The improvement of public awareness on his or her country, is one of the first and more permanent challenges of ambassadors abroad, no matter where the diplomatic services are rendered. This is the basis for interaction between governments and societies in the different fields of human activity.
In our case, this task is rendered more difficult due to one element inherent to our culture - our language. Different from our immediate neighbours, who speak Spanish, English or French, our only official language is Portuguese. Although spoken by almost 300 million people, in Portugal and Brazil, in five African countries, in East Timor and, to a lesser extent, in other parts of Asia, Portuguese is not widely known in other countries, including those of bigger readership or stronger editorial industry.
Therefore, in most cases this challenge has to be met by means of translations of our realities, our minds and aspirations into another language. The translation of our realities, policies, and governmental goals is inherent in our daily life as professional diplomats. The translation of our minds and aspirations, aesthetic values and world vision contained in literary texts is a much deeper challenge. Professor Dilip Loundo faced it with remarkable success.
A Brazilian of Indian origin, Professor Loundo has a solid intellectual background in both cultures, that enables him build bridges between our two countries in the literary field.
It is with great enthusiasm that I accepted Professor Loundo's invitation to write the foreword to this anthology, a selection of texts of a number of outstanding Brazilian writers, including extracts of novels, poetry and short stories. The selection is preceded by an essay on Brazilian literature, that is an analysis of our national character, and also introductory notes on each author represented in the book. His translation of most texts into English, does not follow the Italian saying "traduttore traditore", i.e., while translating, Professor Loundo is faithful to the sense or atmosphere of the text.
His work shows he is capable of translating not only the words but also the minds and souls of authors that produced literature having different social backgrounds, live in different states of the immense country that is Brazil, in different moments of our recent History. Despite such diversity, that only adds flavour to the Anthology, these authors share as a common denomination the fact that they are Brazilians, and they are marked by the Brazilian-ness that binds all.
I hope that the English version is only a first step to a sequence of translations into other languages spoken in India, so that larger segments of the Indian people also have the opportunity to get to know the richness and variety of Brazilian literature.
The renewed interest in Latin America during the last decades has contributed to the dissemination of specialised areas of academic research all over the world and the publication of a variety of works dealing with different aspects of the cultures of the continent. However, as far as literature is concerned, Brazil has received considerably less attention than its Hispano-American counterparts. This can be seen, among others, by the relatively small number of translations into foreign languages particularly into English - of Brazilian classical and contemporary writers.
Brazil stands as a peculiar development in Latin American history. It's the only country in the continent colonised by the Portuguese and yet it's the biggest in territorial extension and demography. Brazil was born as a cultural outcome of a process of miscegenation which combined Amerindian, African and European ethnic groups. It inherited the Portuguese language after moulding it upon the feelings, sentiments and designs of a new cultural persona. With a population of 160 million people, Brazil today, accounts for the largest Portuguese speaking community in the world, ahead of Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome & Principe, Cape Verde and East Timor.
The present anthology represents a modest contribution to the dissemination of knowledge on Brazilian literature among English speaking audience. The Nobel Prize for Literature which was awarded for the first time to the Portuguese language in 1998, increased our responsibility and added to our motivation. The present selection focuses on authors and works which have received widespread recognition in Brazil and elsewhere among the general public and literary critics. The decision to include only modernist and post-modernist writers does not merely reflect a matter of contemporaneity: the modernist movement of 1922 signalled the inception of modernity as a definitive step towards the cultural emancipation of Brazil and a feeling of self-awareness by a part of Brazilian writers of their Brazilian-ness.
The anthology includes eighteen authors and is divided into three parts, viz., (i) novel, (ii) poetry and (iii) short story, each represented by six authors placed in a chronological order by the date of birth. Among them, five are living and active. They mostly belong to a younger generation which was responsible for the boom of short story. To familiarise the reader with the overall production of the eighteen authors, a biographical note is included in the beginning of each text. Besides, I've added an Introduction to Brazilian Literature, a list of Suggested Bibliography for further reading on Brazilian culture and literature, a Glossary of the Brazilian Terms used in the texts, and a Brief Chronology of Brazilian history.
Most of the English versions are fresh translations from the originals in Brazilian Portuguese. This is true for all poetry section and also for most of the short story section. However, the majority of the excerpts of novels are reproductions of existing translations. Here I've taken the liberty to re-instate a few of the original Brazilian terms which seemed to demand explanatory notes (mostly included in the Glossary). I've also used the British orthography throughout. As expected, some poetic rhythms and metres had to be ignored, or rendered by assonance and half-rhymes. Again, some dialectal structures of regional narratives resisted a fluent translation.
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of Brazil, for the financial and logistic support to my activities of promoting Brazilian culture in India. I'm particularly grateful to the former Ambassador of Brazil to India, His Excellency Mr. Luis Filipe de Macedo Soares and the present Ambassador of Brazil to India, Her Excellency Ms. Vera Machado, for their institutional and personal support to the preparation of this anthology.
The development of Brazilian literature is closely associated with the major events which conditioned the formation of Brazil as a cultural composite. Different from other areas of European domination, Brazil - and perhaps most of the Latin American formations - is genealogically linked to the colonial event which started in 1500 when the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral reached the coast of South America in today's Brazilian state of Bahia. Nowhere else but in the idiosyncrasies of the colonial system, one can find the roots of Brazilian people as a "new people". It operated involuntarily as an "industry of de-culturation", negating and synthesising cultural matrices represented by the native Indians, the enslaved Africans and the Portuguese conquistadores. The resulting physical and cultural miscegenation gave birth to a multiracial society of non-Europeans, non-Amerindians and non-Africans, marked by a process of cultural homogenisation which pressed for the replacement of traditional ethnic identities by a "non-ethnic ethnicity" or a common socio historical destiny.
As a product of European commercial and industrial expansion, Brazil finds an immediate insertion in the so-called "occidental civilisation". This insertion is however ambivalent. On the one hand, it implies the assimilation of institutions and designs - such as the Christian religion, the Portuguese language and liberal ideologies - inherited from the dominant European element. But on the other, a set of specific interests put in march, in a seemingly contradictory fashion, the gradual transformation of those institutions: (i) they were made to co-exist with patrimonial structures - or, in the words of Sergio Buarque de Hollanda, with "a culture of personality" - inherited from the slavery system established by the colonisers; (ii) they were animated by the new spirit which resulted from the synthetic incorporation of elements from the dominated matrices, viz., the African and the native Indian cultures. The combination of these two factors favoured the development of an unbalanced homogeneity wherein social exclusion went hand in hand with cultural homogenisation, to form the initial platform under which the national spirit and a peripheral insertion in the international order was staged.
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