Grammatically, Portuguese is a difficult language. Even well-educated Brazilians worry about writing it, and will ask friends to check their manuscripts for grammatical errors. Brazilians do not speak the way they write; the written language is more formal and somewhat cumbersome. In fact, Portuguese is an older language than Spanish, and still retains in its structure Latin forms dating from the Roman Republic. The tendency in this century has been to get away from the old, correct written style, in both prose and poetry, and to write demotic Portuguese. But this has not been completely realized, and Portuguese is still rarely written as it is spoken. A few novelists come close, in passages of conversation, and some columnists and younger poets use slang, gíria, almost unintelligible and changing constantly. One of the goals of the famous “Modern Art Week” in São Paulo in 1922 was to abandon the dead literary language of the nineteenth century and to write poetry in the spoken language. Much poetry of the ’20s attempted this, using slang, abbreviations, ellipses, and apostrophes to indicate letters or syllables left out in ordinary, rapid speech. Very much the same thing had happened in English poetry about a decade earlier. Perhaps it is a recurring phenomenon, desire, or ideal in modern literature. This style in poetry later declined with “the generation of ’45,” and poetry of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, visually at least, is more conventional than those first, early attempts at modernism.
Like other Latin languages, Portuguese has a high number of perfect rhymes and frequent, inescapable assonances. The ease of rhyming in these languages has been envied, sometimes eyed with suspicion, by poets writing in the more obdurate English. But facile rhyme and inevitable assonance can become liabilities, handicaps to originality. With time familiar sets of rhymes grow tiresome, and free verse must have come as a great relief. Almost all the poems in this volume are in free verse or unrhymed metrical verse, but since assonance is innate, many contemporary poets make deliberate use of it to give effects of near-rhyme, casually or in regular patterns. Brazilian poetry, even free verse, can rarely avoid melodiousness, even when the sense might seem to want to do so.
The rules of versification in traditional Portuguese verse are like those of French verse: short and long syllables determine the number of feet in a line, not stress, as in English; and no irregularities in meter are permitted. When contemporary Brazilian poets write in traditional forms (as does Vinicius de Moraes in most of his Sonnets) they obey these rules of versification. Punctuation in modern Brazilian poetry is often puzzling. Apparently, the poets are influenced by, or perhaps simply copy, French usage: no punctuation at all except one stop at the end of the poem; sets of dashes where English poetry might use commas or semi-colons; dashes instead of quotation marks, and so on. In fact, anyone reading Brazilian Portuguese, prose or verse, soon becomes aware of its unperturbed inconsistency in both punctuation and spelling; points of style that have become fixed in English have not yet jelled in Brazil. It resembles our own language in its freer, earlier days. In these translations, the original punctuation has been retained when possible, and only tampered with when it, or the lack of it, might confuse the English-reading reader.
Brazilian poetry cannot be considered truly Brazilian — that is, independent of that of Portugal — until after the Proclamation of Independence in 1822. Its development is more or less predictable, in that its movements parallel those of western Europe, especially France, with a time-lag of ten, twenty, or more years. As in American writing, this time-lag has decreased over the years, growing always shorter, until at present sometimes Brazilian poetry actually seems more advanced than that of the countries it formerly derived from. As in American poetry, there are exceptions to this, apparent regressions in the modernist movement, but none happens to come within the period covered by this volume. There is no space in this brief introduction to give a history of Brazilian poetry over the last hundred fifty years. We shall merely give the highlights, naming a few outstanding poets and their books and briefly outlining the movements that make up the Brazilian heritage of the fourteen poets represented.
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The nineteenth century was, as elsewhere, the romantic century, and Brazilian Romanticism is considered to have started with the publication of a book of poems by Gonçalves Magalhães (1811–1882), called, romantically indeed, Poetic Sighs and Longings. The four outstanding romantic poets, however, were: Gonçalves Dias (1823–1864); Álvares de Azevedo (1831–1852); Casimiro de Abreu (1837–1860); and Castro Alves (1847–1871). All four used genuinely Brazilian themes, Gonçalves Dias* romanticising the Brazilian Indian for the first time, and Castro Alves, in his melodramatic poem “The Slave Ship,” being the first poet to protest against the horrors of the slave trade. They and the other poets of the movement were much influenced, by way of France and Portugal, by the English romantics. Saudade, the characteristic Brazilian longing or nostalgia, and plain homesickness appear obsessively in their poems — perhaps because most of these young poets, “of good family,” made the long ocean voyage to study at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, for Brazil had no universities until the late nineteenth century. Several of them died very young, as did Keats and Shelley, usually of tuberculosis. Gonçalves Dias drowned, shipwrecked on his native shore, while returning from Portugal.
The romantic period gave way to a period of realism, called the Parnassian movement (from around 1870 to 1890) and a brief period of Symbolism (1890–1900). The so-called “realists” were strongly influenced by the French Parnassian school of Gauthier, Banville, Lesconte de L’Isle, and Heredia. The most famous poet of this school was Olavo Bilac (1865–1918), three of whose books are Poesias (1888), Poesias Infantis (1904), and Tarde (1919). The Symbolist movement produced one important figure, the black poet Cruz e Souza (1861–1918). German and English romantic poetry were known to the Brazilians, but French literature and philosophy were, and have remained, until very recently, the strongest influences in Brazilian literature and thought. They are still perhaps of primary importance, but English and, even more, American prose and poetry are now rapidly becoming better known. English is now becoming the most important and fashionable foreign language.
From the turn of the century until 1922, Brazilian poetry went through a period of eclecticism, with no one style predominating, reflecting in general the intense nationalism prevalent at the time. In 1912 Oswald de Andrade, later considered the most radical poet of the 1922 movement, returned from Europe with a copy of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. About that time he created a sensation by publishing a poem without rhyme or meter, entitled “Last Ride of a Tubercular through the City by Streetcar.” The subject-matter and tone of poetry were changing, and in 1917, when Manuel Bandeira published his first book Ash of the Hours, the critic João Ribeiro announced that Olavo Bilac, admired for so long, was “now out of date.”