[José] Oswald de [Souza] Andrade (Brazil)
1890-1954
Born in São Paulo in 1890, de Andrade was the son of a wealthy family whose business was in coffee. In 1912 he visited Paris, coming under the influence of F. T. Marinetti's Futurist writings.
On his return to Brazil he studied law, and received his degree in 1919. But over these years, he increasingly involved himself the writers and artists, and sought to rebel against the traditional society of Brazilian culture. In 1920, he founded the magazine Papel e tinta, and with other young poets and critics organized the Week of Modern Art in São Paulo in 1922, which is said to have been the beginning of Brazilian modernism.
In 1923, de Andrade published his first important work, the novel Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar (The Sentimental Memoirs of João Miramar), a book written in telegraphic style he had discovered in the Italian Futurists. But the fragmentation of the narrative into brief chapters, the numerous puns and linguistic associations, and the poetic style and diction have caused the book to be compared with the work of James Joyce.
A second trip to Paris solidified his involvement in the avant garde, and in 1925 he published Pau Brasil (Brazilwood), in which he propounded the ideas of "primitive" writing free of the influences of other languages and cultures, and a discarding of meter and rhyme, all of which were to the foundations of the Brazilian modernist movement. In a manifesto of 1928, Anthropological Manifesto, de Andrade further developed his aesthetic doctrine, with its emphasis on cannibalism and the native language. In it he continued his advocation of a return to the primitive and an eschewing of European influences.
His second important fiction, Serafim Ponte Grade, was written during the 1930 revolution that brought Getulio Vargas to power, and helped to make de Andrade aware of the brutal realities of Brazilian life. His preface to that book is an angry statement, satirizing some of his modernist friends and denouncing his own participation in the movement. Henceforward, de Andrade refocused his literary activities on social commitment.
De Andrade also published plays such as the 1937 O rei da vela and numerous books of poetry, collected in 1945 Poesias reuidas. He died in 1954, completely out of tune with the modernism he had help to create.
BOOKS OF POETRY
Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar (1924 [mixed genre]; Pau Brasil (1925); Primeiro Caderno do Aluno de Poesia Oswald de Andrade (1927); Poesias reunidas (1945).
from Sentimental Memoirs of João Miramar
Sorrento
Crones sails cicadas
Mists on the Vesuvian sea
Geckoed gardens and golden women
Between walls of garden-path grapes
Of lush orchards
Piedigrotta insects
Gnawing matchboxes in the trousers pocket
White trigonometries
In the blue crepe of Neapolitan waters
Distant city siestas quiet
Amidst scarves thrown over the shoulder
Dotting indigo grays of hillocks
An old Englishman slept with his mouth open
like the blackened mouth of a tunnel beneath civilized
eyeglasses.
Vesuvius awaits eruptive orders from Thomas Cook & Son.
And a woman in yellow informed a sport-shirted individual
that marriage was un unbreakable contract.
Sal o May
The cabarets of São Paulo are remote
As virtues
Automobiles
And the intelligent signal lights of the roads
One single soldier to police my entire homeland
and the cru-cru of the crickets creates bagpipes
And the toads talk twaddle to easy lady toads
In the obscure alphabet of the swamps
Vowels
Street lamps night lamps
And you appear through a clumsy and legendary fox trot
Delenda lovely Salomé
Oh tawdry dancing girl
Full of ignorant flies and good intentions
The javá is a piggish polka with the blue dust
But the purple enpurples the procession of pink curtains
"I don't give a damn."
"I want to know about the nonsense of waiting with
the revolver on the road."
"That black thug gave her a punch and the woman took
a kick."
"In the belly."
The saxophone persists in an ache of frenzied teeth
Which the maxixe spasms
Between shots and tips
But the open leakage of gas escapes
Into the penitentiary night
"Lord grant us the illumined spongecake of redemption"
The tieté rools heaps of bricks
Water-colored and pink.
—Translated from the Portuguese by Jack E. Tomlins
(from Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar, 1924)
Babbling
Cabralism. The civilization of the donées. The Willing and
the Exportation.
The Carnival. The Hinterland and the Slum.
Brazilwood. Barbaric and ours.
The rich ethnic formation. The richness of the vegetation.
The minerals. The food, The vatapá, the gold and the dance.
All history of Penetration and the commercial history of America.
Brazilwood.
Against the fatality of the first white man who entered the port
and diplomatically dominated the savage jungles. Citing Virgil to the
Tupíníquím people. The bachelor.
Country of anonymous pains. Of anonymous doctors. Society of erudite
shipwrecked people.
From where the never exportation of poetry. The poetry tangled in the
culture. In the lianas of the versifications.
Twentieth century. A burst in the learning. The men who knew everything
were deformed like rubber babels. They burst free of enclopaedism.
The poetry for the poets. Happines of the ignorance that discovers.
Pedr'Alvares.
The suggestion of Blaise Cendrars:—You have the locomotives full, you leave.
A black man turns the handle of the rotary where you are. The smallest carelessness
will make you leave, in a direction opposite to that of you destiny.
Against cabinetism, the tramping of the climates.
The language without archaisms. Without erudition. Natural and neo-logic. The
millionaire contribution of all of the mistakes.
From naturalism one had passed to domestic pyrography and the excursionist
kodak.
All the girls talented. Virtuosos of the player piano.
The processions went out the bulge of the factories.
It was necessary to un-do. Deformation through impressionism and
the symbol. The lyricism brand-new. The presentation of the materials.
The coincidence of the first Brazilian construction in the movement of general
reconstruction. Brazilwood poetry.
Against the naturalistic subtlety, the synthesis. Against the copy, the
invention and the surprise.
A perspective of an order other than visual. The correspondent to the physical miracle in
art. Closed stars in the photographic negatives.
And the wise solar laziness. The prayer. The silent energy. The hospitality.
Barbaric, picturesque and credulous. Brazilwood. The orest and the school. The food, the
minerals and the dance. The vegetation. Brazilwood.
—Translated from the Portuguese by Flavia Vidal
(Pau-Brasil, 1925)
Portuguese Mistake
When the Portuguese came
In a heavy rain
He dressed the Indian.
Pity!
If it had been a sunny morning
The Indian would have stripped
The Portuguese.
—Translated from the Portuguese by Régis Bonvicino and Douglas Messerli
(Pau-Brasil, 1925)
Epitaph
I am round, round
Round, round I know
I am a round island
Of the women I have kissed
Because I died for oh! love
Of the women of my island
My skull will laugh ha ha ha
Thinking of the roundel
—Translated from the Portuguese by Jean R. Longland
Ballad of the Esplanade Hotel
Late last night
I tried
To see if I
Could write
A ballad
Before I got
To my hotel
Long ago
This heart
Had enough
Of life alone
And wants
To stay with you
At the Esplanade
I wished
I could
Cover this paper
With lovely phrases
It's so good
To be
A minstrel
In future
The generations
Passing this way
Will say
It's the hotel
of the minstrel
For inspiration
I open windows
Like magazines
I must construct
The ballad
Of the Esplanade
And end up
Being the minstrel
Of my hotel
But there's no
Poetry in hotels
Even though
They're Grand Hotels
Or Esplanades
There's poetry
In hibiscus
In the hummingbird
In the traitor
In the elevator
(Envoy)
Who knows what
If some day
The elevator
Would bring
Your love
Up here
—Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Colchie
Good Luck
Four hundred years ago
you landed in the Tropic of Capricorn
on the carbuncular plank
of ships
steered by dark stars
the pale beetle
of the seas
Every exile was a king
skinny, insomniac, colorless
as clay
You will create a world
from coarse laughter
from sterile glues
from coarse laughter
You will plant insurgent hatreds side by side
frustrated hatreds
You will invoke humanity, mist and frost
Among the lianas you will build a palace of termites
and from a tower circled by hills
bleating with sincere cincerre-bells
you will rise toward the moon
like hope
Space is a prison.
—Translated from the Portuguese by Flavia Vidal
(Poesias reunidas, 1945)
Permissions
"from Sentimental Memoirs of João Miramar"
"Babbling" and "Good Luck"
Reprinted from Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Stephen Tapscott, Oswald de Andrade trans. by Flavia Vidal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). Copyright ©1996 The University of Texas Press. Reprinted by permission of Stephen Tapscott.
"Portuguese Mistake"
Reprinted from Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: 20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets, edited by Michael Palmer, Régis Bonvicino and Nelson Ascher, Oswald de Andrade trans. by Régis Bonvicino and Douglas Messerli (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997). Copyright ©1997 by Sun & Moon Press. Reprinted by permission of Sun & Moon Press.
"Epitah"
Reprinted from An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, edited with an Introduction by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil, Oswald de Andrade trans. by Jean R. Longland (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of England/Wesleyan University Press, 1972). Copyright ©1972 by Wesleyan University. Reprinted by permission of the University Press of New England.