Prose (62 page)

*   *   *

But in spite of the shabbiness, the shortages, the sudden disconcerting changes for the worse in standard products and the inflation, life in Rio has compensations. Carnival is gone, but next will come St. John's Day, the second-best holiday of the year; then St. Peter's Day. For highbrows, a large exhibition of contemporary French painting will arrive in July, in honor of the quatercentenary, and later Spain is sending a ballet and an opera by de Falla. There is also to be a series of concerts of the compositions of Father José Mauricio, the 18th-century Rio de Janeiran priest-composer.

Far more enduring and important than these small treats, in what is now essentially a provincial city, is another compensation for those who have to put up with the difficulties of life in Rio. One example will make it plain. Recently a large advertisement showed a young Negro cook, overcome by her pleasure in having a new gas stove, leaning across it toward her white mistress, who leaned over from her side of the stove as they kissed each other on the cheek.

Granted that the situation is not utopian, socially speaking, and that the advertisement is silly—but could it have appeared on billboards, or in the newspapers, in Atlanta, Ga., or even in New York? In Rio, it went absolutely unremarked on, one way or the other.

1965

Gallery Note for Wesley Wehr

I have seen Mr. Wehr open his battered brief-case (with the broken zipper) at a table in a crowded, steamy coffee-shop, and deal out his latest paintings, carefully encased in plastic until they are framed, like a set of magic playing cards. The people at his table would fall silent and stare at these small, beautiful pictures, far off into space and coolness: the coldness of the Pacific Northwest coast in the winter, its different coldness in the summer. So much space, so much air, such distances and loneliness, on those flat little cards. One could almost make out the moon behind the clouds, but not quite; the snow had worn off the low hills almost showing last year's withered grasses; the white line of surf was visible but quiet, almost a mile away. Then Mr. Wehr would whisk all that space, silence, peace, and privacy back into his brief-case again. He once remarked that he would like to be able to carry a whole exhibition in his pockets.

It is a great relief to see a small work of art these days. The Chinese unrolled their precious scroll-paintings to show their friends, bit by bit; the Persians passed their miniatures about from hand to hand; many of Klee's or Bissier's paintings are hand-size. Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music (Mr. Wehr was originally a composer, and I think I detect the influence of Webern on his painting), some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world? But in spite of their size, no one could say that these pictures are “small-scale.”

Mr. Wehr works at night, I was told, with his waxes and pigments, while his cat rolls crayons about on the floor. But the observation of nature is always accurate; the beaches, the moonlight nights, look just like this. Some pictures may remind one of agates, the form called “[illegible]”; Mr. Wehr is also a collector of agates, of all kinds of stones, pebbles, semi-precious jewels, fossilized clams with opals adhering to them, bits of amber, shells, examples of hand-writing, illegible signatures—those small things that are occasionally capable of overwhelming with a chilling sensation of time and space.

He once told me that Rothko had been an influence on him, to which I replied, “Yes, but Rothko in a whisper.” Who does not feel a sense of release, of calm and quiet, in looking at these little pieces of our vast and ancient world that one can actually hold in the palm of one's hand?

1967

An Inadequate Tribute

Randall Jarrell was difficult, touchy, and oversensitive to criticism. He was also a marvelous conversationalist, brilliantly funny, a fine poet, and the best and most generous critic of poetry I have known. I am proud to remember that, although we could rarely meet, we remained friends for twenty years. Sometimes we quarreled, silently, in infrequent letters, but each time we met we would tell each other that it had meant nothing at all; we really were in agreement about everything that mattered.

He always seemed more alive than other people, as if constantly tuned up to the concert pitch that most people, including poets, can maintain only for short and fortunate stretches.

I like to think of him as I saw him once after we had gone swimming together on Cape Cod; wearing only bathing trunks and a very queer straw cap with a big visor, seated on the crest of a high sand dune, writing in a notebook. It was a bright and dazzling day. Randall looked small and rather delicate, but bright and dazzling, too. I felt quite sure that whatever he was writing would be bound to share the characteristics of the day and of the small man writing away so busily in the middle of it all.

1967

Introduction to
An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry
edited by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil

Poets and poetry are highly thought of in Brazil. Among men, the name of “poet” is sometimes used as a compliment or term of affection, even if the person referred to is a businessman or politician, not a poet at all. One of the most famous twentieth-century Brazilian poets, Manuel Bandeira, was presented with a permanent parking space in front of his apartment house in Rio de Janeiro, with an enamelled sign
POETA
—although he never owned a car and didn't know how to drive. When he was quite old, Bandeira taught for a few years at the University of Brazil, reaching retirement age long before he had taught the number of years necessary for a pension. Nevertheless, the Chamber of Deputies, to great applause, unanimously voted to grant him a full pension.

Almost anyone—(any man, that is, for until very recently poetry has been exclusively a masculine art in Brazil)—with literary interests has published at least one book of poems, “anyone” including doctors, lawyers, engineers, and followers of other arts. Jorge de Lima was a painter and a well-known Rio doctor as well as a poet. Candido Portinari, the painter best known outside Brazil, wrote autobiographical poems and published a book of them shortly before he died. The doings and sayings of popular poets like Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Vinicius de Moraes are constantly and affectionately reported in the newspapers. In the United States only a Pound or a Ginsberg receives as much attention from the press, but for different reasons and in different tones. Poets who produce volumes after long intervals of silence are called “Leap Year Poets,”
Bissextos;
Bandeira edited an anthology of contemporary “Leap Year” poets, showing that although their output may be small, they are esteemed and not forgotten.

It does not follow, of course, that the poetry in the many small volumes is necessarily great or even good, or that poetry is any more welcomed by publishers or sells any better in Brazil than in the United States. Editions are very small, of three hundred copies, for example; books are paperbound, as in France, and so cost comparatively little; and the poet earns very little from them. It may seem to the American visitor that the educated people whom he meets in Brazil read more poetry and
know
more poetry (often by heart) than people in the same walks of life at home. But it should be remembered that the educated elite is still a very small class, living almost entirely in five or six of the larger coastal cities, and that in a country of widespread illiteracy (forty per cent the figure usually given), the potential book-reading, book-buying public is limited. Partly because of poor communications, literary groups in these larger cities are more isolated from each other than they are in the United States—where so much has been made of the “isolation of the artist.” And if anything, Brazilian poets have a harder time making a living than do poets in the United States. There are few reviews and magazines, and these pay next to nothing. The fellowships, awards, readings, and “poet-in-residence” academic posts that help along poetic careers in North America are almost non-existent there.

Poets work in the civil service: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, usually considered the greatest living Brazilian poet, had worked for the Ministry of Education for more than thirty years when he retired in 1966. A few teach, and more go into journalism, sometimes writing columns for newspapers or picture magazines. Since his retirement, Drummond de Andrade has had a regular column of news comment and trivia in a leading Rio paper; occasionally he uses it to publish a new poem. But no matter how he earns his living, there is respect for the poet, his work, and his opinions, and for the more worldly and better connected there is opportunity in the long Latin tradition of appointing poets to diplomatic posts, even as ambassadors. Like Claudel and St.-John Perse in France, Gabriela Mistral and Neruda in Chile, Vinicius de Moraes and João Cabral de Melo Neto, among others in Brazil, have held diplomatic posts. Vinicius de Moraes (commonly known as just “Vinicius”), famous for his film-script for
Black Orpheus
and more recently for his popular songs, performs in night-clubs, produces musical shows in Brazil and other countries, and makes recordings in Europe—all ways of augmenting his income.

*   *   *

This anthology, consisting of selections from the work of fourteen poets of the modern generation and of the post-war generation of 1945, is a modest attempt to present to the American reader examples of the poetry written in Brazil during this century. Inevitably, it is more representative of the editors' personal tastes than all-inclusive. With a population of some ninety million, Brazil is by far the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world, but Portuguese is a relatively unknown language in the United States. It is understandably hard to find good American poets willing to undertake translation, much of which necessarily has to be done from literal prose translations of the Brazilian poems. The editors feel that the translators have done extremely well, keeping close to the texts and yet managing to produce “poems” preserving many of the characteristics of the originals.

Grammatically, Portuguese is a difficult language. Even well-educated Brazilians worry about writing it, and will ask friends to check their manuscripts for grammatical errors. Brazilians do not speak the way they write; the written language is more formal and somewhat cumbersome. In fact, Portuguese is an older language than Spanish, and still retains in its structure Latin forms dating from the Roman Republic. The tendency in this century has been to get away from the old, correct written style, in both prose and poetry, and to write demotic Portuguese. But this has not been completely realized, and Portuguese is still rarely written as it is spoken. A few novelists come close, in passages of conversation, and some columnists and younger poets use slang,
gíria,
almost unintelligible and changing constantly. One of the goals of the famous “Modern Art Week” in São Paulo in 1922 was to abandon the dead literary language of the nineteenth century and to write poetry in the spoken language. Much poetry of the '20s attempted this, using slang, abbreviations, ellipses, and apostrophes to indicate letters or syllables left out in ordinary, rapid speech. Very much the same thing had happened in English poetry about a decade earlier. Perhaps it is a recurring phenomenon, desire, or ideal in modern literature. This style in poetry later declined with “the generation of '45,” and poetry of the '40s, '50s, and '60s, visually at least, is more conventional than those first, early attempts at modernism.

Like other Latin languages, Portuguese has a high number of perfect rhymes and frequent, inescapable assonances. The ease of rhyming in these languages has been envied, sometimes eyed with suspicion, by poets writing in the more obdurate English. But facile rhyme and inevitable assonance can become liabilities, handicaps to originality. With time familiar sets of rhymes grow tiresome, and free verse must have come as a great relief. Almost all the poems in this volume are in free verse or unrhymed metrical verse, but since assonance is innate, many contemporary poets make deliberate use of it to give effects of near-rhyme, casually or in regular patterns. Brazilian poetry, even free verse, can rarely avoid melodiousness, even when the sense might seem to want to do so.

The rules of versification in traditional Portuguese verse are like those of French verse: short and long syllables determine the number of feet in a line, not stress, as in English; and no irregularities in meter are permitted. When contemporary Brazilian poets write in traditional forms (as does Vinicius de Moraes in most of his
Sonnets
) they obey these rules of versification. Punctuation in modern Brazilian poetry is often puzzling. Apparently, the poets are influenced by, or perhaps simply copy, French usage: no punctuation at all except one stop at the end of the poem; sets of dashes where English poetry might use commas or semi-colons; dashes instead of quotation marks, and so on. In fact, anyone reading Brazilian Portuguese, prose or verse, soon becomes aware of its unperturbed inconsistency in both punctuation and spelling; points of style that have become fixed in English have not yet jelled in Brazil. It resembles our own language in its freer, earlier days. In these translations, the original punctuation has been retained when possible, and only tampered with when it, or the lack of it, might confuse the English-reading reader.

Brazilian poetry cannot be considered truly Brazilian—that is, independent of that of Portugal—until after the Proclamation of Independence in 1822. Its development is more or less predictable, in that its movements parallel those of western Europe, especially France, with a time-lag of ten, twenty, or more years. As in American writing, this time-lag has decreased over the years, growing always shorter, until at present sometimes Brazilian poetry actually seems more advanced than that of the countries it formerly derived from. As in American poetry, there are exceptions to this, apparent regressions in the modernist movement, but none happens to come within the period covered by this volume. There is no space in this brief introduction to give a history of Brazilian poetry over the last hundred fifty years. We shall merely give the highlights, naming a few outstanding poets and their books and briefly outlining the movements that make up the Brazilian heritage of the fourteen poets represented.