3.5 Part 3
3.5 Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa, Aléxis de Tocqueville, Gilberto Freyre
Part 3
This, again, is a link between Oswald and Whitman, for absorption was a process that was carried on by Whitman for a long time before publishing his Leaves. Allen (1955, p.125) stresses that the poet “read with astonishing application”, and that he considered “reading as a creative activity”, proven by Whitman’s constant re-reading of “extracts from books and magazines” (p.126), collected and annotated by the young journalist. Canby (1943), another biographer of his, writes an entire chapter (III) on this subject in the life of the poet, who was given “a subscription to a circulating library” at the age of eleven by his bosses at a law office. At age twelve, the boy “was apprenticed in a newspaper and printing office”, for “printing, publishing and editing” had been chosen by or for him as a career. At that time, already “Ink was trickling into Whitman’s blood” (1943, p.19), and certainly it would trickle in and out of his veins forever, as he confesses in this leaf, “Trickle Drops”, from the “Calamus” cluster:
TRICKLE, drops! my blue veins leaving!
O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,
Candid, from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
From wounds made to free you whence you were prison’d,
From my face, from my forehead and lips,
From my breast, from within where I was conceal’d, press forth, red drops, confession drops,
Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops,
Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,
Saturate them with yourself, all ashamed and wet,
Glow upon all I have written, or shall write, bleeding drops,
Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops[1].
(WHITMAN, 1996, p.278)
He spent long years “absorbing passionately human nature behind the scenes […], scenes of nature, and books” (1943, p.25), so that he could later transform his human and literary heritage and background into something new, for he was always against mere imitation or transplantation of foreign models into the literature of his country, and also against the sole description of nature in a naturalistic way, which was also advocated by Oswald in his manifesto. The Brazilian poet was against the naturalistic detail, which for him was only “copying”. The revolution meant “invention”, “surprise”, to “see with free eyes”, without any “previous formulas for the contemporaneous expression of the world”. The expression of Brazil included the “sabiá” or “tordo”, and the Brazilian woods. Our true tropical nature was present in his manifesto, which resounded our indianist poets, properly digested. Another example of this is his poem “Meus Oito Anos” (“At Age Eight”), from Primeiro Caderno do Aluno de Poesia Oswald de Andrade (Poetry Student Oswald de Andrade’s First Notebook), published in 1927, which is a parody[2] of another famous poem in our literature, this time by Casimiro de Abreu (1839-1860), a Romantic poet, who used to write very melodious verses, such as Longfellow’s (as we will see later on, when we discuss Longfellow’s “verbal melody”); de Abreu, who was loved by the readers, died of tuberculosis at the age of 21.
This poem by de Abreu, written in our popular “redondilha major” (heptasyllables), sings of past time, the author’s childhood, when he lived happy times “À sombra das bananeiras, / Debaixo dos laranjais!” (“At the shadows of banana trees, / under the orange trees!”). Oswald makes a parody of this piece, with the same title, in the following way: he sings of the “Aurora da minha vida” (“Daybreak of my life”), recollecting his infancy at his home, but then he mentions that he did it “Debaixo da bananeira / Sem nenhum laranjais (sic)” (“Under the banana tree / With no orange trees”; 1991, p.28). Thus, the “golden dreams” of de Abreu’s world, when he lived in the countryside playing under the trees, can not be a reality any more in an urban and modern area. Besides, Oswald, as he emphasized in his “Pau Brasil Manifesto”, was also against the morbid and melancholic feelings of some of our romantic poets, particularly the ones who belonged to the “second generation” of romanticism, who suffered from the malady of the soul, for they were pessimistic, sad, and many of them died very young (both Álvares de Azevedo, 1831-1852, and Castro Alves, 1847-1871, died of tuberculosis; Alves, who actually belonged to the “third generation” that focused on social issues and was our last romantic poet, wrote many poems on slavery and became famous as an abolitionist poet).
Paulo Prado[3], in his preface to Oswald de Andrade’s book Pau-Brasil, wrote that the growth of a truly national literature was hampered in the nineteenth century by the “romantic malady that, at the birth of our nationality, infected everything and everybody so deeply”. Then, praising this new poetry, which is “the first organized effort for the freedom of the Brazilian verse”, he expects it to “terminate once and for all one of the great evils of our race – the evil of fat and crawling eloquence.” He thinks that, in modern times, poetry should be able to follow the movement of progress, and that in “this age of rapid realizations the tendency is entirely to the rude and naked expression of sensation and feeling, in a total and synthetic sincerity,” which is impossible to do with words “extracted from the Portuguese classics” and “old dictionaries” (ANDRADE, 1990, pp.57-9). Although our Romantic movement has been considered by some critics (CANDIDO & CASTELLO, 1992) of some importance and value for its literary reform and its attempt to release itself from the Portuguese tradition and influence, others are more severe and view our Romanticism more as a copy of foreign writers such as Byron, Musset, Espronceda, Chateaubriand, Cooper and Hugo, even when taken into account that the Romantic movement in Brazil helped to free our literature from a recent classicist past (HOLANDA, 1963), and the honesty and good intentions of its authors. However, Holanda argues that this entire effort of our Romantic generation was not able to grasp the real social life of our country, and eventually, it was more a movement of imagination than of reality, which was ashamed of seeing the “mean and despicable things”(1963, p.156) that were part of our early urban life. This included also Pedro II, the Emperor of Brazil, a man “of his time and of his country”, wrote Holanda (1963, p.158), who was partially responsible for the transformation of an agrarian nobility into an urban aristocracy, which was represented in literature by the writers of the time, including the Romantic poets and authors of fiction. The inconsistency and fragility of this literature is the focus of Prado’s critique, whereas the Modern movement is praised by him as the greatest effort in search for freedom in our verse. Whitman, then, is closer to our Modern poets than to the Romantic ones, as well as the Romantic poets in Brazil are closer to Longfellow, in the United States, as we will see in the next section when we discuss his detachment from the social reality of his time.
For the new times, there should be new poets and new verses. Paulo Prado sounds really like Whitman (2002, pp.621-2) in his 1855 Preface, when the American bard writes that “The poetic quality is not marshal’d in rhyme or uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else, and is in the soul.” The poet adds that “The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems […] are not independent but dependent.” He continues: “All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain” and “If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or woman, it is enough—the fact will prevail through the universe; […] who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost.” These ideas seem all to stem from another basic idea noted down by Whitman in one of his notebooks in the late 1940’s, which Allen (1955, p.135) indicates as a “rudimentary” principle on which the poet was trying to develop his “versification”: “Be simple and clear. – Be not occult.”
One example of the morbidity fought by the modernists is expressed by de Abreu’s poem “Amor e Medo” (“Love and Fear”), included in his only book As Primaveras (The Springtimes), in which he sings that the lady is in love and he is afraid. He is afraid of many things, not only of love, as he chants in the third stanza of this poem: “Tenho medo de mim, de ti, de tudo, / Da luz, da sombra, do silêncio ou vozes.” (“I am afraid of myself, of you, of everything, / Of light, of shadow, of silence or voices.”). Moreover, de Abreu also wrote an “Exile Song”, for he lived in Portugal from 1853 to 1857. Premonitorily, in this song he begs God not to let him die soon, although he intuitively feels that he is going to die in his youth, but he still wants to hear the “sabiá” singing!
The presence of a bird as an archetype of the singer or of singing and of coming spring or summer in poetry is a common feature in literature. For instance, we could mention a Shakespearean sonnet, 102 (SHAKESPEARE, 1992, p.763), where the poet mentions Philomel (GRIMAL, 1991, p.348), one of the daughters of the king of Athens (Pandion), who was changed into a nightingale by the gods when she was persecuted by Tereus; thus Philomel became synonymous with the bird: “As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing”. Besides that, there is the famous passage from Romeo and Juliet (SHAKESPEARE, 1992, p.355; Act 3, sc. 5), where Juliet tells Romeo that it was the nightingale that “[...] pierced the fearful hollow of [his] ear;” to mean that he did not have to hurry to go away from her window, because the nightingale sings in the middle of the night to announce that they had plenty of time to spend together. Another example of poem that brings up the figure of a nightingale, this time singing in a divine language, is rubai, number VI from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, whose re-creation is included in section 3.8: “And David’s Lips are lock’t; but in divine / High piping Pelevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine! / Red Wine!” – the Nightingale cries to the Rose / That yellow Cheek of hers to incarnadine.” It is also a bird[4] that appears in Whitman’s poetry to represent the singer[5]: the thrush, in “Starting from Paumanok”, and in “When Lilacs…”, where the bird announces the spring, and “Solitary, […] avoiding the settlements, / Sings by himself a song.”, the death song sung by the “gray-brown bird”, which will remind the poet, with “ever-returning spring”, of the one the poet loves so much (President Lincoln). Co-incidentally, the Brazilian “tordo”, or “sabiá”[6], which is so honored by our poets as the very symbol of our lyricality, belongs in the same (genus Turdus) family (Turdidae) as the whitmanian thrush.
[1] We include here our re-creation of this poem, which is part of our previous work at this University (SARAIVA, 1995, p.85), in a revised version: “VERTEI GOTAS”:
VERTEI gotas! minhas veias azuis vazando!
Ah gotas de mim! vertei, vagarosas gotas,
Caindo cândidas de mim, pingai, sangrantes gotas,
De ferimentos feitos para vos libertar donde estáveis presas,
De meu rosto, de minha testa e lábios,
De meu peito, de dentro onde eu estava oculto, pressionai rubras gotas, gotas de confissão,
Manchai toda página, manchai toda canção que canto, toda palavra que digo, sangrentas gotas,
Dai a conhecer vosso calor escarlate, permiti-lhes cintilar,
Saturai-as convosco inteiramente acanhadas e úmidas,
Fulgi sobre tudo que tenho escrito ou escreverei, sangrantes gotas,
Que tudo seja visto à vossa luz, enrubescidas gotas.
[2] Oswald (1991, p.27) was so keen on parody that he even wrote another poem to make fun of this one, titled “Meus Sete Anos” (“At Age Seven”).
[3] Paulo Prado (1869-1943) belonged to one of the wealthiest families from the aristocracy of coffee planters from São Paulo. He participated in the 1922 Week of Modern Art as a patron of the arts. He was also interested in Brazilian History and published a book called Retrato do Brasil (Portrait of Brazil) in 1928, a study on the sadness of the Brazilian people.
[4] The nightingale used to belong in the same family as the thrush, but today it is classed in a different family, the “Muscicapidae”.
[5] In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”, it is another bird that comes to the rescue of the poet, to help him awaken his own songs, merging the song of the bird, the word from the sea, “death”, and his own songs into one single chant: “Which I do not forget [the word from the sea, Death], / But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother [the bird], / That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach, / With the thousand responsive songs, at random, / My own songs, awaked from that hour; […]”.
[6] In 1968, Tom Jobim composed the song and Chico Buarque (both are Brazilian composers and song-writers) wrote the lyrics for “Sabiá”, which, again, makes a new parody of the “Exile Song”. The lines read: “Sei que ainda vou voltar / Para o meu lugar / Foi lá e é ainda lá / Que eu hei de ouvir cantar / Uma sabiá”; and “Vou deitar à sombra / De uma palmeira / Que já não há” (“I know I am going to go back / To my place / It was there and it is still there / That I will hear a thrush / singing”; “I will lie down at the shadow / of a palm tree / that does not exist any more”). The song tells of the song of a female thrush, while the traditional poems picture male birds. It also makes reference to a palm tree that has probably been cut off and almost disappeared from our home land.
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