7/4/14

João Guimarães Rosa - One of the two towering figures of post-War Brazilian fiction. The frontier, the borderland, the between-place - the ‘third bank of the river’ - where destinies, relationships, identities and words all exist in an endless state of flux


João Guimarães Rosa, Grande Sertão: Veredas / The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. Trans. by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís. Knopf, 1963. [1956.]

excerpt


Don’t let the cats fool you, João Guimarães Rosa is the man. The man like Mann or Proust or Melville or Faulkner or Borges or Calvino or Joyce…Only, you may have never been made aware of the fact. Don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. As a matter of fact: you’re right at home in the United States of America if you’ve never heard of João Guimarães Rosa.
This is the story: in 1956, in Brazil, a forty-eight year old Brazilian diplomat published a singular novel entitled Grande Sertão: Veredas, a 500-page monologue, set in the North-Eastern Backlands of Brazil (a stark contrast to the stereotypical and often sought after clear-watered beaches of Rio de Janeiro, home to Carnival). The novel follows the exploits of a bandit for hire, Riobaldo, as he questions the existence of the devil and his love for a fellow bandit. Deemed one of the most important works of modernist literature in Brazil shortly after being published there, Guimarães Rosa was elevated to stand beside Clarice Lispector as one of the two most important Brazilian writers since Machado de Assis. With the onset of the Latin American Boom in the U.S. in the early 1960s, and with the success of another Brazilian writer, Jorge Amado, in translation in the U.S., publisher Alfred A. Knopf set its sights on Guimarães Rosa and Grande Sertão: Veredas. In 1963 an English translation of Grande Sertão: Veredas was published in the U.S. It’s English title: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. The translator: Harriet de Onís, a very reputable translator of Spanish and Portuguese, but no match for Guimarães Rosa. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands was deemed a sham for its strategic attempt to achieve readability over anything else—which meant eliminating Guimarães Rosa’s linguistic innovations, one of the most significant marks of the novel. You see, Guimarães Rosa had a working knowledge of something like twelve languages, and was as erudite as Jorge Luis Borges. He spun the Portuguese language like Joyce did English, and incorporated everything from the archaic to the invented… So, in the beginning-end, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands didn’t sell well. And since the point of literature for big publishers is the translation of literature into dollars, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands was never reprinted as such. What happened after that? It’s hard to say. The short of it: Guimarães Rosa and his work was relegated to American universities and rarely mentioned outside again. Now, in Brazil, for the last fifty years, Guimarães Rosa has been a pillar of modernist literature. In other parts of the world too, they know it. But in the U.S., us, we’re just now learning…this isn’t the whole story of course. Just pieces of it. Real stories don’t come clean.
João Guimarães Rosa. João Guimarães Rosa. Few people today know the name João Guimarães Rosa, because few people today speak or read or write the name João Guimarães Rosa. I’d like to change that.
I found The Devil to Pay in the Backlands the way any reader finds any book: by pure chance. For years, I puzzled over why the work of a writer who is not just a great Brazilian writer, but a great world writer, is so long out of print.  In the spring of 2010, I established AMISSINGBOOK.COM, an online literary project aimed at investigating the nearly fifty-year absence of João Guimarães Rosa from English literary discourse. For the last two years, I’ve plumbed the depths of the internet, searching for clues as to Guimarães Rosa’s disappearance. The search has lead me to speak with Rosean scholars at several of the world’s leading universities: Brown, Yale, Vanderbuilt, King’s College, and the University of São Paulo.  Most recently, I created a Google translation of the original Portuguese novel in its entirety—excerpts of which can be read in Out of Nothing’s fifth issue. I invite you to visit AMISSINGBOOK.COM to acquaint yourself with an author counted as one of the most significant modernists of the twentieth century. - Felipe W.Martinez

One of the two towering figures of post-War Brazilian fiction (the other being Clarice Lispector), João Guimarães Rosa is best known for his great novel Grande sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) (1956), in which he singlehandedly reinvented the mythical and cultural significance of the sertão or backlands — the perennial Other of Brazil’s coastal, urban civilisation. In the wake of Euclides da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands (1902) and the Regionalist fiction of the 1930s, the sertão had become synonymous with grinding poverty, cultural and economic backwardness and social exclusion. With The Devil to Pay in the Backlands Guimarães Rosa added a metaphysical and psychological dimension to that world, whose inhabitants, the sertanejos, now grapple with eternal forces: love, violence, good and evil. The sertão has become boundless, coterminous only with the universe itself; as his protagonist Riobaldo says, ‘the sertão is everywhere... the sertão is moving the whole time, you just don’t see it.’
Riobaldo, now an old man and a rancher in the valley of the São Francisco river, recites his ‘caso’, an infinitely extended campside tale, to an anonymous listener who stands both inside and outside the narrative (or inside and outside the sertão), for he might be an actual character, the author himself, or us, the readers. It is the story of his life’s journey as a jagunço, a gunman on the frontiers between northern Minas Gerais and southern Bahia, culminating in his leadership of a band of men and his confrontation with a rival gang leader, Hermogenes. Hermogenes has murdered Riobaldo’s predecessor and, in order to destroy him, Riobaldo must make a pact with the Devil, to whom he offers his soul in exchange for successfully crossing the deadly hostile region of Liso do Sussuarão.
As in the story ‘The Third Bank of the River’ translated in the collection The Jaguar, the idea of the ‘travessia’ or crossing takes on a complex symbolic significance at the heart of the narrative, incorporating a whole set of ethical, metaphysical and even psychoanalytical ramifications. One of the most fascinating of these is Riobaldo’s homoerotic attraction to a fellow gunman, Reinaldo, whom he addresses with feminine overtones as Diadorim. Diadorim’s transexual ambivalence is resolved only when, in his masculine guise, he dies confronting Hermogenes on his beloved’s behalf, a sacrifice that may well be the price exacted by the Devil for his pact. If you’re already intrigued by what sound like extraordinary Latin American variations on the mysticism of the chivalresque romances or the myth of Faust, then you’re well on the way to being hooked by some of the qualities (another is the daringly experimental language) that have made this one of the most studied and written about works of Brazilian fiction.
But Guimarães Rosa’s literary universe wasn’t only confined to the epic space of the sertão, with its cowhands, ranchers and feuding gunmen. In fact, as is clear from the short stories of The Jaguar, a brand-new collection, he was the master of an astonishing variety of narrative situations, registers and voices. These could range from a child’s bittersweet discovery of life’s beauty and transience, to the schizophrenic, stream-of-consciousness monologue of a half-Indian, convinced he is a blood relation of the wildcats he used to hunt; from a would-be scientist’s obsessive and ultimately insane pursuit of his own, elusive mirror-image, to poignant, disturbing and even grotesquely comical dramas of family conflict and disintegration, whether the anonymous folk of the rural interior or the oligarchic dynasties who rule over them. At the heart of all these stories, and of the extraordinary prose-poetry in which they are written, is a fundamental, unifying principle: the frontier, the borderland, the between-place — the ‘third bank of the river’ — where destinies, relationships, identities and words all exist in an endless state of flux. - prabhsharanbir.blogspot.com/2009/10/devil-to-pay-in-backlands.html


How is it possible that Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa’s 1956 novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) has been out of print in English for half a century and remains all but unknown in the Anglophone world except to a small circle of academics and those fortunate enough to have been initiated into its cult? 
Able at last to count myself among the latter, I can scarcely begin to touch on all this complex book has to offer, especially given my almost complete ignorance of Brazilian literature and the not insignificant matter of having read the book in translation.[i] Those disadvantages do not, though, stand in the way of recognizing that Grande Sertão: Veredas is neither of marginal, esoteric interest nor so dauntingly erudite as to be forbidding. On the contrary, it’s the rare kind of work that might serve as the reward for a lifetime of reading, offering potentially endless exploration in its expansive cosmos, resisting reduction along its boundless curvature, with myriad points of entry for myriad potential audiences despite qualities that could well be intimidating. Among these is a linguistic complexity that has spawned lexicons in Portuguese nearly as voluminous as the novel itself and includes word variants, neologisms, regionalisms, catalogues of flora and fauna, utterances, portmanteau names fabricated from multiple languages, slang, even animal cries. A recursive, digressive narrative jumps about in time and pursues paths as numerous as the “veredas” - the oasis-like depressions and the rivulets that connect them - that figure in the book’s title. Guimarães Rosa also draws from an unusually deep and broad aquifer of influences to irrigate his tale: from modernist peers to the ancient Greek tragedies and epics, Augustine’s Confessions to Don Quixote, Dante to the Tao-Te-Ching, the natural sciences to moral philosophy, archaic backlands superstition to contemporary global realities. 
Yet Grande Sertão: Veredas comes across as a supremely engrossing work, and one that makes a great effort not to wear its deep erudition on its sleeve. Rather, not unlike Dante choosing to make his “Divine Comedy” more accessible by writing in vernacular Italian, Guimarães Rosa takes his wealth of knowledge and thoroughly emulsifies it into an ensorcelling, vital narrative in which these cultured elements seem to propagate naturally and organically from the irresistible pull of knowledge and a feverish, infectious love of language (in “Woodlands Witchery,” a revealing story from Guimarães Rosa’s earlier work, Sagarana, a character is obsessed with the sounds of words and refers to their “song and feathers”). Those who heed the narrator’s appeal will likely be amply rewarded:
…think hard about what I have been telling you, turn it over in your mind, for I have related nothing idly. I don’t waste words. Think it over, figure it out. Build your own plot around it.
But in Guimarães Rosa’s world the privilege of language and knowledge is not to be abused by constructing a wall between writer and reader, and his narrator gently concludes the advice above with a gesture of patience and good will: “In the meantime, we’ll have some more coffee, and smoke a good cigarette.” With an openness, immediacy and intimacy that invites trust and humbles one into listening, this captivating voice - rising and falling, emphasizing, warning of zones difficult to talk about and even superstitious to mention, following its own dictates in the way William James described the flow of thought as “like a bird’s life, seeming to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings” - calls upon readers to engage existential and moral questions, fundamentally and recognizably human in a “world beyond control.”  
This beguiling voice belongs to Guimarães Rosa’s unusual choice of narrator, Riobaldo, “an ignorant man,” an unschooled wanderer of the great Brazilian sertão, a retired jagunço (“a member of a lawless band of armed ruffians in the hire of rival politicos, who warred against each other and against the military, at the turn of the century, in northeastern Brazil”[ii]), with a down-to-earth affability, sharp natural intelligence and tremendously inventive, poetic gift for language that invites rather than intimidates. An implicit sympathy with and respect for the practical knowledge and native intelligence possessed by people whom urbanites and academics might regard as simple pervades Grande Sertão: Veredas. Self-effacing and modest about his remarkable narrative skills, which spring directly from his experience, Riobaldo knows that storytelling can only approximate life: “To relate stories full of surprises and deeds of daring may be much more entertaining, but hell, when you are the one who is doing the everyday living, these fancy turns of events don’t work.” 
Riobaldo’s account (an oral, even oracular, tale perhaps best read aloud) is a kind of apostrophe to a vaguely sketched listener, an educated visitor from the urban coast who has come to explore the sertão. Having in his old age “invented this hobby, of speculating about ideas,” Riobaldo finds in this newcomer the sounding board that enables his discourse (that a story depends upon both teller and audience, or writer and reader, is a given in Grande Sertão: Veredas): “To talk like this with a stranger, who listens well and soon goes far away, has a second advantage: it is as though I were talking to myself.” And in finding his auditor to be a learnèd outsider, Riobaldo expresses a simple faith in education as a tool for better managing life’s vicissitudes: 
How many really fine ideas occur to a well-educated person! In that way they can fill this world with other things, without the mistakes and twistings and turnings of life in its stupid bungling….In real life, things end less neatly, or don’t end at all. 
Riobaldo’s recitation of the “real life” he has led - “like a live fish on a griddle” – begins with the intonation of a single word – “Nonada” (“It’s nothing”) - an alpha that will find its omega in another single word and an infinity symbol some 500 pages of uninterrupted monologue later. He seeks to reassure his visitor that the gunshots he’s just heard were not the notorious violence of the backlands, but just Riobaldo himself, practicing to keep up his finest skill, marksmanship. This division between violence and innocence, expectation and reality, will hang like a shimmering curtain throughout Grande Sertão: Veredas. Insisting with magnanimous hospitality, and perhaps a desperate need to unburden himself, that his guest stay - “A visit here, in my house, with me, lasts three days!” - Riobaldo weaves an intricate account of his jagunço life in the sertão: his adventures and trials under various jagunço chiefs; the brutal battles he and his comrades have fought; episodes of violence alternating with moments of great tenderness; dreams of revenge and power vying with a desire to escape the violent hand that life has dealt him; doubts and struggles, both particular and universal, in trying to make sense of a life in which, as Riobaldo repeatedly asserts, “the whole world is crazy.” Two other repeated phrases punctuate his speech: an acknowledgement that “to live is a dangerous thing” and reluctant references, sometimes briefly trailing into reflective silence, to “the devil in the whirlwind, in the middle of the street,” hinting at critical moments of confusion, “memories of things worse than bad,” that still weigh so heavily on Riobaldo that in the first moments of his tale he gets to the point that obsesses him most: Does the devil exist?
Far from being a matter of idle curiosity, Riobaldo’s appeal is the central existential question that plagues him, a need to understand his responsibility regarding the two great entwined forces that have shaped his life: the pact with the devil that Riobaldo may - or may not - have made one cold night alone in the haunting Veredas Mortas in hopes of extinguishing “an irrational evil,” the murderous jagunço Hermogènes; and Riobaldo’s profound love for Reinaldo, or Diadorim, the “different” jagunço companion he has known since a transformative moment of Riobaldo’s youth. These forces come together almost exactly halfway through the novel (the elegant structure of Grande Sertão: Veredas probably merits a dissertation) when two events occur almost simultaneously: the murder by the mutinous “Judases,” Hermogènes and Ricardão, of jagunço hero Joca Ramiro, revealed now to be Diadorim’s father; and immediately preceding this shock, Riobaldo’s first acknowledgment to himself that what he has felt for Diadorim – a desire “to place my fingers lightly, so lightly, over his soft eyes, hiding them, to keep from having to endure their fascination. How much their green beauty was hurting me; so impossible” - goes beyond fraternity and friendship, and is in fact genuine love, a feeling that “had been dormant, unperceived by me, in our everyday living. But now it was springing to life, like day breaking, bursting. I lay still a moment, my eyes closed, thrilled and glowing in my new-found joy” (another dissertation topic: Grande Sertão: Veredas as one of the great depictions of male love in modern literature). 
“Am I telling things badly? I’ll start again.”
That it has taken half the book to get to this point is in part due to Riobaldo’s revision and reorganization of his thoughts, occasionally moving backwards or sideways to render important points or informative anecdotes. About a sixth of the way into his narrative, he abruptly halts his story, which has so far focused on his hunt for the Judases with the band of jagunços led by Medeiro Vaz up until the group falls under the leadership of the reform-minded jagunço chief, Zé Bébelo, intent on ridding the sertão of lawlessness. Riobaldo then begins re-telling it starting from his childhood and not returning to where he left off until some 200 pages later. Such temporal recursions find a parallel in the spatial dimensions of the novel as Riobaldo wanders about the great sertão, at times retracing paths he has taken before. 
A coherence to the narrative is nonetheless sustained by the unswerving attention Riobaldo concentrates on his listener (in one sense, we remain in a fixed place and time: at Riobaldo’s ranch, enraptured by the spell he casts with his tale) as well as by the constant swarm of questions and ruminations he expresses about his place in the world, his relationship to violence and love, obligation and responsibility, even his own identity and existence: 
“Where does my guilt come from?”
“Isn’t nearly everything one does or doesn’t do, treachery in the end?
“Who knows for sure what a person really is?”
“When did my fault begin?”
“Do you suppose there is a fixed point, beyond which there is no turning back?”
“Was I thinking?” 
Questions that might in isolation sound ponderous instead become, enveloped in Riobaldo’s earnest inquiry and voluptuous discourse, matters of importance to ourselves because of Riobaldo’s having involved us fully in his life, enlisting our help in seeking answers to questions that resonate universally. Through the words of this complex, simple man of the backlands of Brazil, a mercenary warrior so ostensibly different from ourselves, who has done “deplorable” things but has “come there, to the sertão of the North, as everyone does sooner of later…almost without noticing that I was doing so, compelled by the need to find a better way of life,” we’re unable to turn away our gaze, or escape our essential, human commonality.
Guimarães Rosa’s concentration on the essential renders aspects of fiction such as plot and dénouement almost entirely subordinate to the pointedness of the book’s existential inquiries and the ebullient freshness and newness of the language with which they are delivered. Whether one knows ahead of time the “surprise” revelation of the end of the novel is much beside the point (especially in a book that ends with an infinity mark). In terms of plot, Riobaldo’s story in the novel’s second half winds along the tension between growing acceptance of a love he fears to admit and the burning, hateful vengeance he feels compelled to pursue and justify. These entangled but competing forces, this “devil in the whirlwind, in the middle of the street,” literalized at the end in an almost cartoonish fusion, but also forming a kind of quantum spin-liquid state in which Riobaldo’s ability to make sense of his life’s choices attains a pitch of constant instability - leave him closer to an answer but still asking the question that has dogged him from the beginning. Does the devil exist? This may seem the simple question of an uneducated person, and it is far from being the only question the novel asks. But if we heed Riobaldo’s advice, to “…listen beyond what I am telling you, and listen with an open mind,” it reveals itself as a question of great importance and enduring relevance, however sophisticated or unsophisticated the manner in which we may phrase it. Is not the world that offers beauty, goodness and love filled with jagunços and all who must deal with them, with persons born to or entrapped in violence and conflict, whose struggles to seek a better life involve us in their existence, whose stories demand that we question our own complicity and responsibility? 
“The sertão,” as Riobaldo says, “is everywhere.” - seraillon.blogspot.com/


“[Into] the wilderness we rode; we were going to invade the sertão, breast the oceans of heat.”

I.

João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas, titled in one of the sole editions in English, from 1963 (with a reprint published in 1971), as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, is a novel in which events unfold like those in dreams. The subjects of the novel are described with the intensity of a painting, with shifting points of reference built on and woven into one another: characters within the narrative change names and identities, pass from life into death with little comment or examination; landscapes transfigure shape and color like shifting clouds (one character implores others to “head north: the face of the earth there is more to my liking”). The total effect of the narrative is that of a trail of memory spiraling away into the ether, the narrator of the novel parsing over this trail in order to examine more deeply philosophical questions of great significance. In passages of beauty and violence, Rosa describes an almost feudalistic world, one overrun by hired guns fighting for power in a desolate region of Brazil so intertwined with nature that the novel’s setting becomes mythological, its inhabitants experiencing their lives through a filter of strange mysticism.
The novel itself is structured as an extremely long (500 pages in English), uninterrupted monologue of an old man describing his life to an unnamed listener; the narrator is known only as Riobaldo, or by his nicknames, Tatarana (a spiny insect), and Urutú-Branco (“white rattlesnake”). Riobaldo was once, as he tells it, a jagunço, a member of several renegade mercenary groups fighting against one another in the sertão (hinterland, or backlands) in the northeast of Brazil. (Rosa was himself from the Minas Gerais state within this area of the country, and in addition to his profession as a writer, he worked there as both a doctor and diplomat.). Riobaldo describes the sertão as a place so desolate that it is almost a space of nightmares, where “the grazing lands have no fences; where you can keep going ten, fifteen leagues without coming upon a single house; where a criminal can safely hide out, beyond the reach of the authorities. . . . God himself, when he comes here, had better come armed!” His life exists primarily between axes of love and violence: he has left behind, in his travels, a woman named Otacília, whom he has promised to marry; he also feels a great, perhaps homosexual, affection for a fellow jagunço named Diadorem. The love of these two people spurs Riobaldo onward and down a path of reflection in his wanderings while he traverses through his experiences as a jagunço at the psychological edge of society.
For a work of such high literary value, Grande sertão: veredas is, regrettably, widely unavailable in English translation; the editions from Knopf are both difficult to find and expensive. Contemporary artists whose work might bear comparison to the combination of ante modern or rural human violence, power, and philosophical discourse used by Rosa within the novel might include Glauber Rocha; Akira Kurosawa, especially in films such as Ran; Kagemusha; Throne of Blood; and Seven Samurai; as well as an author Kurosawa adapted to the screen, Ryūnosake Akutagawa; but the landscape of Rosa’s novel seems to share more with the Old Testament, Homer, Herodotus, the Gospels, Dante, Poe, Conrad, and Kipling, than it does with contemporary literature. Over the course of the novel, for example, we encounter such scenes as: a strange confrontation with a leper in an orchard deep in the backlands; an attempt by Riobaldo to sell his soul at a crossroads to the devil; a place where “the earth was burned and the ground made noises,” and where, in “the Brejo do Jatobàzinho, in fear of us, a man hanged himself”; a knife fight to the death with a man thought to be the devil; a jagunço named Ataliba, who, “with his big knife, nailed [a] backlander to the wall of [a] hut; he died quietly, like a saint”; and vicious bandit-warriors preparing for future battles described as such:
it soon became clear to me . . . that they wanted to be known as one hundred percent jagunços, not alone in deed but in looks as well. I even saw some of the men off in a corner engaged in a strange operation: they were chipping off their own teeth, sharpening them to a point! Can you imagine! The tortures they endured would cause vomiting, the agony enough to drive you mad.
Riobaldo’s long monologue itself describes a number of battles and travels within and around the sertão, between chiefs of rival factions of jagunços, and Riobaldo’s involvement with, reactions to, and comments on them. Within the novel there is a fierce law among the jagunços, who exist almost wholly outside of society: here, “the one sentence that means anything is the bullet from a gun.” The battles between rival factions Riobaldo takes part in, moreover, occur for any number of reasons: revenge; attempts to seize power over a region; or in the case of a minor warlord named Zé Bebelo—a jagunço chief who has aspirations in politics—killing and imprisoning rivals in order to court favor with the government. Allegiances to different chiefs can shift in the sertão in an instant; Riobaldo himself almost assassinates Zé Bebelo after abandoning him and joining a rival gang, later saves his life in another battle and impromptu trial, and then joins him again when the chief Riobaldo has left Zé Bebelo’s group for is in turn assassinated.

II.

This heightened speed with which life at the metaphorical limits of society represented by the sertão can both move and violently end provides a concentrated philosophical backdrop within the novel. A manner of philosophical discourse occurs via Riobaldo’s narrative in two main forms: firstly, there is a physicality to the descriptions of the actions of the jagunços as they give themselves up to, or take what they need from, a merciless world, their lives serving as a sort of memento mori for the reader by illustrating the ephemeral quality of life; secondly (and a point to which I will return) an emphasis on spiritualism expressed in Riobaldo’s reflection on the events he describes exists as a form of Socratic overcoming of the limitations of that physicality and baseness of human life.
Indeed, physical description of human existence, and its corollary within the novel of a spiritual overcoming and understanding of the physical aspect of life, serve to express an idea of human culture as above all else a physical process: we are born, mature, and die, like all living things, and our lifespans cannot possibly give us enough time to thoroughly understand the world in which we live. Moreover the physical process of living is—in its impermanence—unknowable and essentially inexpressible in anything other than the most restricted terms of our conscious thought. It is as though Riobaldo is conveying, in the heightened state in which he lives his life, a primal aspect of humanity which is too often overlooked in day-to-day existence, a purely physical mode of survival of human beings which also serves as a metaphor for that part of our minds which does not understand the world around us and interprets that world only through instinct. Rosa’s novel questions in a mimetic way: to what extent are we like animals, going about our lives as though in a dream, truly unaware of what goes on beyond our awareness of the world around us?
This concept of the human body as a physical, transient object within an environment it cannot understand is overtly reaffirmed in passages describing inescapable, primal aspects of human society such as war and lust. The many battles between groups of jagunços that occur, in particular, emphasize the physical aspect of human life with great intensity, as in this example from a brutal gunfight between two rival factions:
The hours were endless. The sun was pouring down on the back of our necks. The sun, the burning sun, under which I sweated; my hair was wet, and the inside of my clothing, and I had an itch in the middle of my back; parts of my body were numb. I kept on shooting.
Descriptions such as these reveal the underlying fatalism governing the lives of the novel’s characters. Although death can come at any moment, Riobaldo says of the possibility of dying in battle: “Death? The thing was only a whish and a bullet. At any rate, you had no choice in the matter.” For the jagunço, the time of one’s death is believed to be predetermined, and so it follows that one cannot die in battle unless one’s time for death has come. The inverse of this idea is that if one is not meant to die within a particular battle, one is invincible, thus reaffirming for the jagunço that warfare is a natural part of existence, its consequences not the product of the will per se but of an outside—and more importantly, unknowable—force.
It is as though death, for Riobaldo, is an ineluctable fact whose occurrence within the present, near, or distant future—when compared against the sum total of time—is utterly arbitrary: at one point in his narrative, Riobaldo describes a man who, worried that he has become afflicted by leprosy, fastidiously cleans his body, but who also puts himself, to a suicidal extent, in great danger in battles. Riobaldo tells us that this man “courted death because of his fear of leprosy, and at the same time, with the same tenacity, he strove to heal himself. Crazy, was he? And who isn’t, even I or you, sir? But, I esteemed that man, because at least he knew what he wanted.”
In one sense, much like the man who takes care of himself out of fear of his fate and yet embraces the idea of death, we are each aware that one day we will die, and we strive to put our destruction out of our minds through ritual or denial. And yet the man described by Riobaldo is also different to most human beings in his attitude toward life because in his recklessness he acknowledges that there is no escaping death, and he confronts, whether consciously or unconsciously, its possibility.
Such a feeling of ambivalence between a state of living or of dying serves to express a side of human existence which is purely animal; Riobaldo himself earns respect among the jagunços, and eventually a chiefdom, because he is a perfect marksman, making death, as it were, an extension of his personality:
At two-hundred feet I could put a bullet in the socket of a tin candle-holder. Not just once—every time. In this way I put a stop to the thing that was burning me up, the tittle-tattle. “If anyone says anything bad about me, I don’t care. But let them do it behind my back. Anyone who comes to me blabbing and tale-bearing is a dirty dog, and I’ll teach him the name of the whore who bore him.” I let them know. . . . I can tell when a man only appears to have been killed, when he doubles up from a wound, or when he falls because he has been slaughtered. Did I feel pity? Is one going to feel sorry for a wild cat, or have compassion for a scorpion?
Through such bare physicality Rosa expresses the aspect of the corporeal part of human life, the idea that we are a living part of a living world, and thus subject to that world’s consequences; moreover, because we are conscious beings, we may become, tragically, even more violent than the already destructive world into which we are born. When Riobaldo chooses to become a deserter from one jagunço gang, he becomes overwhelmed with fear as he realizes he has given himself up to the destructive power of men, who act as a violent force far more threatening than nature:
I could not help remembering other tight spots, and recalling what I knew of those men’s bloodthirsty hates, of the cruelties of which they were capable, drawing out their vengeance with all possible tortures. I wasn’t thinking clearly, I couldn’t. Fear would not let me. My head was in a fog, my brain was spinning. My heart changed position. And our journey through the night continued. While I suffered the tortures of fear.
This episode, and the idea that Riobaldo exists at this point between two violent alternatives within his life—the violence of nature and exposure, and the violence of mankind—is also important in what it has to say about how human culture creates outcasts, and the hopeless existence such a state involves. The human being or animal cast out of society exists, as it were, in a very real hell from which there is almost no escape. (A literary example of this idea might be found in Thomas Hardy’s character of Tess Durbeyfield.) It is one thing to support a war, for example, from the winning side; quite another to be against that side.
Thus in Rosa’s attempts to define, as much as possible, exactly what constitutes human life, and whether we can as human beings understand our own destructive nature, he leads the reader to a manner of spiritual contemplation about the extent to which we exist at the mercy of others, and of the world; Riobaldo at one point likens man to “a weak thing in himself, soft even, skipping between life and death among the hard rocks.” The world exists to us, Rosa suggests, as something which we perceive aspects of but cannot totalize; each person perceives a different part of the whole, but never the whole, and each person’s perception of the world, is, for them, the universe, and a universe which can exclude the possibility of all others, an exclusion that can manifest itself in symbolic or literal violence. [1] Interacting with a woman who has just given birth, Riobaldo notes: “In taking my leave, I said aloud: ‘My lady, madam: a boy has been born—the world has begun again!’”

III.

In a wider sense the question of the novel becomes: if each person’s version of life is simply the sum total of their perceptions of the world, what exists outside of the world that we call our perceptions?
Related to this question is the very underlying motivation of Riobaldo’s narrative, in that Riobaldo seems primarily moved to tell the unnamed listener his tale by his preoccupation with the existence or non-existence of the devil. For Riobaldo, a sense of spiritual crisis is played out in his concept of an afterlife and the potential state of his soul in such an afterlife: throughout the narrative he repeatedly and overtly questions the possibility that the devil exists because he has been in a profound state of psychological stress following an attempt to sell his soul (an episode of great importance and much ambiguity within the novel), after which his personality has grown inexplicably stronger and allowed him the confidence to become a jagunço chief, and to begin a war against another chief named Hermógenes (also rumored to have made such a pact). Thus, Riobaldo believes, if the devil exists he is damned; however, if he can reassure himself by the telling of his narrative that the devil is merely an absurd concept, then he is saved. Riobaldo says in a moment of reflection, “[Were] we with God? Could a jagunço be? A jagunço—a creature paid to commit crimes, bringing suffering down upon quiet communities, killing and pillaging? How could he be forgiven?”
Moreover, Rosa as a novelist would seem to create, via Riobaldo’s ruminations on the devil, some sort of definition for the forces beyond our grasp, and thus an expression of the limitations of human knowledge. It is as though Rosa is exploring whether or not human beings can come to terms with the state of ignorance into which they are born, and how such a coming to terms must be accomplished. He tries to dimly outline a concept of what we cannot know in our limited human perception. In other words, if we can take Riobaldo’s recounting his tale as a metaphor for Rosa’s writing of his book, we can perhaps compare the exploration of the existence of the devil, as a motivation for Riobaldo’s telling of his narrative, with the exploration of the limitations of human knowledge as a motivation for Rosa’s writing of his novel; Riobaldo’s narrative would become in this way a metaphor for, and a reflection of, the novel itself.
It would thus be through the mystic outlook on the part of Riobaldo that Rosa completes a literary metaphor for the way in which we apprehend the world around us: as human beings we are unable to perceive the nature of our lives, and we live in an uncertain state in which truth is obscure, but is a concept of which we can conceive the existence. Conscious thought creates the idea of evil, and yet what if, the novel seems to ask, evil does not have any intrinsic meaning, for at least in the concept of the selling of a soul there lies the inverse idea that the soul at one time belonged to the seller, and is thus meaningful at representative of the possibility of salvation, an original point of goodness to which human beings can return. It is as though Rosa is asking which is the worse scenario: that we have a soul that is possible to be sold, or have no soul at all? At one point Riobaldo asks his listener, “Doesn’t everyone sell his soul? I tell you, sir: the devil does not exist, there is no devil, yet I sold him my soul. . . . That is what I am afraid of, my dear sir: we sell our souls, only there is no buyer.” Perhaps Rosa suggests that whether we explain the world beyond us through mysticism or superstition, as Riobaldo does, or through the “superior” understanding of science, we are ultimately deluding ourselves; there is simply too much that we cannot understand or hope to understand within the universe. Perhaps also in becoming conscious we have given away some part of ourselves that is irreplaceable and unknowable. In The Seventh Seal, the knight asks Death if, at the hour of his own passing, Death will reveal his secrets to him. Death replies, “I have no secrets.” The knight inquires as to whether Death in fact knows nothing, to which Death replies, “I am unknowing.” A similar burden and paradox of consciousness is expressed in Grand sertão.
Three scenes within the novel in particular are striking symbols of the limits of what we can know as human beings. In one, the jagunço group that Riobaldo is a part of is under siege within a house, thick cowhides around the interior walls of the building serving as their only protection by absorbing the impact of thousands of bullets fired at them. In a moment of quiet after they are fired on, a butterfly comes in through a window, which Riobaldo says appears to be “peace itself.” The butterfly, in its lack of consciousness, is unaware and incapable of understanding the situation of great violence occurring all around it. As though to reaffirm this symbol, in the same battle, the opposing side—unable to kill their rivals through the building—begin shooting those rivals’ (including Riobaldo’s) horses. The horses cry out against the slaughter and are left suffering on the ground as their masters—who cannot leave the house because they will themselves be shot—can only listen. Riobaldo and the other men passionately desire to go out of the building to kill the horses out of mercy, but they know that they will also be killed.
The horses, like the butterfly, are profound symbols of what it means to perceive the world as a human being; they do not understand why destruction occurs on all sides of them, or causes them pain, or comes down on them at random; something that is so meaningful and perversely rooted in reason to men as a battle is for the animals something bringing death with no explanation and no meaning. This is very much like our existence in the natural world; we simply cannot—as much as we delude ourselves—understand either ourselves or the violent forces that surround us, much less their meaning, if there is any, however much we may believe that we do. Like the knight in Bergman’s film, we strive after secrets which do not exist, and long to understand the very negation of understanding.
In a third symbol, a jagunço gang has taken up in a brothel, and after a heavy meal and drinks one of their younger members falls asleep at a table. Riobaldo notes that the boy is carried in his sleep to a soft bed by beautiful women, but never knows that this event has occurred. This is another profound symbol of what it means to be human: we exist in life as though we are asleep, unaware of what is beyond those things of which we are able to understand in the dimness of our consciousness, whether it is that we are, in a symbolic sense, brought to violent ends by devils, or unknowingly carried to rest by angels.
Here again it is not just that Grande sertão is describing Riobaldo’s exploits; it is describing a person who exists at the limits of human existence and who functions as a sort of everyman, expressing in his travels what he has discovered about human nature at those limits. Ribaldo tells his listener, “I am an ignorant man, but tell me, sir, is life not a terrible thing?” Still another reason Riobaldo would seem to put forth his narrative is to describe, over the course of his journey with the jagunços and his possible encounter with the devil, is his overcoming of fear, via courage, as an act deeply attached to an overcoming of one’s perception. Riobaldo says at one point,
I would like to understand about fear and about courage, and about passions that drive us into doing so many things, that give shape to events. What leads us into strange, evil behavior is that we are so close to that which is ours, by right, and do not know it, do not, do not!
The world of Grande sertão is unlimited in its dangers, and again, the dominant types of human experience are base—war, lust, and fear—and drive us into a sort of madness. The only answer in confronting the latter, as Riobaldo would suggest through his narrative, is to overcome animal instinct through courage, a force of action that becomes an almost philosophical undertaking, similar to Socrates’ pitting of reason against brute oblivion in confronting his own death sentence. Indeed, an important fact within the novel is that what separates Riobaldo from his fellow jagunços is a Socratic distance (however tempered by provincial fatalism and mysticism his outlook may also be). He is unable, in his constant philosophical reflections on the nature of existence, as unsophisticated as they might be at times, to fully immerse himself in the world of the jagunços; he can only be swept along in the tide of life, as it were, so long as he can view the process as a philosophical experience while others simply come to terms with their place in the world.
Riobaldo concludes at one point within his narrative that “Living is a dangerous business, isn’t it? Because we are still ignorant. Because learning-to-live is living itself.” Because we only live a single life, Riobaldo seems to say, we are born into a world from which we have no other context to judge the nature of our existence, and no other perspective from which to judge the lives of others except our own—creating within this state of ignorance an arbitrary quality to the reasons and explanations we ascribe to that existence. It is the expression of this idea, and the beauty with which Rosa expresses it, that elevates the novel to a work of art.
[1] Jacques Derrida once said of animals that the linguistic separation of “man” from “animals” in itself creates and allows the actual violence shown to them. -
 
Joao Guimaraes Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands is a riveting novel that explores a wide variety of themes. Rosa delves into the political, spiritual, social, emotional, and psychological dynamics of human nature by centering the novel on its jagunço protagonist, Riobaldo. Much of the novel is spent as a listener, as Riobaldo speaks philosophically about his inner thoughts and emotions to the audience while the novel’s plot builds toward a war between the Riobaldo-led jagunços versus another group of jagunços led by the two Judases, Ricardao and Hermógones. One of the more important subplots of the novel is Riobaldo’s love for his fellow jagunço, Diadorim. This relationship between Riobaldo and Diadorim is one of the aspects in which I found intriguing, and was something I continued to pay attention to as the novel progressed.
Riobaldo and his relationship with Diadorim led to a somewhat paradox in The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. The paradox was this duality between Riobaldo and Diadorim’s theme of “love” and this overall setting of “war” in the sertão of present-day Brazil. It is clear and evident throughout the novel that Riobaldo has an eternal love for Diardorim. I found it interesting that this deep presence of love was embedded in a character that can equally be extremely violent and dangerous, being that Riobaldo is an expert shooter. Diadorim was also one of the more dangerous of the jagunços due to the fact that he was probably the most courageous. But even with these war-related attributes Riobaldo and Diadorim have, they both have a deep and almost intimate love for each other, which is commonly expressed in Riobaldo’s thoughts in the novel. This love between the two in the setting of the novel is what creates this duality of love and war in the novel. Because the novel takes place in the sertão, the backlands of Brazil where violence tends to occur among the jagunços in the novel, I found it odd (but interesting) to place these inner thoughts of such intimate love for another person in a place filled with such violence and war. - Ryan Picardal

more Student Responses

João Guimarães Rosa, The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories, Trans. by Barbara Shelby Merello, Orbis Tertius Press, 2020


A reissue of Barbara Shelby Merello's 1968 English translation of João Guimarães Rosa's 'Primeiras Estórias,' with the short stories restored to Rosa's original order.


Beginning shortly before the turn of the last century, there was a noticeable trend towards the ambiguous in modern Brazilian literature. Writers such as Machado de Assis and Jorge Amado have both explored the use of the unstated and the forced compromise between extremes that have grown to be so crucial to the modernist movement. No Brazilian author, however, has mastered the compromise quite like João Guimarães Rosa, a man who was once described as not only leading, but preceding the reader "to a place where there is discord and cacophony under which there is a strange harmony…the third bank of the river…the land every soul craves for." In his collection of short stories, Primeiras Estórias (1962), Rosa pays particularly close attention to ambiguity as a main theme in Brazilian backland writing. First translated to English in 1968 under the title First Stories, Primeiras Estórias, and in particular, "The Third Bank of the River," is in many ways the defining work of the Brazilian short story.


In prototypical form, Sagarana first appeared in 1938 as a one thousand-page manuscript, entitled Contos, submitted to the Premio Humberto de Campos fiction contest by a thirty eight year-old João Guimarães Rosa, under the pseudonym Viator. The manuscript took second place, but even with the interest of critics and publishers piqued, no one could find Viator to offer a publishing deal. Eight years would pass before the manuscript, pared down to half the number of pages and reworked by the author, would reappear for publication, this time titled Sagarana.
Luis Hrass, in the most intimate portrait of João Guimarães Rosa written in English, wrote of the great author’s penchant for the letter S. Almost a vertical infinity symbol, and fluid like the rivers of which he so often wrote, the S for Guimarães Rosa  was fluid and ideal for capitalization, which is to say initiation. So it is only appropriate that the letter S should begin his first published title and portmanteau.[1]
The word Sagarana, invented by Guimarães Rosa, and composed of two halves, unites two very separate languages, Icelandic and Tupi. The Icelandic saga, a cognate of the English say, refers to what is said/story/tale. –rana, a Tupi suffix, signifying in the manner of/like, can be found, among others, in the Tupi word for cougar: suasuarana: deer-like[2]. Thus: Tale-Like. Though, beyond a mere collection, Sagarana, as deemed by its English translator, Harriet de Onís, is a cycle of stories. A cycle through which the following line echoes in myriad forms: “the story of a little donkey, like the story of a big man, can be told by summing up a single day of his life.[3]” Stephanie Merrim, in her essay Sagarana: A Story System, when she quotes Gregory Lukas: “For the epic, the world at any given moment is an ultimate principal…” We recall the infinite contained within a single symbol.
I’ve read, I can’t find where now, amidst the piles of papers and books I’ve collected over the past year, that Grande Sertão: Veredas exploded the path laid out in Sagarana.  From what I’ve read of Sagarana (“The Little Dust-Brown Donkey,” “The Return of the Prodigal Husband,” and “Woodland Witchery”), of course!  And I should mention that it was Harriet de Onís who sought out João Guimarães Rosa. She writes about it in the Translator’s Note in Sagarana:
“I feel a great pride in Guimarães Rosa, not only because he is in my opinion one of the most skilled practitioners of the art of the short story in the world today—and I am using authors like Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, and Jorge Luis Borges as my basis for comparison—but also because he was my own discovery. I came upon one of the stories in Sagarana several years ago in an Argentine literary review; the author was unknown to me, the translation left much to be desired, but the story, “Augusto Matraga’s Hour in Turn,” made such a deep impression on me that I immediately ordered the books in the listed bibliography, which included the novel Grande Sertão: Veredas…
Three sentences later she continues:
“The translation of Sagarana has not been easy. I have been in constant communication with the author, and at times I have felt like a sick-bay steward delivering a baby by radioed instructions from a doctor on land.”[4]
In Portuguese, Sagarana received the Prêmio da Sociadade Felipe d’Oliveira, and was described by Wilson Martins, the same year it was published, as “a book in which one does not encounter the typical and normal flaws of a first work. On the contrary, [he added] if there is any mature and complete work in contemporary Brazilian fiction it is Sagarana!” [5]
In 1967, Harriet de Onis’s English translation won the PEN Club’s Prize for Best Translation.

[1] Hrass, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann.  Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin American Writers. New York: Harper & Row, 1967 (P. 151).
[2] I believe the likeness to a deer refers to the coloring.
[3] O Burrinho Pedrês in Sagarana. José Olimpio Editora: Rio, 1970 (P. 4). Trans. FM
[4] Sagarana, New York: Knopf, 1966
[5] As quoted in Third World Literary Fortunes, Piers Armstrong. Bucknell Univ Press: 1999 (P.111)

João Guimarães Rosa, The Jaguar & Other Stories. Trans. by David Treece, 2001.

David Treece is Camoens Professor of Portuguese at King’s College London, and the first person to translate the work of João Guimarães Rosa into English in forty years. The Jaguar & Other Stories was originally published by Boulevard Books in 2001, then again in 2008, in celebration of the centenary of Guimarães Rosa’s
birth.  You can read Professor Treece’s own description of the work and its genesis Here.



The collection is comprised of six short stories and two novellas. The short stories were originally published in Primeiras Estórias (1962), and the novellas, in the posthumous collection Estas Estórias (1969). Every page is filled with what I can only imagine are examples of what is possible when the translator possesses a command of both the original and target languages; and
, while I cannot speak for the quality of the translation, I can tell you that The Jaguar & Other Stories proves the finest reading of  João Guimarães Rosa in English. The language is vibrant and surprising
, the tone rich, and, as I rer
ead the stories again and
again, I cannot help but think that this is the very closest I’ve ever come to reading the words
of João Guimarães Rosa. Having read Barbara Shelby’s 1968 translation of The Third Bank of the River so many times, it’s strange to see Treece’s words on the page. They are familiar and alien. The same events,
new emotions. Whereas the early translations commissioned by Knopf are criticized for being insipid, Treece’s text jumps when Treece says “Jump”; it sublimely
pulls at every intellectual and emotional string of the reader
, all while celebrating the human imagination in all its protean splendor.
With my eyes doing double takes at every turn of the word, I truly believe Professor Treece has given Senhor Rosa his due consideration in carrying out this very important work.  I hope we will see more translations in the future, from Professor Treece, as well as from all of the translators spread out across the globe
who have yet to realize the great challenge available to them.

A conversation with Dr. Leopoldo Bernucci



Studies in the Literary Achievement of João Guimarães Rosa, The Foremost Brazilian Writer of the Twentieth Century Editors. Ligia Chiappini, David Treece, Marcel Vejmelka
The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012.

This long awaited and very much deserved anthology is the first of its kind in the English language: an anthology entirely dedicated to the study of  works by João Guimarães Rosa. Originally published in Brazil in 2009, the anthology collects selected academic essays first presented at an international symposium held in Berlin, Germany, in December 2008, in celebration of Guimarães Rosa’s centenary, and has just recently been translated into English.
David Treece, one of the editors of the anthology (and the English translator of a collection of short stories by Guimarães Rosa) had this to say about the anthology when I first spoke with him in May, 2010:
“The volume that we’re publishing, I think, could be very important. It’s a very wide-ranging anthology of essays, which came out of some conferences that we were organizing in 2008. The essays range from overviews of the impact of Guimarães Rosa on Brazilian Culture as a whole, surveys of the impact his works have had in the other arts and elsewhere in literature, essays on adaptations of his work for the cinema, very in-depth literary analysis of work including Grande Sertão, his short stories and other texts, there is a biographical essay by Guimarães Rosa’s daughter—a whole range. So I think this book could be something of a companion to Guimarães Rosa. That’s where we are in the Anglophone world with Guimarães Rosa: we have a limited number of translations to work with, [now we have] a kind of companion study, the anthology.”
A companion indeed. Or better yet: twenty six companions (writers, translators and scholars, Guimarães Rosa’s daughter among them), representing seventeen universities in nine countries. Individuals who have studied Guimarães Rosa for decades in many cases, and provide the English reader with otherwise inaccessible insights into the work of (as the lengthy yet appropriate title states) the foremost Brazilian writer of the twentieth century. This work will prove invaluable to the reader who truly wishes to understand the scope of the impact Guimarães Rosa has had on modern world literature and the arts.
 
 
 
 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.