Brazilian Tales

Brazilian Tales, by

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, José 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 José 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
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
BRAZILIAN TALES ***

Produced by Todd Fine and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images
of public domain material from the Google Print project.)

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 JOSÉ 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, José 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
México," 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
Señor 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