GUIMARAES ROSA, Joao (LITERATURE)

Born: Cordisburgo, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 27 June 1908. Education: Educated at the Colegio Arnaldo, Belo Horizonte; Medical School of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, 1925-30, degree 1930. Family: Married 1) Lygia Cabral Pena in 1930, two daughters; 2) Aracy Moebius de Carvalho in 1938. Career: Public servant, Statistical Service, Minas Gerais, 1929-31; doctor in private practice, Itaguara, Minas Gerais, 1931-32; volunteered as military medical officer, Belo Horizonte, 1932; medical officer, Ninth Infantry Battalion, Barbacena, Minas Gerais, 1934; passed civil service examinations and joined Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1934; vice-consul, Hamburg, Germany, 1938-42: briefly interned in Baden Baden, following Brazil’s entry into World War II, 1942; secretary, Brazilian Embassy in Bogota, Colombia, 1942-44; director, Ministry of State’s Documentation Service, 1944-46; secretary, Brazilian Delegation to Paris Peace Conference, 1946; secretary-general, Brazilian Delegation to Ninth Pan-American Conference, Bogota, 1948; principal secretary, Brazilian Embassy, Paris, 1949-51; cabinet head, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rio de Janeiro, 1951-53; budget director, Ministry of State, Rio de Janeiro, 1953-58; head of Frontier Demarcation Service, 1962-67. Vice-president, First Latin American Writers Conference, Mexico City, 1965. Awards: Brazilian Academy of Letters poetry prize, 1936; Carmen Dolores Barbosa prize, 1957; Paula Brito prize, 1957; Brazilian Academy Machado de Assis prize, 1961. Member: Brazilian Academy of Letters, 1963. Died: 19 November 1967.


Publications

Fiction

Sagarana (stories). 1946; revised edition, 1951; as Sagarana: A Cycle of Stories, translated by Harriet de Onfs, 1966.

Corpo de baile: sete novelas (includes Manuelzao e Miguilim; No Urubuquaqua, no pinhem; Noites do Sertao). 2 vols., 1956; 3 vols., 1964-66.

Grande Sertao: Veredas. 1956; as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, translated by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onfs, 1963.

Primeiras estorias. 1962; as The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories, translated by Barbara Shelby, 1968.

Os sete pecados capitais (novellas), with others. 1964. Campo geral (stories). 1964.

Tutameia: terceiras estorias. 1967.

Estas estorias. 1969.

Contos (stories), edited by Heitor Megale and Marilena Matsuola. 1978.

Other

Ave, palavra (prose and verse). 1970.

Correspondencia com o traductor italiano [Edorado Bizzarri]. 1972.

Seleta (anthology), edited by Paulo Ronai, 1973.

Sagarana emotiva: cartas de Guimaraes Rosa a Paulo Danteas. 1975.

Rosiana: uma coletanea de conceitos, maximas e brocardos, edited by Paulo Ronai. 1983.

Critical Studies:

Trilhas no Grande Sertao by M. Calvalcanti Proenga, 1958; Guimaraes Rosa edited by Heriqueta Lisboa and others, 1966; Joao Guimaraes Rosa: travessia literaria, 1968, and ”Joao Guimaraes Rosa,” in Studies in Short Fiction, 8(1), 1971, both by Mary L. Daniel; Em memoria de Joao Guimaraes Rosa by various authors, 1968; Guimaraes Rosa by Adonias Filho and others, 1969; Guimaraes Rosa by Francisco Assis Brasil, 1969; Guimaraes Rosa by Guilhermino Cesar and others, 1969; Guimaraes Rosa em tres dimensoes by Pedro Xosto, Augusto de Campos, and Harolde de Campos, 1970; O mundo movente de Guimaraes Rosa by Jose Carlos Garbuglio, 1972; Structural Perspectivism in Guimaraes Rosa by W. Martins, 1973; Guimaraes Rosa: dois estudos by Nelly Novaes Coelho and Ivana Versiani, 1975; O insolito em Guimaraes Rosa e Borges by Lenira Marques Covizzi, 1978; A Construgao do Romance em Guimaraes Rosa by Wendel Santos, 1978; O dialogo no Grande Sertao: Veredas by Paulo de Tarso Santos, 1978; Joao Guimaraes Rosa (in English) by Jon S. Vincent, 1978; The Process of devitalization of the Language and Narrative Structure in the Fiction of Joao Guimaraes Rosa and Julio Cortazar, 1980, and The Synthesis Novel in Latin America: A Study of Grande Sertao: Veredas, 1991, both by Eduardo de Faria Coutinho; Guimaraes Rosa: signo e sentimento by Suzi Frankl Sperber, 1982; Guimaraes Rosa edited by Eduardo de Faria Coutinho, 1983; A culturapopular em Grande Sertao: Veredas by Leonardo Arroyo, 1984; O discurso oral em Grande Sertao: Veredas by Teresinha Souto Ward, 1984; Logos and the Word: The Novel of Language and Linguistic Motivation in Grande Sertao: Veredas and Tres tristes tigres by Stephanie Merrim, 1988; Guimaraes Rosa: O alquimista do coragao by Jose Maria Martins, 1994; O roteiro de Deus: Dois estudos sobre Guimaraes Rosa by Helofsa Vilhena de Araujo, 1996; Viagem ao sertao brasileiro: Leitura geo-socio-antropologica de Ariano Suassuna, Euclides da Cunha,Guimaraes Rosa by Vernaide Wanderley and Eugenia Menezes, 1997; O mito de Fausto em Grande sertao: Veredas by Fani Schiffer Duraes, 1999; Guimaraes Rosa by Walnice Nogueira Galvao, 2000; Guimaraes Rosa: Magma e genese da obra by Maria Celia Leonel, 2000; Palavra e tempo: Ensaios sobre Dante, Carroll e Guimaraes Rosa by Helofsa Vilhena de Araujo, 2001.

When Joao Guimaraes Rosa died on 19 November 1967 at the age of 59, he had published only five works of prose fiction; however, these five volumes had earned him a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters and undisputed recognition as the greatest writer of prose fiction to emerge in Brazil since 1945.

He was born in Cordisburgo in the state of Minas Gerais in 1908. He studied medicine but practised it for only four years—first in the backlands of the Brazilian sertao and later in the army—before joining the Brazilian diplomatic service in which he would serve for the remainder of his life. His childhood and his time spent as a country doctor provided the raw material with which he fashioned an extraordinary fictional world—an amalgam of fantasy, folklore, and myth, yet invariably resting upon a bedrock of harsh reality in which the life of the inhabitants of the vast wilderness, or sertao, of northern Minas Gerais and southern Bahia comes vividly and exuberantly to life. The way of life of the farmers, traders, ranchers, cowboys, and bandits of the sertao is closely observed and painstakingly described. To call these fictions regionalist would be to misunderstand totally the scope and richness of a fictional world that attains a mythic grandeur and universal significance. This attainment of the universal through the particular is well illustrated by the title of Guimaraes Rosa’s first book, a collection of novellas entitled Sagarana. Sagarana is a neologism combining the Germanic ”saga” with a Tupi Indian word, ”rana,” meaning ”in the manner of.” Naturalistic and magical by turns, sometimes simultaneously, these novellas tell of a world in which animals talk and think like human beings, a young man insults a warlock and is punished with temporary blindness during which he learns much about himself, and a murderous bully wins redemption after a lifetime of tribulation and wandering. Sagarana was followed ten years later by a second volume of novellas entitled Corpo de baile [Corps de Ballet] and the vast novel, Grande Sertao: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) which appeared in the same year. A literal translation of the latter would be something like ”Great Backlands: Paths.” The novel is as enigmatic and elusive as its title. It consists of an autobiography told by an ageing rancher to an unseen interlocutor. Riobaldo relates the story of his career as a jagungo, or bandit of the sertao, of his love for his mysterious, hermaphrodite comrade-in-arms, Diadorim, and of his existential anguish over the possibility that he may have sold his soul to the devil. Riobaldo tells his story in the hope that his listener may be able to pronounce on the mystery and thus release him from his torment. It is a story of love, hate, revenge, and betrayal, a tale of epic proportions in which bandit armies quarter the sertao in search of their enemy, and in Riobaldo’s case, so that his destiny may be charted and realized.

It also reveals Guimaraes Rosa as a profound student of medieval and Renaissance European literature. Like the world of the medieval epic and romance, Guimaraes Rosa’s fictional world tells of the constant struggle between good and evil, and contains large doses of tragedy and ecstasy as well as an underlying current of poetic justice. It is epic as well as mythic, because its protagonist’s trajectory is clearly, on one hand, a rite of passage, and on the other, a chivalric quest during which deeds are done in the name of an absent lady, Otacflia, and in order to fulfil the chivalric enterprise: the defeat of the traitor in the midst, bandit leader Hermogenes, so as to avenge the death of the betrayed—supreme commander Juca Ramiro. The sertao becomes a vast natural theatre or cosmic space in which the jagungos act out this drama and become at one with their environment. Neither the individual nor the space in which they move has primacy. In its scope and ambition, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands has been compared to The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Faust, Moby Dick, and Ulysses. In its themes, the work is certainly Faustian, but linguistically-speaking, the comparison with Joyce’s Ulysses is the most useful one; for the language in which the novel and the novellas that preceded it are expressed is baroque and intensely poetic. Guimaraes Rosa employs alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, and verse rhythms. His vocabulary is enormous, and as in the case of Joyce, there is a constant recourse to neologisms of which there can be as many as a dozen on a single page. The language is poetic not only in its evocations of the Brazilian sertao, but also in the fundamental sense that it offers incessant renewal of a Portuguese enriched by a lexis borrowed from numerous languages. Guimaraes Rosa also has a taste for metaphor. His fourth book, Primeiras estorias (The Third Book of the River and Other Stories), is a set of short stories in one of which a family man, for no apparent reason, says goodbye to his family, paddles in a canoe to the centre of a wide river, and remains there until his son, years later, offers to take his place. The English title of this story, chosen as the title story for the volume when it was translated and published in 1968, reads ”The Third Bank of the River,” a notion bespeaking mysticism and utter dislocation.

Guimaraes Rosa’s remaining books are Tutameia [Trifle], another set of even briefer stories, the posthumous short stories of Estas estorias [These Tales], and the miscellany, Ave, palavra [Hail, Word]. His prose fiction is little known in Europe. This is due to the fact that translating him into any other language has proved a daunting task and because, in any case, he wrote in Portuguese. This last fact has meant that, unlike the great Spanish-American writers of the Latin American ”Boom,” he has yet to be ”discovered” by the English-speaking world. The day this happens, the Old World will encounter, with astonishment, a rural, Brazilian post-modernist whose total achievement constitutes the great watershed of Brazilian literature, a literary phenomenon commensurate with that of Joyce in English letters.

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