The following books, all available in English translation, deal with themes that epitomize the currents in Brazilian literature at their time of publication and beyond:

• O Urugai by Jose Basilio de Gama, translated by Richard Burton (University of California Press, 1983).

Published in 1769 and based on the historical episode of the campaign by Portuguese and Spanish armies to enforce the 1750 Treaty of Madrid by expelling Jesuit missionaries from Brazilian land, this epic verse was the first literary text in Portuguese to lament the tragedy of conquest. In the vein of Indianism, the protagonists are portrayed as heroic warriors fighting for liberation and defending their natural right to the land. Da Gama was influenced by the anti-clerical sentiments of the enlightenment, denouncing the missionaries’ manipulation of the “innocent” natives. Richard F. Burton made a meticulously researched English translation of this text in 1865?1868, which was destroyed by his wife who was offended by the anti-Jesuit sentiment. The translation, which was one of the first English translations of a Brazilian literary work, later resurfaced in a library in California and was finally published in 1982.

• Iracema by José de Alencar, first translated by Lady Isabel Burton (Bickers & Son, 1886).

Published in 1865, when the Romantic Indianist movement was at its height, Iracema is a “foundational romance” about the nation’s beginnings. The plot employs the marriage of a Portuguese soldier and a native tribeswoman to illustrate the complex meeting between the Portuguese colonizers and the people indigenous to Brazil, and the “new” Brazilian culture that emerged from this union. While the romance is tragic, it results in the birth of a mixed-race son, who can be interpreted as the archetypal original Brazilian. The idea of a national identity and unity built upon miscegenation recurs throughout Brazilian literature. Iracema remains one of the most read and best known literary works in Brazil, taught in all public schools. Isabel Burton, Richard Burton’s wife, first translated Iracema into English under the title Iracema, The Honey Lips, a Legend of Brazil.

• Maira by Darcy Ribeiro, translated by E.H. Goodland and T. Colchie (Vintage Books, 1984).

Maira is another novel dealing with the Brazilian Indians’ place in the larger context of Brazilian society, but in this case dramatizing the survival of native cultures and traditions in the face of globalization and urban and industrial developments. Ribeiro worked as an anthropologist and in 1970, well before writing Maira, published a work subtitled “The integration of the indigenous populations into modern Brazil.”

 

 

 

• Rebellion in the Backlands by Euclides da Cunha, translated by Samuel Putnam (Phoenix Press, 1944).

Rebellion in the Backlands tells the story of the civil war fought in the Northeast interior, between a community of devout Christians and the military forces of the Republican state. The Canudos settlement was founded by Antonio the counselor, a charismatic preacher who drew the following of peasants frustrated with the taxation imposed on them by the Republic. Da Cunha initially set out to document the struggle with the perspective prevailing at the time ? that it was a legitimate attempt by the progressive Republic to halt a reactionary monarchist revolt of religious fanatics. After witnessing the struggle firsthand as a newspaper correspondent, Da Cunha was forced to acknowledge the initiative and resilience of the Canudos community and the brutality of the Republican forces who, in the end, massacred the entire population. Though a work of nonfiction, combining the language of scientific materialism, ethnography, journalism, and political commentary, Rebellion in the Backlands nevertheless holds a place within the Brazilian literary canon and is considered to be one of the finest of its works.

• The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa, translated by J.L. Taylor and Harriet De Onis (Knopf, 1963).

Guimarães Rosa is one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers. In this novel, published in 1956, he continues the tradition of Regionalist fiction, which began with Da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands. The Sertões, in this work, function as a backdrop to a metaphysical and psychological narrative, one which reshapes the mythical and cultural significance of the region.

 

• Three Marias by Rachel de Queiroz, translated by Fred P. Ellison (University of Texas Press, 1963).

Published in 1963, Three Marias is a Regionalist novel that treats the theme of life in the Sertões from a female point of view. The novel plots out the roles of women in a male-dominated world, the limitations placed on them, and the measures taken to discourage and punish them for any form of rebellion against the status quo. Queiroz’s work is sociological in nature, and draws on her own experience of being raised in the Serão in North-Eastern Ceará. In 1977 she became the first women to be elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

 

• Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant:  A Novel by Manuel Antonio De Almeida, translated by Ronald W. Sousa (Oxford University Press, 2000).

This novel is an entertaining and informative portrait of the life of the middle class in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Portuguese court arrived in Brazil and installed itself in the capital.

 

 

• O Cortiço by Aluísio Azevedo, 1890

Written in a naturalistic style, O Cortiço tells the stories of members of a community in a slum of Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth century. The cast of characters range from European immigrants, former African slaves, and Brazilian-born mulattos, all in some way rejected by the bourgeois. The cortiço, or slum, functions as a microcosm of Brazilian society, and is at the same time represented as a single entity or organism. In contradiction to Romanticism, this work represents people as a collective, treats themes of social injustice, and portrays the proletariat class, which until then had not been significantly represented in Brazilian literature.

• Mulatto by Aluísio Azevedo, translated by Murray Graeme Macnicoll (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Toronto University Press, 1990).

The effects of miscegenation and the experience of mixed-race individuals in Brazilian society are common themes in all Brazilian cultural production. In this novel, a mulatto man attempts to make his way in society during the late nineteenth century, as Brazil transitions from empire to republic.

 

 

 

• Macunaima by Mário de Andrade, translated by E.A. Goodland (Interlink Publishing+group Inc, 1988).

Mario de Andrade was the unofficial artistic leader of his generation and a main figure behind the Week of Modern Art. In Macunaima, the “characterless hero,” he challenged the ideas of national identity that had been popular at the time of the Republic. In contrast with the image of the heroic Indian warrior, or the mestiço, the “new” Brazilian representing the fortuitous union of Portuguese and natives, Macunaima is an anti-hero, of mixed Indian, black, and white origins, indefinable, unreliable, and subversive. The plot follows this disturbing yet irresistible protagonist’s quest from his pre-industrial village in the Amazonian rainforest to the capitalist, modern metropolis of Sao Paulo. Written in 1928, during a period in which Brazilian society and economy were moving away from the ‘coffee oligarchy’ and toward industrialized urban centers, Macunaima is a dramatization of the challenges Brazil faced during this transition, and a radical confrontation of the new Brazilian reality.

• Industrial Park by Patrícia (Pagu) Galvão, translated by Elizabeth Jackson and K. David Jackson (Nebraska University Press, 1993).

Considered a “proletarian novel” for its depiction of working-class life, Industrial Park is a satirical critique of capitalism in Sao Paulo during the early 1930, dealing particularly with issues working women faced. Galvão was a controversial figure, censured by and expelled by the communist party for “individualism and sensationalist agitation.”