary Criticism of Mario de Andrade” by Thomas R. Hart, in Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History edited by Peter Demetz and others, 1968; Roteiro de Macunaima by M. Cavalcanti Proenga, 1969; Poesia e prosa de Mario de Andrade by Joao Pacheco, 1970; Morfologia de Macunaima by Haroldo de Campos, 1973; Roteiro de Macuniama by M. Cavalcanti Proenga, 1977; Politica e poesia em Mario de Andrade by Joan Dassin, 1978; ”Macunaima as Brazilian Hero”, in Latin American Literary Review, 1978, and Literatura e Cinema: Macunaima: do modernismo na literatura ao cinema novo, 1982, both by Randal Johnson; Mario de Andrade e a revolugao da linguagem by Jose Maria Barbosa Gomes, 1979; ”Preguiga and Power: Mario de Andrade’s Macunaima" by Renata R. Mautner, in Luso-Brazilian Review, Summer 1984; Mario de Andrade: Hoje edited by Carlos E.O. Berriel, 1990; A presenga do povo na cultura brasileira: ensaio sobre o pensamento de Mario de Andrade e Paulo Friere by Vivian Schelling, 1991; Modernisme bresilien et negritude antillaise: Mario de Andrade et Aime Cesaire by Maria de Lourdes Teodoro, 1999; Mario de Andrade: the Creative Works by Jose I. Suarez and Jack E. Tomlins, 2000; Correspondencia Mario de Andrade and Manuel Banderia, with introduction by Marcos Antonio de Moraes, 2000.

To call Mario de Andrade the creator of Brazilian modernism is an oversimplification, but if Oswald de Andrade, fellow poet and novelist, was its catalyst and presiding genius, Mario was surely the doyen, supreme symbol, and principal ideologue of that iconoclastic and brilliant artistic movement that burst upon the Brazilian cultural scene in 1922, changing forever the aesthetic landscape of Brazil. Andrade also distinguished himself in more, and disparate, fields than any other single individual among the talented generation of writers and artists that included the sculptor Brecheret, the composer Villa Lobos and the important poets Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Born in Sao Paulo in 1893, Andrade first studied sciences, but entered the Sao Paulo Conservatory of Musical and Dramatic Art in 1911, graduating in 1917 with the piano as his special subject. His musical background and a lifelong passion for folklore and the plastic arts caused him to make a mark early in his writing career as journalist, critic, and essayist. His writings on music, painting and folklore, especially that of his native Brazil, run to many volumes; but he was to make his mark most spectacularly as writer of lyric poetry and prose fiction. At the time of World War I, the predominant fashion in Brazilian poetry was that of a polite symbolism and Parnassianism. Andrade’s first volume, Ha uma gota de sangue em cada poema [There Is a Drop of Blood in Every Poem] betrays the Parnassian influence but it contains, too, the unmistakeable rebelliousness and innovatory drive of all his imaginative oeuvre. He was destined to spearhead the artistic revolution of modernismo that was inspired by the Symbolist and Expressionist currents abroad in Europe in the last decades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th. In formal terms, this meant experimentation with free verse, a broadening of terms of reference with regard to the possible thematics of poetry, and an impulse to embrace, artistically, the whole of lived experience—all the phenomena of early 20th-century life; hence the inordinate impact on Andrade and his artistic comrades-in-arms of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto published in Paris in 1909. The age of speed and of the machine would fuel the imagination of the Brazilian Modernist movement in its heroic phase. Indeed, Andrade and his friends were called ”futurists” in the months leading up to the Sao Paulo Modern Art Week they organized in February 1922. Andrade had written most of his second and most famous book of poetry, Pauliceia desvairada (Hallucinated City)— referring to Sao Paulo—in 1920, but it had been quoted extensively in the press and widely disseminated by members of the group, so that the poetry of the man whom Oswald de Andrade had hailed in a famous article as ”my Futurist poet” was predictably greeted with boos and catcalls of the massed opponents of modernismo who crowded the hall in February of that year to hear it recited. The impact of this aggressive, anti-bourgeois poetry has a very rough English parallel in the reception accorded to the poetry of T.S. Eliot up to and including The Waste Land, although Hallucinated City and the febrile urban poetry that was to follow it was far more uneven in quality; but just as Eliot found himself the poet of London, so Andrade became in the 1920s the quintessential urban poet of Sao Paulo.

The collections of poetry that Andrade published later in the 1920s and in the 1930s add to the iconoclasm, the humour and the irreverence a wealth of allusion to Brazilian myth and folklore. At its worst, this poetry is undisciplined and structured in a wayward fashion. This ill-discipline is redeemed by the humour, the by now typically Modernist incorporation into lyric poetry of the rhythms and lexis of colloquial speech—the language of the street—and by the pervasive, gentle lyricism. In ”Momento” (1937) he writes:

The wind cuts people in two

Only a desire for clarity buoys up the world. . .

The sun shines. The rain rains. And the gale

Scatters in the blue the trombones of the clouds.

Nobody gets to be one in this city.

The doves cling to the skyscrapers, comes the rain.

Comes the cold. And comes the anguish . . . It is this violent wind That bursts out of the gorges of the human soil Demanding sky, peace and a little spring.

Andrade was to earn considerable critical acclaim within Brazil for his prose fiction. Few Brazilians have written better short stories, but it is his novel, Macunaima, that has brought him most enduring, and international, celebrity as a storyteller. Macunaima (”The Hero Without Character” is a translation of its subtitle) is a surrealistic fantasy in which Andrade draws on his compendious folkloric research in order to weave a coherent fiction that is, at the same time, also a compendium of Brazil itself. Here, he demonstrates his lifelong contention that popular forms of expression are legitimate material for the elaboration of high art—a cornerstone of Brazilian Modernist ideology. Thus are Brazil and its culture rescued from its European and colonialist past. Yet, the protagonist has no character because of his colonial status. The 20-year-old, magical Amazonian chief whose hilarious passage along with his brothers Jigue and Maanape through the society and the streets of Sao Paulo is wide-eyed and innocent. Macunaima, the hero, exhibits all of the vices and virtues Andrade saw in his countryman together with an unformed character: only when Brazil comes of age, Andrade declared, will she emancipate herself from Europe and acquire a character. The setting of the opening chapters is Amazonian, but the novel is by no means regionalist. Macunaima’s magical journeys quarter the length and breadth of Brazil from the island of Marajo in the mouth of the Amazon to Rio Grande in the far south. In the course of these peregrinations Macunaima experiences extreme suffering and extreme joy. At the close of his journeying he is in a state of profound disenchantment. The Brazilian gods take pity and transform him into a new constellation of stars—the Great Bear, in the midst of which ”he broods alone in the vast expanse of heaven.”

Andrade succeeded, as perhaps only Lima Barreto among Brazilian writers before his time did, in viewing Brazil and its people through entirely Brazilian eyes. This capacity, he felt, was the true legacy of Brazilian modernism. Barreto had opined that in Brazil ”the desert encircles the city.” Andrade, urban poet, expressed eloquently his awareness of the difficulty of this pan-Brazilian enterprise, the dilemma of the mutually alienated Brazils, in his ”Dois poemas Acreanos” [Two Poems Concerning Acre]:

Brazilian rubber-tapper, In the gloom of the forest Rubber-tapper, sleep. Striking the chord of love I sleep. How incredibly hard this is! I want to sing but cannot, I want to feel and I don’t feel The Brazilian word That will make you sleep. . . Rubber-tapper, sleep. . .

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