Crossbreeding and early writing
It would be all the more unfair to think that Brazilian literature was born when the country was colonized by the Portuguese, given that it was nourished by the culture of the native peoples, and that their language so influenced that of the newcomers that it is now customary to distinguish between Brazilian and Portuguese. When Pedro Álvares Cabral came ashore in April 1500, after a long month at sea, he thought he had discovered an island he nicknamed Ilha de Vera Cruz. There he met the Tupis, a group of Amerindians divided into several tribes. Their rather warm welcome does not make us forget the persecutions they will soon experience when the madness of trade hardens these budding relations, nor their taste for human flesh, which Hans Staden, who was their prisoner after being shipwrecked on the island of Saint-Vincent, will not fail to evoke in Nus, féroces et anthropophages, a curiosity available from the fine éditions Métailié.
The first exchange, strictly speaking a literary one, took place through the Jesuits, who were keen to evangelize the indigenous people and, to this end, learned their language and put it into writing, following the example of José de Anchieta (1534-1597), who wrote a Tupi Grammar and gave translations of the holy texts. But his commitment went even further, as he encouraged the Indians to return to the forest in order to protect them from the excesses of the colonists, who could have driven them away from the faith. One of these villages, which they founded and where they lived together, would become São Paulo, the largest city in South America. De Gestis Mendi de Saa, published anonymously in 1563, and De Beata Virgine dei matre, a poem about the Virgin Mary, remain the most famous. His compère, Manuel da Nóbrega, also contributed to the emergence of so-called colonialist literature through the letters he sent to his superiors, which remain first-rate historical documents, although the enthusiasm he continued to display was gradually distanced from the sad realities. Editions Chandeigne has published an anthology of these correspondences, typical of the conquest of the New World, assembled by Jean-Claude Laborie and Anne Lima, which will delight the curious.
Portugal in the early 17th century saw the birth of Antonio Vieira, who was destined for Brazil as a young man, as his father worked as a clerk at the court in Bahia. A member of Holy Orders, his sermons and political stances led him to travel back and forth between continents, even earning him a trial at the hands of the Inquisition. A figure of the Baroque, his Complete Works - in which he defended the Indians more often than not - are among the greatest Portuguese classics. Gregório de Matos (1636-1696) followed in the same footsteps, sharing the same verve as our preacher, as suggested by his nickname, O Boca de Inferno (Hell's Mouth). His poetry is beautifully crafted and imbued with a healthy dose of irony. His independent life, which flouted the rules of propriety, and his art of satire, which he used to denounce corruptions and other depravities, also earned him a trial, from which, to his great pride, he was pardoned.
But the 18th century was already taking shape, and with it a new trend, Arcadianism, whose name refers to the Peloponnese and thus aspires to a neoclassical aesthetic. Its most fervent exponent is undoubtedly Tomás Antônio Gonzaga (1744-1810), with his poem Marília de Dirceu, in which he evokes his love for a Brazilian woman to whom he was engaged. But we shouldn't forget the importance of Basílio da Gama, better known by his pseudonym Termindo Sipílio, who was born in the colony in 1740, but joined Arcadia in Rome. In 1769, he wrote an epic poem set in the Guaraní war, with the enslaved Indians as its heroes. O Uruguai is a fine example of the Indigenist movement, and a harbinger that the Romanticism already in the offing would not be devoid of a certain nationalist claim.
The quest for an identity
This search for a specifically Brazilian identity was supported by a significant historical event: in 1808, the royal family moved to Brazil, fleeing the threat of Napoleon's army, which had just invaded Portugal. From then on, the colony acquired a new status, and literary figures benefited from the European spirit, which challenged them on both social issues and the notion of subjectivism engendered by the Enlightenment. The Romantic wave swept through and took on many forms, including the rather comic theater of manners, in which Martins Pena, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1815 and prematurely deceased in Lisbon in 1848, excelled. With him, a new path opened up, with plays totally inspired by the minor foibles of his native country, no longer imitating the European standards to which his peers had previously confined themselves. Tragedies by Gonçalves Días (1823-1864) were also performed on stage, such as Patkull, in which love and betrayal are intertwined, but Gonçalves Días was best known for his patriotic poetry, which earned him the title of national poet. A few lines from his Chant de l'exil(Canção do exilio), written while he was in Coimbra and feeling nostalgic for his native land, were included in the Hino Nacional Brasileiro: "Nos forêts ont plus de vie/Notre vie en ton sein plus d'amours" ("Our forests have more life/Our life in your bosom has more love").
Poetry becomes a vehicle for exalted feelings towards the motherland, which claims its heritage and the protection of its diverse peoples. Castro Alves, known as the Poet of the Slaves, proclaimed his abolitionist ideals in Os Escravos and A Cachoeira by Paulo Afonso. In the year of his death, 1871, when he was just 24, a law he had called for was passed to regulate child slavery. We should also mention Álvares de Azedo (1831-1852), whose admiration for Lord Byron and the fulgurance of his short life embodied the figure of the ultra-romantic poet, or Fagundes Varela (1841-1875), who mourned his dead and sublimated his anguish in Cantos e Fantasias (1865). However, one of the most influential was undoubtedly José de Alencar, born in Fortaleza in 1829. In 1856, he entered the world of literature through polemics, harshly criticizing, under cover of a pseudonym, A Confederação dos Tamoios, which Gonçalves de Magalhães (1811-1882), spearhead of the Romantic movement and protégé of Emperor Peter II, had conceived as the first great Brazilian epic that would put the Indian back at the center, elevated to the rank of national hero. More than the content, it was the form that Alencar deplored, his diatribe becoming a promise of the aesthetic reform he was to bring about with the publication the following year of the novel O Guarani, first in serial form in the Diário do Rio de Janeiro, then in a single volume. What appeared to be the start of a trilogy - Iracema and Ubirajara were published in 1865 and 1874 respectively - won him public acclaim, and the praise of a man who was to become the representative of the realist movement, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908).
Modernity
The son of a mulatto father and a mother of Portuguese descent, Machado was born into a modest family at a time when his country was witnessing the rise to power of a very young 16-year-old. Machado was hardly older when he published his first poems, Ela and A Palmeira, with the help of a bookseller who opened up new intellectual perspectives. Driven by a desire to progress socially, but also by a precocious passion for literature, the aspiring writer first tried his hand at drama, without success, then became a journalist, with greater success, and finally a civil servant, for security. Critics agree that he divided his literary output into two periods, the first of which(Ressurreição in 1872, Helena in 1876, etc.) was influenced by the Romantic movement, from which he freed himself to reveal to the world his true nature as an innovative author. The second period began in 1881 with the publication of the novel Mémoires posthumes de Brás Cubas (éditions Métailié), which already contained a realistic approach and a psychological character that set him apart from his peers and, above all, made a stark contrast, through this quasi-nihilism, with the mawkishness of the sentimental stories he had previously delivered. This was followed by Quincas Borda in 1891 and Dom Casmurro in 1899, both of which established him as a champion of realism, and had an influence, sometimes unsuspected, far beyond the limits of the Portuguese-speaking world.
The period was also marked by the pre-modernist movement that took hold in the work of Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909), author of Os Sertões, which recounts the Canudos War in which he participated as a press correspondent, and Lima Barreto (1881-1922), whose acuity in describing the life of the little people of Rio de Janeiro is undisputed. Some of his finest short stories can be found in the collection L'Homme qui parlait javanais (The Man Who Spoke Javanese ) published by Editions Chandeigne.
From the end of the 19th century onwards, a literary revolution began to take shape, one that did not shy away from political themes, but called for the exploration of new aesthetics. In this respect, the poets of the "Parnassian Triad" - Alberto de Oliveira, Raimundo Correia and above all Olavo Bilac - prefigured the deployment of the modernist current, which reached its apogee during the "Week of 22" - in February 1922 - during which modern art was the focus of all attention. Leading the way was Mário de Andrade (1893-1945), who in 1928 published a work that can only be described as seminal, Macounaima, a novel that plays with an "impure" language, but also incorporates elements of Brazilian folklore, a journey that was also made in French thanks to the fantastic editorial work of the Cambourakis publishing house. Alongside him, Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) published a provocative text the same year, Le Manifeste anthropophage (The Anthropophagous Manifesto ), which called for the digestion of foreign cultures - particularly those of the colonists - in order to combat appropriation. "I'm only interested in what isn't mine" could sum up his credo. Literature lived in parallel with the history of a country that, over the course of this century, would be subjected to numerous turpitudes, coups d'état and dictatorships, but was now strong enough in its own experiments to allow itself to evolve in different directions. João Guimarães Rosa used this freedom in Diadorim (Le Livre de Poche), certainly one of Brazil's masterpieces, where the language, so intimate, is matched only by the universality of the moral questions confronting the narrator. Last but not least, Jorge Amado (1912-2001), who lived in French exile, will demonstrate the richness of Brazilian literature and its promise of travel: Cacao, Dona Flor et ses deux maris, Le Vieux marin, La Boutique aux miracles, etc.
