Why You've Never Heard of Brazil's Greatest Writers

Painting of a red train traveling through a snowy landscape at night, with a railroad crossing signal in foreground and a starry sky above.

I. Welcome, Bem Vindos

“Viver - não é? - é muito perigoso. Porque ainda não se sabe. Porque aprender-a-viver é que é o viver, mesmo.”

“To live – right? – it’s very dangerous… Because learning-to-live is in fact what it is to live.”

The line comes from João Guimarães Rosa, one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Yet outside Brazil, very few people read him, or even know of him. Why is that?

Brazil, in terms of sheer land size, is larger than the continental U.S. It’s the seventh most populous country with almost 223 million people, accounting for about 2.6% of the global population. Portuguese has somewhere around 270 million native speakers, making it the 6th most spoken language in the world. Yet, I dare to say that you’ve never heard of a Brazilian author. Or maybe you have, Clarice Lispector, maybe, because of that controversial translation of Agua Viva that came out some 6 years ago. Or Paulo Coelho, who wrote The Alchemist, o Alchemista.

It’s not a question of a lack of translatability as you might expect. Or, at least not entirely. I’ll introduce you to some incredible Brazilian writers for your Want to Read list, but more importantly, I’ll use Brazil’s literary tradition as a case study to show how entire forms of literary achievement can become invisible, wading in deep waters far offshore from the Land of the Canon.

But before we get to that, I’m going to tell you a little about Brazil’s history to explain why its literature has lacked the momentum of European and Hispano-American literary traditions had.

II. “What Is Brazil?” From Colony to Country

Portuguese sailor Pedro Alvares Cabral landed on Brazil’s shores in 1500. No one knows for sure, but many studies suggest that there were anywhere around 8-10 million people in the area we recognize as Brazil in 1500. During the 322 years it took for Brazil to gain independence, it was a colony whose economy was structured around extraction of pau-brasil, brazilwood, then sugar, then gold. Brazil was a Portuguese colonial territory whose culture, economy, and writing systems were structured around extraction, administration and religious indoctrination.

Meanwhile, in those same 300 years, European nations were already deep into the developments of their own national cultural and literary identities. In the 1500s Vaz de Camões wrote the Lusiadas in Portugal; in the 1600s, Cervantes wrote the Don Quixote; and in the 1700s Voltaire wrote Candide. Meanwhile, philosophers like Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Kant etc. were in their heyday.

But in 1808, a shift begins for Brazil. The Portuguese royal court flees Napoleon, relocating to Rio de Janeiro. Institutions like libraries––Rio has one of the most beautiful libraries in the world in my opinion–– and presses start cropping up. But there was still no major sense of “Brazilian” identity, because “Brazil” was still a colony.

So when independence came in 1822 the question couldn’t have been “What should Brazilian literature look like?” Not even “What is Brazilian literature?” But “What is Brazil?” “Who is Brazil?”

The 1872 census, the first census conducted country-wide after Brazil’s liberation, revealed that Brazil’s population was incredibly heterogenous: made up of a majority of enslaved Africans or descendants of enslaved Africans (Brazil’s emancipation didn’t come until 1888) followed by whites/mixed-race and indigenous peoples.

Thus, at this point to itself, Brazil feels like Rimbaud’s “je est un autre,” roughly translating “I is Somebody Else.” And these regional, ethnic, and cultural differences didn’t magically poof disappear when Brazil was declared a republic under Pedro I. In 1928, modernist writer Mario de Andrade, wrote Macunaíma, who is the “herói sem nenhum caráter,” meaning “the hero without character.” To put it roughly, Macunaíma represents Brazil, and in order to do that, he could never have had a ‘single’ character because Brazil’s identity is so complex. Brazil is still one of the most genetically, ethnically, and culturally diverse regions. According to the 2022 Census, there are still over 391 unique indigenous ethnicities and 295 indigenous languages in Brazil, and this is after being ravaged by disease, enslavement, and a general lack of preservation for much of the past four centuries. Our heterogeneity makes Brazil one of the most genetically, ethnically, and culturally diverse countries in the world. The unique diversity in Brazil is a condition that shaped and continues to shape its literature.

III. “Who is Brazil?” The First Answers

Some decades after it declared independence, in 1850s there were artists writing who were participating in and responding to European literature traditions, such as Álvares de Azevedo, Castro Alves, and José de Alencar. Perhaps literature is always an act of call and response, but it’s also undeniable that these writers were starting to invent and imagine a nation with novels like Alencar’s O Guarani and Iracema.

Then we get Machado de Assis, one of the more internationally known names. Although he had a brief stint with Romanticism in novels of his youth, he found his footing in realism, a movement which emphasized depicting mundane subject-matter in faithful and straightforward ways that avoid grandiose forms.

But to call Machado’s Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, a fictional autobiography of a recently deceased man written by himself “from beyond,” realist in the same way that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is would be a blundering misnomer. It doesn’t do justice to the major reconfiguration Machado de Assis enacted on the aesthetics of realism. As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht writes in his chapter on Emerging Dialogues on Machado de Assis, Machado’s realism is “founded upon a firm philosophical questioning of placing reality into representation” and focused on a “singular narrative form of instability and self-reflexivity.”

It couldn’t have happened any other way.

In “A Modernização Seletiva: uma reinterpretação do dilema brasileiro,” sociologist Jessé Souza describes the modernization during the 19th and 20th centuries as selective and superficial. He writes that while modern institutions expanded, did they so unevenly, reinforcing rather than dissolving deep social hierarchies that originated from the country’s founding economic systems. Because in the 1800 and 1900s, Brazil boasted of expanding metropolises like Rio and São Paulo but they existed alongside quasi-feudal systems, latifúndios––large estates owned by aristocrats. This uneven structure of modernity also shapes the conditions under which Brazilian literature emerges.

In a striated life, a strict “realism” is basically precluded by the historical and cultural moment. Notice in Bras Cubas Machado is telling a ghost story. In 1993, Jacques Derrida published Spectres of Marx, in which he coined the portmanteau term “hauntology,” arguing that the present is never fully whole or self-contained. The idea of the present is inextricably mixed up with past and future. Just as Bras Cubas’ ghost shaped the story of his life and Hamlet’s father acts as character in the play so so-called dead ideologies, ghosts of the past, and unfulfilled expectations continue to shape the realities that follow them.

Brazil’s colonial past and its repercussions loomed just behind each action bred a multiplicious ‘modern condition’ that Brazilian writing inherits, represents, and is shaped by. And the question “who is brazil?” cannot be answered singularly.

When the 20th century begins, writers like Euclides da Cunha, Lima Barreto, and Monteiro Lobato all give different answers.

For da Cunha, the answer lies in the sertão, the interior—which provides a distinct reality to that of the coastal living—while Lima Barreto provides a skeptical claim about the nation-building project itself, warning and heeding people to not buy the official narratives and patriotic fantasies. Monteiro Lobato is more practical, investigating the “how tos” of building a modern Brazilian nation. He’s also probably the greatest Brazilian children’s literature writer. The genius of Brazilian writing was there, already in the nineteenth century, but it never managed to enter into the global canon the way Dickens or Tolstoy did. This lack of recognition starts getting to Brazilian writers and artists, which brings us to 1922.

Which brings us to: 1922, and the Brazilian modernists.

III. Brazilian Modernism: Tupi or Not Tupi, That Is the Question

By 1922, European and U.S. modernism was well underway (if you want a deeper dive into that, check out my other video linked here and in the description). Brazilians who had money had gone to Europe to study them, and they saw things like cubism, futurism, expressionism, etc.,

A group of 5 artists––Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Menotti Del Picchia, Anita Malfatti, and Tarsila do Amaral––organized the “Semana de 22.” It was a three day art, literary, and music festival held in Sao Paulo’s municipal theatre during Brazilian carnival. Not only was it going to celebrate 100 years of Brazil’s independence, but it was also going to inaugurate a new era of Brazilian art, establishing our artistic independence from Europe.

It was an exposition open to the public with about 100 works and during the three nights that it ran, the 13-17 of February, there were literary and musical performances. In reality, it actually didn’t have a huge impact when it happened, but it was the seed that catalyzed Brazil to move into a new literary era. But after Mario de Andrade died in 1945, that week started to be considered as the moment that founded an intellectual universe with totally new and genuinely Brazilian thinking.

In 1924 and 1928, two very important manifestos by were released, the Pau-Brasil by Oswald de Andrade who said that artists needed to make Brazilian literature Brazilian literature, not something defined in the negative by what it was not (eg not European) but that had a complete sense of identity by returning to Brazil’s heritage, nature, and primitive spontaneity. The goal was to create a modern Brazilian art that was so valuable that it could be exported to the world, like pau brasil was, hence the name.

The Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) was an evolution of the first; it was firmer, more aggressive; it advocated for ‘devouring’ from the Other, being Europe, only what was useful/extremely necessary in order to create this new Brazilian literary identity, which found its essence rooted in its own indigenous and African heritage. The most famous line, “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question,” is a play on Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be,” suggesting that Brazil should embrace its indigenous roots (Tupi), embrace spoken rather than formalized grammar and syntax to overcome colonial influence and truly create Brazilian lit for the Brazilian people.

Oswald was giving a very clear answer of what and whom he thought Brazil was and was not, and advocated for the creation of a literature that solidly answered that, working from a place of rupture. It was a Nietzschean “life-affirmation,” the radical, active ‘yes’ to existence in all its chaos, pain, and meaninglessness: we transvalue, metabolize European cultures and transform colonial taboos into a localized, life-affirming power: Brazilian literature.

After that is when the masterpieces that you’ve never read start coming into existence.

IV. “Nonada:” The Hidden Masterpieces

By the mid-twentieth century, the questions of the nature of nation, modernity, and language had become the conditions of writing. Although there are many Brazilian writers to whom I want introduce you, I’m going to focus on four who I think majorly represent the level of formal experimentation and intellectual intensity that rivals any literary tradition in the world—but that happens largely outside global circulation.

These four writers show how Brazilian literature moved from exposing material reality to reinventing the very language needed to express it.

Graciliano Ramos (1892-1953) wrote Vidas Secas (Barren lives) and São Bernardo, among other works. He writes a world where survival is precarious, social structures are oppressive and concrete and he links his content with his form by using reduced, dry, and minimal language. Specifically, he writes about the sertão, the Brazilian interior, which I’ve mentioned stands in high contrast to the coast.

For example:

“Fabiano got along well with ignorance. Had he right to know? Had he? He hadn’t. There it is. If he learned anything, he would need to learn more, and would never be satisfied.

“Fabiano dava-se bem com a ignorância. Tinha o direito de saber? Tinha? Não tinha. — Está aí. Se aprendesse qualquer coisa, necessitaria aprender mais, e nunca ficaria satisfeito.”

By the way, these are my personal translations.

When you read Graciliano Ramos, your mouth gets dry with all the dusty sertão vocabulary but your mind runs rich with the images. With Ramos, Brazil is hunger, it is drought, it is labor, it is exhaustion. The answer to what does it mean to live in Brazil is limited to brutal materiality.

Fabiano knew knowledge would make him unquenchable, which is an impossible condition in the caatinga.

But Carlos Drummond de Andrade, from Minas and who lived in Rio, brings us from the question of “what’s happening to me?” to “What does it mean to be a living someone in this historical condition?”

In “Maos Dadas,” Hand and Hand translated, but also hands given to each other transliterated. Here are the lines in Portuguese and in English:

Não serei o poeta de um mundo caduco

Também não cantarei o mundo futuro

Estou preso à vida e olho meus companheiros

Estão taciturnos mas nutrem grandes esperanças

Entre eles, considero a enorme realidade

O presente é tão grande, não nos afastemos

Não nos afastemos muito, vamos de mãos dadas

_______

I will not be poet of a world fading away

Nor will I sing of a world to come

I’m bound to this life and look at my companions

They are taciturn yet harbor great hopes

Among them, I contemplate vast reality

The present is so big, let’s not drift apart

Let’s not drift too far apart; we’ll go hand in hand.

Drummond emphasizes the present moment of modernity as a condition of writing and being, of consciousness. He writes about love, friendship, happiness, loss, showing how modernity intimately.

But in Clarice Lispector, that stability of feeling begins to dissolve. As Lawrence Debbs in his video about Clarice Lispector, reading Lispector’s writing feels like you’re watching an alien writing about human life from the way she wields language. I would say because with her, consciousness stops clearly reflecting the world, and it becomes the problem itself. For example, her oeuvre, The Passion According to G.H., is an intense stream-of-consciousness novel about a woman who finds a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door, which crushes it. She watches it die, and spends the next three hundred pages confronting the existential, spiritual, and metaphysical implications of the encounter, including whether she ought to eat it.

In The Passion According to G.H., G.H. repeatedly reaches experiences that she claims are beyond language and then spends pages trying—and failing—to articulate them. A similar pressure appears in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where Sethe’s attempt to explain what happened to her to Paul D exposes how traumatic history resists narration, forcing language into fragmentation and repetition. Circling circling

While Lispector is focused on the failure of language, Guimarães Rosa asks, what if we can reinvent language itself, where the vast emptiness left by what can’t be said isn’t an unending abyss, but the precipice for creation. If there are experiences language cannot contain, then Guimarães Rosa says, the language must become larger.

In Grande Sertão: Veredas, he invents a revolutionary, hybrid language that blends rural Brazilian speech front the sertão with erudite Portuguese, classical mythologies, and his own neologisms. The poetic stream of consciousness, voice, and language is likened to Joyce’s Ulysses. In 2016, Words with Borders published a translated excerpt from the beginning of Grande Sertão by Alison Entrekin, and you can read it to give you an idea

From the first line, “nonada” or “nonought,” as Entrekin translates it, the novel signals that it’s creating a linguistic world that first doesn’t abide by strict existent grammar rules and second nestles into a space that cannot easily be captured or occupied by simplistic, ordinary categories––in other words, what the experience of Brazil and what being Brazilian has felt like to many people over the past centuries. And beyond the linguistic genius and imagination that that takes, what’s more impressive is that Guimarães Rosa is expressing experiences and realities that ordinary or literary Portuguese could never. In fact, “nonada,” across all its ambiguous meanings–– “Nothing, In the middle of nowhere, nowhere, it’s nothing,” conveys that the novel is starting from linguistic zero. It violates the principle that something can’t come from nothing, it conjures story from a non-beginning, from this point of rupture.

So there’s a progression in all of Brazilian literature and it all circles and circles identity and language, self and creation: In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers wonder: “who is Brazil?” Modernists develop that question into “How can we represent Brazilian in the most authentically Brazilian way without replicating European forms?” Lispector turns that inward as well as beyond questions of country, asking “what are the limits of a consciousness’ self-knoweldge?” And then Guimarães Rosa creates a new lexicon, asking: “How can we use language to reflect and express what Brazilian consciousness has experienced in what history has brought to light?”

And then we have to ask, why hasn’t history brought this to the forefront of literary tradition the way it has Joyce or Dostoevsky?

V. Why is this Canon Hidden?

You could argue that Grande Sertão––precisely because of its linguistic ingenuity and the way its meaning-building relies on neologisms, syntax, and oral rhythm––is untranslatable. But the issue of overlooked literature goes way beyond the question of translation; you’ll hear that much nuance that comes from Dostoyevsky’s language use in Notes from the Underground is totally lost in English, but we still see Doystoyesky as a classic. Why not Guimarães Rosa?

i. A Brief History of the Canon

In Arthur Krystals’ essay collection This Thing We Call Literature, he gives a brief history of the canon: “The word canon, from the Greek, originally meant ‘measuring stick’ or ‘rule’ and was used by the Church Fathers to differentiate the genuine or canonical books of the Bible from the apocryphal ones….in effect, the canon formalized modern literature as a select body of imaginative writings that could stand up to the Greek and Latin texts” CUT BACK that is, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which became benchmarks of quality writing]. When European nations started focusing on studying their own languages and literatures, the English, for example, wanted Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton to be included. The French, Montaigne and Moliere; The Italians, Dante and Virgil. And so on.

Russian literature like that of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy was produced inside a European-facing literary system, it was immediately legible within the publication and criticism industry as part of the novel tradition and was absorbed into European intellectual history.

Krystal continues on: “The canon anointed the worthy, and by implication, the unworthy, functioning as a set of commandments that saved people the trouble of deciding what to read.”

These became ‘the Classics.’ Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the cultural context of the Cold War and Cuban revolution brought international interest to the sociopolitical reality and literature of Latin America. Mind you, Grande Sertão had already been published. But Brazil was once again overlooked as no Brazilian writers were considered really in this expansion. The writers that rose into canon territory were all Spanish speaking: Garcia Marquez, Borges, Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and on.

But the problem wasn’t the language difference. Fernando Pessoa, writing in the late 19th and early twentieth century, was a Portuguese writer already known around the world.

It’s because the problem is not translation, it is categorization. Brazilian literature is relegated to sub-genre: Latin American literature, regional modernism, global south narrative. And the thing is, there isn’t an actual set list of writings and writers who are or are not canonical. It’s kind of like a chicken and egg situation: do readers read certain texts and thus they’re considered popular and get more attention and publishing or do publishers consider certain texts more important and thus dictate what readers read? It’s a little bit of both, probably. Nonetheless, canons are not objectively formed lists of texts; canons organize narratives about literary history.

Brazilian literature was produced in a peripheral literary system, and our literary tradition fits no single dominant story or history cleanly. It’s naive to chalk it up to the language barrier. The map of “world literature” most readers inherit is not neutral—it is a selective history of what kinds of experience are allowed to count as central.

It is thereby impossible to treat “world literature” as a neutral category once we see how unevenly it registers different kinds of literary complexity. However, we are lucky.

In English, the word ‘fate’ comes from Latin ‘fātum,’ –– a thing said, as in, when something is said, you can write it down, and it’s there forever. And we have translations of Guimaraes Rosa, Clarice Lispector, Graciliano Ramos, Carlos Drummond, etc. etc. And you as a reader can consume this literature with the awareness you’ve now learned and change the way literature is seen and consumed. You can be a guerilla reader, perhaps.

It does in fact seem like Clarice Lispector is growing in her English audience, which is excellent; she can be your starting point. But she shouldn’t be your ending point.

Every literary canon is also a history of attention. It tells us not only what generations of readers chose to preserve, but what they learned to overlook. Brazilian literature reminds us thatgreatness and visibility are not the same thing. And if that’s true, then the hidden canon isn’t just Brazil. It’s every masterpiece waiting just beyond the edge of the map we’ve inherited. While the map we’ve inherited is incomplete, reading is one way of redrawing it.

VI. Brazilian Writers Reading List

Poets/Poetry:

Carlos Drummond de Andrade: “Mãos Dadas,” “No Meio do Caminho,” “José” “A Máquina do Mundo,” “Sentimento do Mundo,” “Congresso Internacional do Medo,” “Poema de Sete Faces,” “Memória”

Cecilia Meireles: “Motivo,” “Timidez,” “Retrato,” “Canção,” “Epigrama nº 2”

Manuel Bandeira: “Vou-me Embora pra Pasárgada,” “Pneumotórax,” “Os Sapos,” “Evocação do Recife,” “Consoada”

Vinicius de Moraes: “Soneto de Fidelidade,” “Soneto de Separação,” “A Rosa de Hiroshima”

João Cabral de Melo Neto, Education by Stone

Short Prose:

“O Alienista” (The Psychiatrist) – Machado de Assis, trans. William L. Grossman

“Pai Contra Mãe” (Father Against Mother) – Machado de Assis, trans. John Gledson

“Amor,” (Love), “A Hora da Estrela” (The Hour of the Star)– Clarice Lispector, trans. Katrina Dodson

“A Terceira Margem do Rio” (The Third Bank of the River), “A Hora e Vez de Augusto Matraga” (The Hour and Turn of Augusto Matraga) – João Guimarães Rosa, trans. Barbara Shelby

"O Ex-Mágico da Taberna Minhota" (The Ex-Magician of the Taberna Minhota)– Murilo Rubião, trans. Thomas Colchie & Edla van Steen

"Antes do Baile Verde" (Before the Green Ball), "A Caçada" (The Hunt) – Lygia Fagundes Telles, trans. Margaret A. Neves

Novels:

Read on!