Brazilian Tales

Brazilian Tales, by

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Jos�� Medeiros e Albuquerque, Coelho Netto, and Carmen Dolores This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Brazilian Tales
Author: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis Jos�� Medeiros e Albuquerque Coelho Netto Carmen Dolores
Translator: Isaac Goldberg
Release Date: April 12, 2007 [EBook #21040]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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BRAZILIAN TALES

TRANSLATED FROM THE PORTUGUESE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
ISAAC GOLDBERG
Author of "Studies in Spanish-American Literature," etc.

Boston The Four Seas Company
1921
Copyright, 1921, by THE FOUR SEAS COMPANY Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
The Four Seas Press

CONTENTS
Page
PRELIMINARY REMARKS 7
THE ATTENDANT'S CONFESSION 43 BY JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS
THE FORTUNE-TELLER 65 BY JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS
LIFE 87 BY JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS
THE VENGEANCE OF FELIX 107 BY JOS�� MEDEIROS E ALBUQUERQUE
THE PIGEONS 121 BY COELHO NETTO
AUNT ZEZE'S TEARS 139 BY CARMEN DOLORES

TO
J. D. M. FORD
SMITH PROFESSOR OF THE FRENCH AND SPANISH LANGUAGES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

SOME INFORMAL PRELIMINARY REMARKS
The noted Brazilian critic, Jos�� Verissimo, in a short but important essay on the deficiencies of his country's letters, has expressed serious doubt as to whether there exists a genuinely Brazilian literature. "I do not know," he writes, "whether the existence of an entirely independent literature is possible without an entirely independent language." In this sense Verissimo would deny the existence of a Swiss, or a Belgian, literature. In this sense, too, it was no doubt once possible, with no small measure of justification, to deny the existence of an American, as distinguished from an English, literature. Yet, despite the subtle psychic bonds that link identity of speech to similarity of thought, the environment (which helps to shape pronunciation as well as vocabulary and the language itself) is, from the standpoint of literature, little removed from language as a determining factor. Looking at the question, however, from the purely linguistic standpoint, it is important to remember that the Spanish of Spanish America is more different from the parent tongue than is the English of this country from that of the mother nation. Similar changes have taken place in the Portuguese spoken in Brazil. Yet who would now pretend, on the basis of linguistic similarity, to say that there is no United States literature as distinguished from English literature? After all, is it not national life, as much as national language, that makes literature? And by an inversion of Verissimo's standard may we not come face to face with a state of affairs in which different literatures exist within the same tongue? Indeed, is not such a conception as the "great American novel" rendered quite futile in the United States by the fact that from the literary standpoint we are several countries rather than one?
The question is largely academic. At the same time it is interesting to notice the more assertive standpoint lately adopted by the charming Mexican poet, Luis G. Urbina, in his recent "La Vida Literaria de M��xico," where, without undue national pride he claims the right to use the adjective Mexican in qualifying the letters of his remarkable country. Urbina shows that different physiological and psychological types have been produced in his part of the New World; why, then, should the changes stop there? Nor have they ceased at that point, as Se?or Urbina's delightful and informative book reveals. So, too, whatever the merits of the academic question involved, a book like Alencar's "Guarany," for instance, could not have been written outside of Brazil; neither could Verissimo's own "Scenes from Amazon Life."
II.
Brazilian literature has been divided into four main periods. The first extends from the age of discovery and exploration to the middle of the eighteenth century; the second includes the second half of the eighteenth century; the third comprises the years of the nineteenth century up to 1840, while that date inaugurates the triumph of Romanticism over pseudo-Classicism. Romanticism, as in other countries, gave way in turn to realism and various other movements current in those turbulent decades. Sometimes the changes came not as a natural phase of literary evolution, but rather as the consequence of pure imitation. Thus, Verissimo tells us, Symbolism, in Brazil, was a matter of intentional parroting, in many cases unintelligent. It did not correspond to a movement of reaction,--mystical, sensualist, individualist, socialistic or anarchistic,--as in Europe.
Two chief impulses were early present in Brazilian letters: that of Portuguese literature and that of the Jesuit colleges. At the time of the discovery of Brazil only Italy, Spain, France