A Texas Sertão: Fred P. Ellison and Rachel de Queiroz

Fred P. Ellison (1922–2014) was a Hispanist in the full sense of the term and a pioneer in Luso-Brazilian studies in the United States. In 1983 he was voted one of 20 Corresponding Members of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, as the seventh occupant of Chair 12, succeeded after his death by Mario Vargas Llosa. It is a privilege to add my voice to the deserved homage from the MLA to a great figure in Brazilian studies. To me, Fred was a friend and close colleague in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin during almost twenty years. For how many evenings did we entertain the ever-patient Ad Ellison for long hours with our fanciful plans for promoting study of Portuguese language and Brazilian literature?

Fred’s doctoral dissertation at the University of California Berkeley and 1954 book, Brazil’s New Novel, first brought Brazil’s social novel of the 1930s to the attention of literary studies, and there began his life-long friendship with the distinguished Brazilian novelist Rachel de Queiroz (1910–2003). I benefitted from their friendship during a visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1984. I telephoned Rachel, who generously invited my family of three, at the time, to Thursday tea at the Academy of Letters. Rachel would become the first woman to be offered a cabinet position in the government (1961), the first inducted into the Academy of Letters (in 1977, Chair 5, Number 5), in recognition of the prodigious, lyrical novels she wrote in her early 20s depicting social issues of the Northeastern sertão in the state of Ceará.

In 1963, the year after Fred came to Austin, the University of Texas Press published his translation of Rachel’s fourth novel, The Three Marias (1939). Fred had traveled to Fortaleza to meet Rachel, visiting the convent boarding school featured prominently in her novel. Written to introduce Rachel and bring her works to the attention of world literature in English, his preface to the translation is a model of its kind, fulfilling its purpose with an understated perfection. It serves today as a mirror to remind us of the qualities that we admire in Fred as a scholar, colleague, and constant friend. The language is natural, almost conversational, always concise and direct, with a certain formal elegance in its tone and exposition.

Fred was certainly aware that geological, demographic, and biological features of the Brazilian sertão are not unlike parts of Texas, being a semi-arid interior sub-region of the Northeast with cowherds, scrub bush land, and climatic extremes characterized by periodical floods and droughts. And at approximately 100,000 square miles, the Brazilian sertão in area equals the western half of Texas. Perhaps those features depicted in novels by Northeastern authors captured Fred’s attention, and they became the subject both of literary scholarship, personal friendships, and artistic translations. In The Three Marias, Maria Augusta—a character who speaks for the young Rachel—states bluntly “My folks lived in the sertão, in the Cariri region” (28). Fred’s respect for the specificity of the regional term must have convinced him to leave it in Portuguese in his translation, in italics, rather than give it one of the weak translations found in other books. In his preface, Fred notes the presence of the sertão in Rachel’s works, whether in her defense of a highland oasis from inundation by hydroelectric power construction or, in The Three Marias, by her portrayal of three young schoolgirls struggling against a patriarchal system that traditionally subordinated women and imposed a double standard of sexual morality. That system, Fred writes, was “based on large landholding and monoculture, and involving a rural and now urban proletariat emerging from slavery only in this century” (xviii).

Fred was interested in equality for women writers and their works, and Rachel was his first and perhaps greatest example. Like others before and after her, Rachel became an important figure in Fred’s estimation because of her intellectual contributions to national life as a social...