JOSE DI ANCHIETA (1534-1597)
Anšijeta (port. Joseph of Anchieta,1534-1597) is a poet whose story can be imagined in millions of somethings: he converted millions to the Christian faith; he founded two cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which today have about twenty million inhabitants; furthermore, he crowned his observations with millions of idioms (he was a polyglot, he wrote the first grammar of the indigenous language Tupi).
But, despite the fact that he developed his mind in several intersecting directions, different from each other, he is above all a poet, the founder of Brazilian literature. To be honest, “founder” should be put in quotation marks, just as the “founders” of the Middle Ages were one Isidore of Seville (601-636), Venerable Bede (672-735), the Ricardo (1110-1173); in this context he mentions them Dante Alighieri: of Isidore, of Beda, and of Richard (Raj, 131-132).
Let's leave Italy aside, because it is at the forefront of Western culture, after Greece, having evacuated the endangered spiritual spark from Byzantium to Latium, but then, as you go west, the first next stop is Portugal.
Anšieta was a contemporary Camoes, the father of Portuguese literature (Luís de Camões, 1524-1580), one of the key authors of the West. It doesn't cost me half a Brazilian real to notice that he and Anchieta are the “founders”, because they truly founded two literatures of one language.
Spain comes after them, the Golden Age; only then England, the Elizabethans.
Apostle of Brazil
Anšijata is called Apostle of Brazil (Apostle of Brazil); Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1980, and Papa Francis canonized as a saint in 2014; he was the first in many ways: the first grammarian and poet born in the Canary Islands; the first missionary on the shores of the Atlantic; the first to preach the Gospel to a jaguar in the rainforest; the first writer on the soil of the two Americas. But founding a literature means more than being the first - it means dreaming.
His father was a Basque rebel against the Spanish king and his mother was the daughter of a converted Jew. He studied philosophy at the famous college in Coimbra, and in 1551 joined the Jesuit order of his father's relative. Inasija de Lojole. The minds of people prone to different grammars, and Anchieta certainly was one, he knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Guarani, Tupí (Quechua), the indigenous language Aymar and others, do not fall under routine laws. At only twenty years of age, he founded São Paulo and gave the city, in fact, a philological name, the conversation about the apostle Paul (conversão do apóstolo Paulo).
There is no doubt that he was a great poet (Não ha dúvida, era un grande poeta), says the writer Aires di Montalbo (real name Friar Aloísio Furtado), guided, obviously, by a moral but also professional obligation not to deny grammarians the credit for the glory that poetry enjoys in the breathing of nations.
A literature can be dialogical or monological; the former is Greek, for example, French, English, that is, that which measures its achievements, among other things, by the degree of distance from epic. Brazilian is certainly among them; most African and Asian have the other starting point, monological (and all Balkan literatures are basically monologically oriented).
Monologue literature gives birth to monologue politics (welcome to the Balkans in an autocratic edition!). Monologue is, in its own way, suffering. For a writer, orienting oneself to world literature means, along with many troubles, the advantage of being spared the sufferings of folklore.
Fantastic philosopher
Anchieta, despite being the author of a religious epic (De Gestis Mendi de Saa, port. Os Feitos de Mem de Sá, about the victory of the Portuguese over the French armada, Rio in the poet's time), remains dialogically oriented as one of the fundamental authors of humanism in the West. Nota bene, one who writes in two or more languages (Anchieta wrote the epic in Latin) is automatically a dialogical writer. A writer is defined by the language in which he writes and the languages in which he reads, the rest of the stories are usually a hint.
Brazilian criticism describes his work with the epithets of theocentrism, lyricism, evangelism, but also through the underestimation of Indian culture (devaluation of indigenous culture), which is only partially true, when taken in particular, through the lens of the violent transformation of a civilization. Not when evaluating the preservation of local languages, which simply would not exist without the written preservation of grammatical structures.
Anšijeta the poet witnessed the transformation of millions of speeches into one, Portuguese, while Anšijeta the chronicler witnessed the French military defeat, a hostage of the Indians (he learned their language and wrote a grammar for it). Reading his poetry is pure speculation, especially the poem "Sveta Ines", a pure reception of fantasy. He is a philosopher of fantasy.
Poetry is incorruptible when it speaks through talent, we have known this since the early Bokas. The image of a saint formed through worship - has traditional European symbols, although particular characteristics of new singing on new soil are noticeable - decapitation in the function of faith (Virginal head); we know that story, after all, Kotor at that time tells a very similar one, and the rest, therefore, speaks more of a universal feeling than of local folklore.
After all, Anšijeta is the closest of the contemporary Kotor poets. Ljudevit Paskavlić (1500-1550), as if they had grown up in the same city; poetry is a craft made up of sensitive instruments, they read in the same language, Latin, and therefore their speech is the same.
Language and tone
The new edition of what Anšijeta wrote about the Tupi language, and in it, is thanks to a philologist Maria de Lourdes de Paula Martins who published her work in a critical light, Sao Paulo, 1954. Mr. Romantic Gonçalves Dias interprets the etymology as tupi meaning that which must die, in which there is no contradiction, provided that tupi is all that exists; Díaz adds ou devereço ser, or it will have to be (dead), which is the same; although it is now dead, like Persian or Old Slavonic to some extent, tupi was the language of Brazil for the first few centuries (a língua do Brasil dos primeiros séculos).
Few of the later poets of America and Africa failed to admire Anshieta.
One of Brazil's greatest romantics, a bohemian and haunted poet Varela (Portuguese by Luiz Nicolau Fagundes Varela, 1841-1875), posvetio mu je zbirku Anchieta or The Gospel in the Jungles (Anshieta, or the Gospel in the Jungles).
The Portuguese language bears the name of ten million speakers where it originated, Portugal, but 250 million from other nations (Brazil, Angola, Mozambique) call their language by the name of that “minority” without any complexes. That is why I said earlier that Balkan literatures are monological, because if they were not, they would call their common language by one name like the rest of the normal world. The monological complex, in fact, is nothing more than folklore suffering. Suffering through a conversation with oneself.
ANA KRISTINA CESAR (1952-1981)
The postmodern poets of Brazil have something in common with all postmodernists, the rage of creativity. It would cost a hundred thousand pages to describe this curiosity in documentary form, as professors in the departments require, and another hundred thousand to catalog the evidence, so it is more economical to avoid unnecessary effort and rely on the heart of postmodernism, that is, on the rage of creativity.
Each of us is right. Schopenhauer (Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860): It's easy for me to imagine my body being eaten by worms in the grave, but the hair on my head stands up at the thought of professors in their departments nibbling on my work..
Therefore, it is not difficult to consider Schopenhauer as a like-minded person even two centuries later in the attributes of postmodernism: Gothic intimacy; informal language; fragmentation; everyday themes; parody of classics and tradition; intertextuality; self-criticism of marginal poetry; departure from traditional structures; autobiography; criticism through irony and ambiguity. One could list the oddities of postmodernism day and night until 2030, but in some things one should know the measure.
Carioca, meaning born in Rio, Ana Cristina Cesar (1952-1981) is considered one of the best postmodern poets of Brazil. For a time during her short life, she lived in London, and translated from English. She was engaged in criticism in the wave of so-called marginal literature of the seventies, at a time when the oil crisis shook the USA and Brazil and lifted Japan and Germany. It would probably be unwise to dwell on stock market movements here, so we should hurry to say something specific about the poet.
Postmodern climates
Postmodernists call her first steps the beginning of evil, and here are her first actions in the literary climate of Rio in the seventies: she publishes poetry; she writes for the best newspapers, Brazilian Newspaper, Sheet (Page) which is still published in São Paulo today in millions of copies; published in the magazine Opinion (Opinion), and Kiss (Kiss). While in England, she published a collection Children's gloves (Kid gloves).
Friend and poet, Armando Freitas Filho, published a collection London writings (Escritos em Londres) also originated in London, as a legacy. Posthumous tributes are more common for American postmodernists, as touched upon by one of the leading early ones, the New Yorker Ashbury (John Ashbery, 1927-2017), in the context of postmodernist play with ideas, but that's how the poet from Rio ended up.
Her doctoral thesis at the Catholic University of Rio is interesting, Literature is not a document. (Literatura não é documento, 1980), not only in title but also in content, since at that time, in Europe, there was a somewhat fruitless debate about the strength of this prose and how far it goes. From American soil comes the simple and accurate answer that documentary prose is overrated; we all know that it is also boring, but the Americans were the first to say so.
They are publishing her most famous collection At your feet (A teus pés, 1982), posthumously. Those years still had the habit of early postmodernism to remember famous collection titles, famous authors.
It won't be long before the end of the century brings a mild taste of terror that the literary name, and the literary collection, will be ignored, minimized, and the two thousandth something is even worse: the author does not exist, nor the collection, nor the idea, nor the style, nor the artistic power. Today, in 2024, the author really does not exist, there is only someone's project, application, hub, installation, marked with a tourist abbreviation. But that is no longer the author.
Dissident, counterculture
Why is postmodernism significant, because from her perspective Ana Kristina Cesar, with her work spanning barely a decade, seems like a classic; and why is today's fleeting fashion for projects and applications trivial, stupid, because artistic power lies not in applications and abbreviations, but in talent and knowledge. And in experimenting from the position of talent and knowledge, that most powerful artistic weapon. But, alas, a good story requires an author, not an institution, not a project, not an abbreviation!
In the 1970s, a generation of so-called mimeographers, experimental authors on the margins, emerged in Brazil; they published books in their own press, something like Russian samizdat; although samizdat was forced by communist censorship, while the Brazilian wave was determined by the aesthetic temptation to be alternative and, to some extent, by the censorship of the military junta. The dissidents published infectiously good prose, but they wrote it with difficulty and blood.
It was a countercultural movement, modeled on the American Counterculture, American mimeography, in the West; shapirographs, samizdat, the technology of the dissident era not only in the East, but among the marginalized everywhere. Two works by Kristina Cesar were published in this attractive technique, Dinners in April (April dinners, 1979), i Entire correspondence (Complete correspondence, 1980).
The following titles were published posthumously: Unpublished and scattered (1985); English writing (1988); Written in Rio (1993); Criticism and translation (1993). There are years of culture when it seems that their true representatives (authors, not projects) were not born of their mothers, like other people, but were created by those cultural years; that they were not raised by father and mother but by taste, the taste of the decade; such was the author of the collection Written in Rio.
Authorship
Ana Cristina Cesar committed suicide by jumping from a building on Tonelero Street, in Copacabana. It is one of those crescent-shaped streets that follow the sandy arc of Copacabana, several kilometers long, and the streets are also long, with gardens of sequoia, araucaria, and jobuticabe, cultivated around wrought-iron fences and old villas of the Brazilian aristocracy in the imperial style.
It doesn't cost me any effort to admire the era when it was glorious to bear the title of postmodern poet, nor to recall the disappearance of the author from the works of the seventies (Roland Barthes, 1915-1980; Michel Foucault, 1926-1984; Giorgio Agamben, 1942). It would, however, take effort and remorse to equate the disappearance of the author from the work, on the one hand, with the disappearance of the author from the stage in general, on the other. Why? The answer is simple.
The author who disappears from the work is still there, in the background, a screen, a curtain, a colored background. However, the disappearance of the author today, fifty years later, is actually the invention of the author, the invention of language, a futile attempt to replace the artist with (someone else's) project, an abbreviation, an institution, a conceited slob, polished like a bureaucrat's ass, which is a completely different matter. But that is another story.
See more:
Download the app and follow the news
FOLLOW US ON
