Poets of Brazil 1525-2025: Finding the right way out of tradition at the right time - Bento Teixeira Pinto and Kalila Das Merses

BENTO TEISEIRA PINTO

(1550 - 1600)

Dualism and contradiction gave birth to the poets of the Baroque. Sensual and obscure at the same time, doctrinaire and profane, with the soul of an angel and the costume of a devil, in a body pregnant with passion, the Baroque poet knew that life was short. He spent it with the woman he loved, with music, and in the vicinity of crime and human blood.

In no epoch of history has a poet been so fatally aware of the shortness of life as he, a dandy with a turned-down collar, asleep in those laces, with a shoe smaller than the buckle on his shoe, with a unique figure, and a saber on a kajas whose scabbard, inside, is crusted with the fresh blood of his rivals. This is a Brazilian poet Bentu Teišeiri Pintu.

It is known that he was Jewish, which is to say a poet whose biography is satisfied with a single word: Judaism (the religion, philosophy and way of life of the Jewish people). Indeed, Bento Teixeira Pinto (1550-1600) is among the poets whose exact biography has been lost, but whose life and singing have not. History honors him with the attribute of the first Baroque poet in Brazil.

The size of Brazil

Dialogues on the Greatness of Brazil was apparently written by Bento at the end of the 16th century, probably in the northern province of Paraíba. It was first published in 1930 by the Brazilian Academy of Letters, with an introduction Capistrano (João Capistrano Honório de Abreu, historian from Rio, 1853-1927) and notes Garcia (Rodolfo Augusto de Amorim Garcia, 1873-1949).

The work was forgotten until a literary historian Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen did not make a copy in 1874 from an apograph he found in an archive in the Netherlands. He is also mentioned as the author Brandao (Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, 1555-1618), in which I do not see a contradiction, because writing and copying, in the Baroque period, made no difference. A Christianized Jew (Cristão-novo), Brandão, barely a few years younger than Bento, persecuted by the Inquisition, may have himself concealed his authorship and hidden in Brazil, a country that he would describe with the open eyes of a humanist and without fear of European inquisitors.

There is little biographical information about Bento, some believe that he lived in Brazil, in the state of Pernambuco, since a court document mentions a participant in the trial named Bento Teixeira, baptized in Porto and coming to Brazil. Others believe that he was born on Brazilian soil, others that he was a professor of grammar and Latin, and still others that he married a woman named Filipa Raposa, the fifth that he killed this, or some other woman, with his own hands and, finally, having discovered his Jewish origin, had to flee to the monastery of Sao Bento.

There he wrote his life's work entitled ProsopopejaThe epic has about a hundred good stanzas. The inspiration was Kamoesh (Luís Vaz de Camões, 1524-1580, father of Portuguese literature, the first great poet of the West after the Renaissance, in a language spoken by 300 million today).

Mythological adventure

Bento embarks on a mythological adventure like so many Baroque poets, starting with Triton, the god of the sea and son of Poseidon and the nymph Amphitrite, who will later be immortalized by his artistic brother out of a Baroque sense of exaggeration, Bernini (Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1598-1680), condemned to see things with eyes five times wider than other people; among those whose lives are destined for drama, Bento feels like a fish in water.

Bento Teixeira received Jewish doctrine from his mother, although he studied at a Jesuit school. This led him to abandon his priestly vocation. After the death of his parents, he moved to Brazil. He married a Christian woman, Filipa Raposo, whom he apparently killed for religious reasons; those who say that a baroque story can be more cruel than other cases are right. The reason is that the woman reported to the inquisitor that her husband was rejecting Christian customs and practicing Jewish customs; he was tried and deported to Lisbon for further proceedings. There he denied the allegations, but under pressure from the new inquisitor he confessed and was forced to solemnly renounce the faith of his ancestors at an auto-da-feu; a confession made under duress, however, is not considered valid in Judaism and a person can return to the fold of the faith.

Horror and terror, a field for which literature is perhaps the most responsible area of ​​human reason, or at least the most competent, entered the cultural mainstream as everyday life relatively late. The beautiful word with its derivatives, film, theater, journalism, is responsible for its becoming a part of everyday life. Experimental talents are more inclined towards horror and terror, Euripides, Dante Alighieri, while the great rationalists, Tolstoy, Male, for example, do not pay enough attention to this genre, which, if it could speak for itself, would probably declare that it considers nothing more natural than for literature to deal with horror and only horror.

In the darkness of melodies

I don't know why, but I see all the poets of the colonial literary processes, Brazil, Boka Kotorska, Vojvodina, no matter how uneven they are in terms of academic parameters, as experimental and closer to the Gothic picture of the world. Maybe because they are bilingual and know the secret of every language: "only in the double sphere/ does it become eternal and gentle" (R. M. Rilke).

But this is small compared to the largest literary diasporas, for example Magna Grecia, in Sicily: most of them, Aristophanes, Euripides, Theocritus, Empedocles (founder of the first Democratic Party in history, 5th century AD), all born in Sicily and wrote in Greek; Prague Jews, Kafka, Freud, Huserl, Rilke, were born in Prague, or somewhere there, and wrote in German; my “minor writers”, Gavrilo Trojičanin, Danil iz Šudikove, Sava from Zastup, Venijamin Crnorizac, they lived on the territory of present-day Montenegro and wrote in Old Church Slavonic.

When you write in a language that is not spoken around you, you don't hear it on the street, in a cafe, in the neighborhood, you don't hear it on the radio, you don't come across books in that language - and yet you write, that's something special. Some writers know this, and I'm afraid I wrote more than half of my books that way. In the darkness of a melody that no one alive around you knows.

KALILA DAS MERSES

(1989)

Calila das Mercês (1989) is a poet, theorist, doctor of literary sciences at the University of Brasilia; professor at the University of São Paulo (USP); author of theoretical works in international literary communication, and collections, among which the most influential is Prayer plant (Planta Oração); winner of Brazil's highest literary award (Prêmio Jabuti); that would be a superficial view of a phenomenon entering the broad literary scene of Brazil.

On the Brazilian scene, theory as a condition and urgency has been promoted the most in recent decades. Antonio Cicero (Antonio Cicero Correia Lima, 1945-2024), prose writer, philosopher, national worker in the field of the history of ideas, critic in the performing arts, mostly in film, political critic. In short, a total writer with an impressive body of work in all textual directions.

Idea bank

He was most inspired by the Americans (Richard Rorty, 1931-2007), Jews from Prague (Ernest André Gellner, 1925-1995), a fellow countryman from São Paulo and critical thinker (Bento Prado, 1937-2007), epic poet from the Caribbean (Derek Walcott, 1930-2017, Nobel Prize in Literature 1992), but also Brazilian poets John Bosco (1946) Waly Dias Salomão (1943-2003), Adriana da Cunha Calcanhotto (1965) and Lulu Santos (1953) with whom he worked as a stage co-author.

The end of the last century, and this one as well, has been marked by theoretical thought in Brazil by infiltrating everywhere it can. It seems that even the variety show on Copacabana, in Rio, for New Year's Eve, is not beyond the reach of theory, not because the variety show relies on theory, far from it, but because theoretical actors on the theater and film scene are there somewhere, and nothing separates them from the totality of the cultural climate, including folklore.

At the bottom of Copacabana Beach, in the Leme neighborhood, an elite neighborhood in Rio, there is an institution called Philosophy on the Beach. It is run by a writer, former Brazilian Minister of Culture, and ambassador. Jeronimo Moscardo de Souza (1940). I admitted to him that I was honored that he called me, and considered me, his sincere friend.

Kalila das Merses published a collection Notes from the surrounding interior and other affections (Notas de um interior contiguous e outros afetos, 2019) in the midst of the assembly, interassembly, inter-assembly, or whatever you call the support, the security that a theoretical background gives to a cultural climate. Personally, I have been most interested in Brazilian experimental prose writers lately, and I noticed, not without surprise, that in this wide panorama, even the visual arts, let alone experimental prose, are not visible without theory as drapery and logistics. Large universities and, especially, a large number of students - hundreds of thousands, millions - are changing even the hardest, most ossified image of the world of extra-theoretical superficiality and “instinctive literature” (Borges).

For an artist, as important as respect and understanding of his predecessors is the way out of tradition - to be able to find the right way out of tradition at the right time - and that is the real task, otherwise he turns into a parasite with a short life of action and influence. The assurances that experimental prose is the best way out of the shackles of tradition are never redundant. In Brazil, this phenomenon occurred in the early nineties when Cicero published his work Relativism instead of a world vision (Relativism as a worldview, 1994), što je dalo ubrzo rezulate.

A new generation of creators has emerged, loyal to the exploitation and even elimination of relativism (parasitism on tradition) from the worldview of their time. Among the first female authors are Fabiana Carneiro da Silva (born 1985 in São Paulo), with her topos of the body, history and nationalism as literary obsessions, and, finally, Kalila das Merses. Like so many Brazilian contemporary artists, they do not renounce the services of co-authorship.

“The two of us, Brazilian researchers, have taken part in a dialogue with a Portuguese audience,” the first says of the second. “Confronting the ghosts of the past is in fact avoiding contemporary traps. We have created a cultural connection at a distance, very distant places, Bahia, Salvador, São Paulo, João Pessoa, Brasilia. Kalila das Merses is a black woman on the move, an internal migration, she recreates her place of origin, unique colors, textures, smells and tastes, and thus gives density to the exploration of diaspora in Brazil.”

Africa in Brazil

Kalila belongs to the great wave of Afro-literature in Brazil. African authors, in fact authors with African roots or, as the critic says, Beatriz Mello, the face on the cover (Folha de Rosto: Calila das Mercês), have never been more present in the Portuguese language understood by three hundred million people. They began to appear in the fifties, above all poetic voices, the first being Carolina Mary of Jesus (1914-1977), followed by Beatris Nascimento (Maria Beatriz do Nascimento, 1942) Bjanka Gonsalves (Bianca Gonçalves) Cristiane Sobral (Rio, 1974), to the latest black voices: Nina Rizzi (Sao Pualo, 1983) Mel Duarte (1988) and Kalila das Merses.

There are so many things that need to be understood more deeply on the Africa (West Coast) - Brazil (East Coast) route, through millions of immigrants, migrants, some sold, some bought, some for a living, and to classify that knowledge. But not through positivist history, when, how, but through the lens of the future: where, why, and how long?

If there is an environment where world literature is not dominantly history, but theory, sensibility, it should be sought in Brazil, and not only on the East Coast, but also in the interior, from Rio Grande to Amazonia, from Pernambuco to Santa Catarina, and the endless provinces of Mato Grosso, Minas Gerais, Goiás.

Theory is, today, in self-respecting circles, what the history of private life is in the European West and in the USA: the pinnacle of contemporary cultural thought. Here, it's a different story.

The Balkans are still struggling with their ideological histories. Take a look at the Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Bosnian and all other Balkan literary and political scenes and it will be clear to you: there are three times as many dead. Here, it is harder than elsewhere to free oneself from something that has long since ended.