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2. Allusive, Elusive: Brazilian Reflections of/on USAmerican Literature
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
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2 Allusive,Elusive Brazilian Reflections of/on USAmerican Literature Welcome, Brazilian Brother—thy ample place is ready; A Loving Hand—A Smile from the North . . . Thus begins a poem written by Walt Whitman upon the birth of the republic of Brazil in 1889.1 The topic is especially apropos for Whitman, as a seer who celebrated self, difference, and the Americas, and who influenced poets of modernismo and beyond. Not until a century after this verse of welcome, however, did a significant rapport begin to develop in the realm of poetry. In the context of the modern Americas, the most important relationship of any given nation is with the United States, and Brazil is no exception. If historical vincula in lyric are relatively few, recent and ongoing connections between these two countries of continental proportions are noteworthy. During and following World War II, the USA courted the nations of the hemisphere, especially, given its size and resources, Brazil. Literary ties became closer via such interfaces as the sponsored cultural tours of writers like novelist Érico Verissimo and poet Cecília Meireles in the 1940s, the residence of Afrânio Coutinho (1911–2000) at Columbia University in the late 1940s and his subsequent advocacy of New Criticism in Brazil, and the promotion of Pound and Cummings by the concrete poets in the 1960s.2 Appreciable numbers of Brazilian artists viewed the United States antagonistically or with suspicion in the wake of the Cuban Revolution and during the years of authoritarian military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–85). Since then, one of the notable aspects of poetry is the enjoyment of common New World poses, which may comprehend change— diminution, reconsideration, evanescence, reversal—in anti-imperialist sentiment. A transamerican ethic of a different stripe manifests in Brazilian lyric in several ways, especially in the use of English (titles, isolated words, Brazil, Lyric, and the Americas 34 keywords, phrases, passages, entire poems) and in a spectrum of intertextual gestures (dedications, epigraphs, homages, quotations, thematizations, full structural allusions) that both link literary domains and point to other artistic realms. Conventional endeavors of recent literary cooperation between the United States and Brazil include the promotion of bilingual binational anthologies . Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain (Ascher et al.), with Michael Palmer as noteworthy coeditor, reached a second edition. Outras praias / Other Shores (R. Corona) was published in São Paulo with an eye to international readership. The public presentation of an anthology of contemporaries contained in an issue of New American Writing elicited an optimistic local response, with the assertion of “many reasons” to turn to Brazilian poetry, “each reason expressive of a latent desire, or expectation, or wish from our own poetry,” and of an element of “resistance to globalization,” which can be traced back to concrete poetry, Oswald de Andrade, and Cinema Novo (Whitener, 91–93). A Brazilian feature in Rattapallax included important names born since 1960 and young hopefuls residing abroad; the journal, moreover, had a publishing partner in Brazil.3 Another bilingual volume of Brazilian poetry in the first decade of the twenty-first century featured even younger voices.4 Some items in these samplings of Brazilian lyric are not translated from Portuguese but rather written directly in English. Since such concrete poems as “Life” in the late fifties, Brazilian poets have occasionally composed in the tongue of Pound and Cummings.5 One of these chance-takers ventures to say that the previous common preoccupation with brasilidade, or Brazilianness, in national letters has passed, in deed and idea, to a “transnacionalidade comportamental”—behavioral transnationality.6 This passage sets up strong North American frames of reference, as opposed to the historically dominant prestige of things European, especially French. In her discussion of nineties lyric, Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda sees mindsets shaped by such historical events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, AIDS, the increasing exclusion of the masses, and the ethos of globalization; she underscores plurality and the identity imperatives of gender, race, Jewish heritage, gay life, and class.7 Each of these concerns naturally spurs circumstantial conjugations and inflections of the local, yet all are linked, it is fair to say, to international movements centered in the USA. Even poetic acts in Brazil are inseparable from those unavoidable emanations, be they political , economic, cultural in general, or linguistic more specifically. By way [3.215.183.194] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:09 GMT) 35 Allusive, Elusive of illustration, Amador Ribeiro Neto specifically notes that his poem “Até que um...