João Guimarães Rosa
This is the first installment of a double number dedicated to João Guimarães Rosa. I would like to thank Suzi Frankl-Sperber for her superb work as guest editor. Her lifetime work makes her the ideal editor, the one who could congretate the most significant critics and scholars of one of Brazil's greatest writers.
The importance of Guimarães Rosa's œuvre worldwide has never been in doubt in countries where good translations of his works were accomplished. It is indeed part of Guimarães Rosa's studies, the correspondence between the author and his translators in German, Italian, Spanish and French. His epic Grande Sertão: Veredas is duly recognized in those countries and language regions. The exception to this is the English language, where an inadequate, flawed translation of the novel under the odd title "The Devil to Pay in the Backlands" pays no heed to the characteristics of the author's language, which would require from the part of the translator, a deep understanding of Brazilian Portuguese, the author's own invented language, and an equally profound understanding of the English language as well.
Guimarães Rosa's language is an amalgam of various registers of languages (not only Portuguese) in various stages of evolution. It is indeed a language in evolution with its orality, regionalisms archaisms, neologisms, universalisms, personal orthography, verbal inventions, characteristic music and rhytm, and finally a voice that is recognized as inimitable. Moimeichego looks like one of those "weird" regional names so common in Minas Gerais, the ground zero from which Guimarães Rosa builds his cathedral of words, but it is a name consisting of the word "me" in various languages: moi, me, ich, ego.
Equally challenging are his short stories, among which the best ever written in Portuguese, Deeply original, highly philosophical (but not on the surface), some of his stories have been translated into English, but more translations, given the difficulty of this author, often wrongly compared to James Joyce, William Faulkner, Carlo Emilio Gadda, would be welcome.
As a Guimarães Rosa scholar myself, having delved for years into what remained of his personal library at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros in the University of São Paulo, it was never a surprise to see a book in Latvian with some marginalia in it, but it was an immense revelation, so many years ago, to get into a battered cheap copy of the Phedro with so many of Guimarães Rosa's neat handwriting in it. It took me years to get to the bottom of that relationship, article by article, and now in what comprises a long essay in my forthcoming book. What a wonderful travel companion!
Élide Valarini Oliver
Guest Editors
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Suzi Frankl Sperber
Professor Emerita
Universidade Estadual de Campinas
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Editor
| Élide Valarini Oliver Professor of Brazilian and Comparative Literature Director of the Center for Portuguese Studies UC Santa Barbara |
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Assistant Editors
| Pedro Craveiro, Ph.D. Lecturer of Spanish and Portuguese UC Santa Barbara pedrocraveiro@ucsb.edu |
Priscilla Gardina Undergraduate Student UC Santa Barbara pgardina@ucsb.edu |
Volume 15
Introdução, Suzi Frankl Sperber (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
Refazendo a pé a travessia do sertão por Riobaldo, Willi Bolle (Universidade de São Paulo)
YawarHetê, Byron Vélez Escallón (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
Meu tio o 'belo e bom', Clarissa Marchelli (Universidade Federal do Ceará)
Êe! Iauaretê! Um grito parado no ar: Resistência ao apagamento do indígena no território brasileiro e legitimação de sua fala, Suzi Frankl Sperber (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
No grão nulo de um minuto: Notas sobre dor, conhecimento e amor em dois contos de 'Primeiras Estórias' de João Guimarães Rosa, Anita Martins Rodrigues de Moraes (Universidade Federal Fluminense)
A letra, o ecrã e as travessias: Guimarães Rosa em diálogo com Eisenstein, Kurosawa e Fellini, Julio Augusto Xavier Galharte (Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul)
Ocovi: Poema dramático em várias vozes, Alckmar Santos (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)