From Idylle to idílio: Mário de Andrade's Parody of Hermann und Dorothea

Mehr wohl angestattet möch ich im Hause die Braut sehn; Denn die Arme wird doch nur zulezt vom Manne verachtet, Und er hält sie als Magd, die als Magd mit dem Bündel hereinkam. O verso seguinte veio, sem ela querer: Ungerecht bleiben die Männer . . . repeliu-o.

[I would like to see the bride of the house more richly adurned; Because the poor woman will only be scorned by her husband, And he will treat whoever arrives as a maid with her bundle as a maid. The next verse came to her against her will: Men are always unjust . . . She rejected it.]

—Mário de Andrade, 1927

Goethe specialists will recognize the hexametric prosody of the German lines in the epigraph as belonging to Hermann und Dorothea, even if they perhaps do not quite recall their exact place in the idyll, or the character who speaks them. (It is Hermann's father in the second canto, "Aussicht," 2.183–85)¹ They will certainly notice the several errors in transcription: "angestattet" instead of "ausgestattet" ("angestattet" not being a word in German, I have translated it with the English neologism "adurned"); "möch"; and "zulezt." And anyone can see that this resulting text is bilingual. The final line in Portuguese says that the next verse came to "her"—the novel's protagonist—unwittingly, and that she rejected it. The number refers the reader to a footnote that provides a somewhat free translation of Goethe's lines into Portuguese, which are almost the last lines in Mário de Andrade's 1927 novel, Amar, verbo intransitive. Idílio (To love, intransitive verb, idyll; hereafter Amar).²

The "she" is a German woman named Elza living in Brazil, who is usually referred to as "Fräulein"; various sentences in German, or sentences sprinkled with German words, as well as an entire poem by Heinrich Heine declaimed by Elza's pupil, appear in the middle of the Portuguese. In the erlebte Rede (i.e., free indirect discourse) narrative modality of much of the novel, German authors and poems are cited repeatedly. The citations are sometimes translated, or more frequently mistranslated. For example, the aphorism of act 3, scene 1 of Friedrich Schiller's Wilhelm Tell—"wer gar zuviel bedenkt wird wenig leisten" (whoever thinks too much achieves little) loses its "gar" and is rendered into Portuguese with the meaning "those who think too much, do not marry" (Amar 168). The last words of the text are three Portuguese translations of the Heinrich Heine poem, "Das Fischermädchen." However, in the culmination of the novel's plot, "Fräulein" recalls Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea and quotes from it, as we have seen above. Her reasons for doing so, as well as the overall relationship between the plot and purpose of Amar and Goethe's epic idyll, will be revealed in what follows. How and for what reasons did a text of the German national literary canon find its way into a narrative by the single most disruptive author in the history of Brazilian literature? The answers to this question are of interest to Brazilianists inasmuch as they provide a new interpretive framework for understanding the novel. Andrade's appropriation of Goethe is, moreover, another example illustrating one of the most prominent theories of Brazilian literature and culture; namely Roberto Schwarz's notion of "idéias fora do lugar" (ideas out of place), which refers to the contradictions that arise when European concepts and ideas are applied to Brazilian contexts, provoking original narrative and generic coping strategies.³ Goethe specialists, on the other hand, are aware that Hermann und Dorothea, along with Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), was Goethe's most popular work throughout the nineteenth century, with its influence waning as the twentieth century progressed and its message to the European middle classes grew increasingly out of date. Andrade's repurposing of Goethe's plot, albeit under the aegis of modernism, demonstrates the continuing relevance of a text that might otherwise be considered of...