Poet of
Contained
Emotion

With Manuel Bandeira and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Mello Neto constituted the Holy Trinity of the Brazilian poetry. The poet was also Brazil's best hope for a Nobel Prize in literature.

Alessandra Dalevi

He once took the time to explain that it was quite natural that he was terrified by the idea of hell although he did not believe in God. Maybe it was also quite natural that atheist poet João Cabral de Mello Neto ended up dying in Rio, on October 9, a few months before turning 80, while holding hands with his wife Marly de Oliveira and praying to the God he didn't think existed.

According to Marly, after reciting Our Father, the head of João Cabral fell to one side and she thought he had fallen asleep. "It was a moment of beatitude," she commented later. "It was so serene that I wished at that moment that we could go together. I believe it was his contact with religion that made his passage so peaceful. He started having another vision of life."

João Cabral was better known for his long poem Morte e Vida Severina (Severino Life and Death), but he considered this work made at the request of playwright Maria Clara Machado as a Christmas play, a minor one. "I didn't write Morte e Vida Severina for intellectuals," he once told poet Vinicius de Moraes. "I wrote it for the illiterate folks who listen to folk poems at the Santo Amaro open market in Recife."

He once complained against those who asked for more political commitment from him when the play-poem was presented: "I think that some people would like me to go up there on stage and scream at the end of every show: `Long live the agrarian reform.'"

A recluse for most of his life, the poet and diplomat had become even more of a hermit after being struck by blindness in 1994. He rarely gave interviews and stayed in touch only with close friends and family. Losing his sight also made him bitter and he refused to dictate new poems.

The poet was born in Recife on January 9, 1920 in a wealthy family that owned a sugar cane farm, but the contact while growing up with farm workers, drought-stricken folks, and popular literatura de cordel (string literature) made him highly tuned to the plight of the poor peasants. He was very popular among the workers at the farm since he was a little boy. As nobody knew how to read, he became their main source of entertainment.

When these men had some money left they would go to the city and bring little booklets written by improvisers telling in verse stories of love and misadventure, tales of miracles and dreams, the adventures of the heroes and villains of the Northeast. On these occasions, João Cabral was more than happy to oblige and read to them this popular literature_often from the top of an ox cart. Fifty years later he would remember those sessions in "Descoberta da Literatura" (Discovery of Literature), a poem included in the book A Escola das Facas (School of Knifes) from 1979:

No dia-a-dia do engenho,
toda a semana, durante,
cochichavam-me em segredo:
saiu um novo romance.
E da feira do domingo
me traziam conspirantes
para que os lesse e explicasse
um romance de barbante...

In the sugar-mill's day-to-day,
the whole week, throughout,
they whispered to me in secrecy:
there is a new novel out.
And from the Sunday open market
they brought me conspiring
so I read them and explained
a novel of string…

He moved from Recife (capital of Pernambuco) to Rio in 1945. He was still 17 when he started to work as a bureaucrat and continued doing this for eight more years. During this time he wrote poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade an untitled poem that remained unpublished for more than 50 years:

Difícil ser funcionário
nesta segunda-feira.
Eu te telefono, Carlos,
pedindo conselho.
Não é lá fora o dia
que me deixa assim...
É a dor das coisas,
o luto desta mesa;
é o regimento proibindo
assovios, versos, flores...

Hard to be a public servant
this Monday.
I call you on the phone, Carlos,
asking for advice.
It's not the day outside
that makes me like that…
It's the pain of things,
this table's mourning;
it's the regulation forbidding
whistling, verses, flowers…

He was 22 when his first book, A Pedra do Sono (The Sleep's Stone), was released. The work, a manifesto against the dominant poetry of the time_Parnasianism and its adherence to metrical form_became a landmark and an inspiration for future poets. Three years later, in 1945, he published O Engenheiro (The Engineer). By this time, he had already become friends with the best poets of the day: Vinicius de Moraes, Murilo Mendes, Jorge de Lima, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. In 1946 he married Stella Maria Barbosa de Oliveira_granddaughter of renowned writer Rui Barbosa (1849-1923).Together they had five children.

Poetic Journeys

Having passed in 1945 the exam to the Instituto Rio Branco, which prepares Brazilian diplomats, João Cabral would become another kind of bureaucrat traveling the world as a representative of the Brazilian government. In 1947, he was sent to Barcelona, Spain, for his first foreign mission. There he met and became a friend of painter Joan Miró and created a printing shop to publish Spanish and Brazilian poetry, including two of his books: Psicologia da Composição (Psychology of Composition), 1947, and O Cão Sem Plumas (Featherless Dog), 1950. His Barcelona stint would change his life and deeply influence his poetry.

It was also in 1950 that an unexplained headache struck the poet, a cross he would carry for most of his life, getting only mild relief from drugs. The pain would inspire him to write a hymn to aspirin, a product he avidly consumed for years, until he was given other drugs by his doctors.

Monumento à Aspirina

Claramente: o mais prático dos sóis,
o sol de um comprimido de aspirina:
de emprego fácil, portátil e barato,
compacto de sol na lápide sucinta.
Principalmente porque, sol artificial,
que nada limita a funcionar de dia,
que a noite não expulsa, cada noite,
sol imune às leis de meteorologia,
a toda hora em que se necessita dele
levanta e vem (sempre num claro dia):
acende, para secar a aniagem da alma,
quará-la, em linhos de um meio-dia....

Monument to Aspirin

Obviously: the most practical of suns,
the sun of an aspirin tablet:
of easy usage, portable and cheap,
a sun compact in the succinct headstone.
Mainly because, artificial sun,
that nothing limits to work by day,
that at night, does not expel, each night,
sun immune to the meteorology laws,
any time you need it
gets up and come (always in a clear day):
turns on, to dry soul's burlap,
whiten it under the sun, in linens of noon….

From the book A Educação pela Pedra(The Education by the Stone)

From 1950 to 1952 the poet stayed in London. Accused of being subversive and a communist at the time McCarthyism was raging in the US, he had to return to Brazil. Placed in a forced sabbatical in 1953 he worked for Rio's newspaper A Vanguarda until being reinstated to the diplomatic career in 1954. In 1955 he wrote the painful story of a poor northeastern man who has no place to stay after losing his little piece of land to the drought and a rich farmer. This was Vida e Morte Severina.

Maria Clara Machado, who had ordered the play, returned it to the sender explaining that her O Tablado had no structure to stage it. The poet decided then to cut the stage indications and publish the work as poem in Duas Águas (Two Waters), a book he was publishing and had not enough material according to his publisher.

Finally in the '60s, with music by Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Morte e Vida Severina was shown on stage, first in Brazil and then in Europe, receiving awards and applause wherever it was presented. In 1966, the show was presented by the Tuca troupe in France's Nancy Festival and Cabral received the Best Author Alive award.

An enquiry on his alleged leftist connections didn't prove anything. He was back in Barcelona in 1956. In 1972 he was sent to Senegal as ambassador. He would still work in Ecuador (1979), Honduras (1981), ending his career in Porto, Portugal. He retired as diplomat in 1987.

João Cabral had a dry way of writing verses. In an interview with Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira, he said: "For me, poetry is a composition. When I say composition, I mean something built, planned—from the outside in. No one imagines that Picasso made the paintings he made because he was inspired. His problem was to take a canvas, to study the spaces, the volumes. I only understand the poetic in this sense. I am going to write a poem this size, which such and such elements, things I keep placing as they were bricks. That's why I can spend years creating a poem: because there is planning. For me, poetry is a construction as a house. I learned this with Le Corbusier."

The Brazilian poetry has its Holy Trinity, which is comprised of Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and João Cabral de Mello Neto. João Cabral was Brazil's best hope to get a Nobel Prize in literature. In the last five years every time the Swedish Nobel Foundation asked for a Brazilian candidate for the Nobel, the ABL (Academia Brasileira de Letras—Brazilian Academy of Letters) offered his name. He was himself a distinguished member of that 40-member literary club. The poet was elected to the Academy in 1968. He occupied seat 37, which belonged among others to President Getúlio Vargas and media mogul Assis Chateaubriand.

Lições de Sevilha

Tenho Sevilha em minha cama
eis que Sevilha se faz carne,
eis-me habitando Sevilha
como é impossível de habitar-se
Nada em volta que me lembre
a Sevilha cartão-postal,
a que é turística-anedótica,
a que é museu e catedral
Esta Sevilha que é trianera,
Sevilha fundo de quintal,
Sevilha de lenço secando,
a que é corriqueira e normal
É a Sevilha que há nos seus poços,
se há poço ou não, pouco importa,
a Sevilha que dá às sevilhanas
lições de Sevilha, de fora.

Seville Lessons

I have Seville in my bed
Here's Seville becoming flesh,
here's myself inhabiting Seville
in a way it is impossible to inhabit
Nothing around that reminds me
of a postcard Seville
that is touristy-anecdotic
that is museum and cathedral
This Seville that is neoclassical
Backyard Seville,
Seville with drying kerchief,
which is ordinary and normal
It's the Seville that exists in its wells,
if there's a well or not, it doesn't matter,
Seville which gives Sevillan women
Seville lessons, from the outside

Bibliography:

Pedra do Sono (1942), published by the author
Os Três Mal-Amados (1943), Revista do Brasil
O Engenheiro (1945), paid for by poet Augusto Frederico Schmidt
Psicologia da Composição (1947),
O Livro Inconsútil (Barcelona, 1947)
O Cão sem Plumas (1950)
O Rio (1953), São Paulo's Commission for the 4^th Centennial
Poemas Reunidos (1954), Orfeu
Duas Águas (1956), containing "Morte e Vida Severina," "Paisagens com Figuras" and "Uma Faca Só Lâmina," José Olympio
Quaderna (1960), Guimarães Editores (Portugal)
Dois Parlamentos (1960), published by the author
Terceira Feira (1961), published by the author
Educação pela Pedra (1966), published by the author
Poesias Completas (1968), José Olympio
Museu de Tudo (1975), José Olympio
A Escola das Facas (1979), José Olympio
Poesia Crítica (1981), Nova Fronteira
Auto do Frade (1982), Nova Fronteira
Agrestes (1985), Nova Fronteira
Poesias Completas _ 1940-1965 (1986), José Olympio
Crime na Calle Relator (1987), Nova Fronteira
Museu de Tudo e Depois (Poesia Completa 2) (1988), Nova Fronteira
Poemas Pernambucanos (1988), José Mariano Foundation and Nova Fronteira
Primeiros Poemas (1990), Faculdade de Letras of UFRJ
Sevilha Andando (1990), Nova Fronteira
Poemas Sevilhanos (1992), Foreign Ministry and Nova Fronteira
Obra Completa (1994), Nova Aguilar
Serial e Antes (1997), Nova Fronteira
Educação pela Pedra e Depois (1997), Nova Fronteira

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