HELENA MORLEY* | MINHA VIDA DE MENINA | *Pen Name of ALICE DAYRELL CALDEIRA BRANT

2017- Celebrating the love of reading Brazilian literature The year of #lovetoreadBrazil

BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB| HELENA MORLEY* | MINHA VIDA DE MENINA | *pen name of ALICE DAYRELL CALDEIRA BRANT

7th December 6.30-9 PM 2017- the year of #lovetoreadBrazil

CELEBRATORY & ACCLAIMED END OF YEAR LITERARY QUIZ

Minha Vida de Menina (1942) by Helena Morley- pen name of Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant (1880 –1970)

translated as

The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’ (1957)

What does ‘Dear diary’ conjure in your mind or memory?

Candid teenage diaries -particularly by girls – make fascinating reading charting evolving perceptions of young women – & necessarily redacted for privacy or censorship & …!

Recording personal histories has been practiced by ancient and medieval diarists, e.g. Elisabeth of Schönau through the 17th & 18th century with notable diarists such as Samuel Pepys and lesser known Dorothy Wordsworth, boom in 19th & 20th century multiplicity to zillions of digital diaries in one form or another!

We could even speculate that Helena Morley was instigated by traditions Brought by her British grandfather Dr. John Dayrell, mentioned by Sir Richard Burton*, a physician to either the ‘Companhia de Cocais’ or/and São João del Rey Mining Company.

Morley’s diary (redacted for sure!) will take you to an assortment of tales from the land of diamonds Diamantina in Minas Gerais– from 5th Jan1893 to 31st Dec1895.

* (1869)Explorations of the highlands of the Brazil; with a full account of the gold and diamond mines. Also, canoeing down 1500 miles of the great river São Francisco, from Sabará to the sea.

DETAILS OF AVAILABLE PUBLICATIONS:

ENGLISH 1957 The Diary of “Helena Morley” translated by Elizabeth Bishop by Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy

Reprinted 2008 The Diary of “Helena Morley” Imprint: Virago Modern Classics no. 534 ISBN: 9781844084937

PORTUGUESE 1942 -Minha Vida de Menina

Reprinted

1988 Minha vida de Menina: cadernos de uma menina provinciana nos fins do século XIX. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio Editora, 1988 ISBN 8571647682 Various editions in Brazil

Free download from https://raaletras.weebly.com/uploads/4/9/9/4/49942009/6630207-helena- morley-minha-vida-de-menina.pdf

SHORT HISTORY OF THE BOOK AND TRANSLATIONS

Minha vida de Menina: cadernos de uma menina provinciana nos fins do século XIX is the only book by Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant, published in her lifetime, and under the pen name Helena Morley in 1942. There have been speculations that it is a re-creation of her childhood notes. Seemingly, there are no available manuscripts of the original(s). There are accounts of how the diary was first published as a book to be distributed among friends, who in turn circulated the

book, which ended up becoming popular. However, this could also be part of the spin to promote it.

In her September 1942 Note to the first Edition, Helena Morley, tells her readers that her father encouraged her to write a diary from an early age. In addition, while she attended the Teaching College (Escola Normal), her Portuguese language teacher required all girls to produce a daily piece of writing, which could be a description, letter or narrative on a topic of the girls’ choice. She claims that there were various notebooks and loose leaves kept for years at the bottom of a drawer and virtually forgotten. As the author re-read them, she tells the readers that she decided to review and order them for her granddaughters. The idea to collate them into a book emerged naturally, particularly, because she wanted to tell about how different her granddaughters’ lives were compared to those of her early teenage years.

Further on, she states that no changes were made in the original texts, but small corrections with occasional substitutions of a few words, which could be difficult to understand. The concluding paragraph carries a special message to her granddaughters.

The setting of the diary is in the town (municipality) of Diamantina huddled in the mountain range - Serra dos Cristais - at some 1280 metres above the sea level, a hilly town surrounded by extraordinary natural beauty, part of the Chapada Diamantina. The first settlement in the town was the Arraial do Tijuco, the first name of Diamantina, founded in 1713. A chapel dedicated to Saint Anthony started the settlement there; and following the discovery of diamonds in 1729 the settlement grew swiftly. By the end of the 18th century it had the third largest population of the Captaincy of Geral da Minas, after the capital Vila Rica, currently Ouro Preto, and the prosperous town of São João del-Rei. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Diamantina became a major hub for diamond mining with an influx of many persons and

3 companies from various places in the world, lured by possible riches. Many significant Brazilian Baroque buildings were built, some of which are quite lavish, reflecting the wealth and importance of the town.

One of the claims to fame of this town is a freed slave, Chica da Silva (ca. 1732-1796), who was the common law wife of the richest man in Colonial Brazil, João Fernandes de Oliveira (1720-1779), a Portuguese diamond miner. They would have thirteen children and she became part of the Brazilian folklore featuring in various forms of art.

Another significant personality was the Brazilian general, politician, distinguished folklorist/ethnographer and polyglot José Vieira Couto de Magalhães (1837-1898), who was born in Diamantina. His 1863 Viagem ao rio Araguaia (Journey to the Araguaya River), 1876 O Selvagem (The Savage) and 1894 Testes de antropologia (Tests of Anthropology) are invaluable sources.

Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (1902-1976), born in Diamantina, served as the 21st President of Brazil from 1956 to 1961. His modernization development plans for Brazil, which he pursued with great acumen, ensured that his term of office would become marked by economic prosperity and political stability. In addition, he famously achieved the feat of constructing of new capital of Brazil, Brasília, in the geographic centre of Brazil, in a very short period of time.

The town of Diamantina has been granted the accolade of UNESCO World Heritage Site. Helena Morley’s diary has become a symbol of life in Diamantina at the end of the 19th century, most probably because of its translation into Portuguese.

The diary narrates the life of the author and her extended family in the town of Diamantina, in the state of Minas Gerais from the age of 12 to 15. The period spans a period of great changes in Brazil with the fianl steps of the Abolition of Slavery and the Proclamation of the Republic of Brazil. In addition to recording various local customs and traditions, the diary is a treasure trove for historians of the Brazilian Portuguese language, as it contains local lexicon and even some local morpho- syntactic forms. A number of typical local dishes are mentioned in the diary, so much so that one could possibly produce a Diamantina recipe book.

Alice Dayrell married Augusto Mario Caldeira Brant, who served as a president of the Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro. She became a socialite in the federal capital. Her husband greatly encouraged her to publish the diary, which first appeared as Minha vida de menina published by José Olympio. Needless to say that the author was selective in what she included in her diary and there is evidence that she chose to finish it at the end of 1894. Later commentators have stated that other diary notes of the subsequent years contained accounts of how she met her husband and remain unpublished. She got married in 1900 and the couple had five children. There are many descendants in Brazil and possibly elsewhere. As any published diaries, Morley’s diary is redacted and her husband had a significant input particularly into the translation into English. Diana Athill, in her foreword, refers to the fact that the husband was actually the editor of the diary (2008: vii-xi).

On publication, she gained admirers such as the French Novelist Georges Bernanos (1888 –1948), who published The Diary of a Country Priest (1936). He wrote a letter to the author, which was printed on the back jacket of Elizabeth Bishop’s 1957 translation into English.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911 –1979), the American poet and short-story writer, resident in Brazil at the time, translated it into English as The Diary of Helena Morley. In Brazil, the book would be reprinted several times. The author would get congratulatory letters, some of which are much later, including one from Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967) from 1958. There are unfounded claims that the diary was translated into French and possibly Japanese (c.f. Elizabeth Bishop in her 1977 Foreword) and Italian. However, there does not seem to be any publication of the said translations or reference to any of the translators. E. Bishop also notes in her 1977 foreword that Dr. (used for lawyers) Augusto Marion Brant and Mrs Brant ‘refused, characteristically, to let it be translated into Russian’.

Various biographical accounts of Elizabeth Bishop’s life have been published. The Poetry Foundation contains a succinct outline of her life: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/elizabeth-bishop

“During her lifetime, poet Elizabeth Bishop was a respected yet somewhat obscure figure in the world of American literature. Since her death in 1979, however, her reputation has grown to the point that many critics, like Larry Rohter in the New York Times, have referred to her as "one of the most important American poets" of the 20th century. Bishop was a perfectionist who did not write prolifically, preferring instead to spend long periods of time polishing her

work. She published only 101 poems during her lifetime. Her verse is marked by precise descriptions of the physical world and an air of poetic serenity, but her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing.

Bishop, an only child, experienced upheaval at a tender age. Her father died before she was a year old. Her mother suffered through serious bouts of mental instability and was permanently committed to an institution when Elizabeth was only five years old. The poet never saw her mother again. She was taken at first by her maternal grandparents, who lived in Nova Scotia, Canada. After some years, however, her paternal grandparents took charge of her. They were well-to-do inhabitants of Massachusetts, and expressed their concern over the limited financial and educational resources available in Nova Scotia. Under their guardianship, Bishop was sent to the elite Walnut Hills School for Girls and to Vassar College.

Her years at Vassar were tremendously important to Bishop. There she met Marianne Moore, a fellow poet who also became a lifelong friend. Working with a group of students that included Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, and Margaret Miller, she founded the short-lived but influential literary journal Con Spirito, which was conceived as an alternative to the well- established Vassar Review. After graduating, Bishop lived in New York and traveled extensively in France, Spain, Ireland, Italy, and North Africa. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her journeys and the sights she saw. In 1938, she moved to Key West, where she wrote many of the poems that eventually were collected in her first volume North and South (1946). Her second poetry collection, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring (1955) received the Pulitzer Prize. In 1944 she left Key West, and for 14 years she lived in Brazil, where she and her lover, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares, became a curiosity in the town of Pétropolis. After Soares took her own life in 1967, Bishop spent less time in Brazil than in New York, San Francisco, and Massachusetts, where she took a teaching position at Harvard in 1970. That same year, she received a National Book Award in Poetry for The Complete Poems. Her reputation increased greatly in the years just prior to her death, particularly after the 1976 publication of Geography III and her winning of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Bishop worked as a painter as well as a poet, and her verse, like visual art, is known for its ability to capture significant scenes. Though she was independently wealthy and thus enjoyed a life of some privilege, much of her poetry celebrates working-class settings: busy factories, farms, and fishing villages. Analyzing her small but significant body of work for Bold Type, Ernie Hilbert wrote: "Bishop's poetics is one distinguished by tranquil observation, craft- like accuracy, care for the small things of the world, a miniaturist's discretion and attention. Unlike the pert and wooly poetry that came to dominate American literature by the second half of her life, her poems are balanced like Alexander Calder mobiles, turning so subtly as to seem almost still at first, every element, every weight of meaning and song, poised flawlessly against the next." :

The editor of the 2008 Virago Press edition (Modern Classics 534) The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’ has rather presumptively placed the name of the translator on the front cover and placed the name of the translator before the name of the author on its first page. The second page, regrettably, only brings the English language title – The Diary of Helena Morley’ – without any reference to the author’s name. This is followed by ‘Translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop’ and ‘Introduced by Diana Athill’. The back cover brings a longish excerpt of the Bishop’s account of how she discovered Minha vida de menina in 1952 when she went to Brazil. A very short sentence, which mentions the name of the author appending it with ‘Senhora’, which in the 21st century, could sound rather patronizing; followed by a sentence about the fact that the translator was one of the greatest 20th century poets. Diana Athill (1917-) in her introduction entitled ‘Why I love The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’’ , written in 2007, states that the diary allows her to see how ‘Diamantina was almost sixty years ago’ through the eyes of Elizabeth Bishop (Sic!) and only refers to the ‘girl’ of the diary (page viii). Actually the diary depicts Diamantina from 1893 to 1895. The translated text contains various notes, which do not appear in the original added by the translator, probably nudged by the author’s husband. A film adaptation, Vida de Menina, directed by Helena Solberg (1938-) was made in 2004 and released in 2005, with photography by Pedro Farkas (1954-) and sound track by the musician, conductor, pianist and composer Wagner Tiso (1945-).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0371586/

BIOGRAPHY

HELENA MORLEY

pen name of

ALICE DAYRELL CALDEIRA BRANT (28th August 1880 – 20th June1970)

ALICE DAYRELL CALDEIRA BRANT was born in Diamantina, Minas Gerais, on 28th August 1880 and died in Rio de Janeiro on 20th June 1970.

Alice was one of the granddaughters of a British physician, Dr John Bayrell, born in Bridgetown, Barbados, who trained in London before setting off to Brazil to work as a physician in Minas Gerais. He married Alice Rice Callender and had many children including some out of wedlock (17 according to some): Felisberto Dayrell, Helena Morley’s father, Mortimer Dayrell , José Mortimer ( Dayrell Mortimer ), João Dayrell, Serrano Dayrell, Francisco Dayrell, Carlos Leopoldo Dayrell, Augusto Dayrell, Leopoldo Carlos Dayrell, Maria Elvira Dayrell, Alice Mortimer Dayrell, Guilhermina Dayrell, Henriqueta Dayrell, Otília Dayrell Rolim, Georgina Dayrell.

Dr John Dayrell at times referred to as Dr John Lucy Smith Dayrell, became known as the ‘English doctor’ in Brazil.

Source: www.familiadayrell.uaivip.com.br

It is Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), in his 1869 Explorations of the highlands of the Brazil; with a full account of the gold and diamond mines. Also, canoeing down 1500 miles of the great river São Francisco, from Sabará to the sea , who refers to Dr. Dayrell, from a ‘Barbadoes’ family originally from Buckinghamshire. Sir Richard states in his account that Dr Dayrell came to work for the ‘Companhia de Cocais’ in 1830 and that by the time of the writing of Explorations… the doctor had already been in Brazil for some thirty years (esp. chapter VIII). The Publishing House Itatiaia published a translation of Sir Richard Burton’s book translated into Portuguese in two volumes.

The author of Minha vida de menina makes various references to her English, which in Brazil has long stood for ‘British’ grandfather, auntie and more extended

9 family. In one of the entries, Morley tells about about the place, where her grandfather had been buried.

Her husband Augusto Mário Caldeira Brant (1876-1968), was also born in Diamantina, son of Col. Augusto Afonso Caldeira Brant, from a family of diamond miners and Maria Hermínia de Caldeira Brant. He read law and served in local and national government in various capacities. When he lived in the Federal Capital, he continued his journalistic activity (he had started it in S. Paulo) contributing to newspapers such as Gazeta de Notícias and A Noite as well as the magazine Kosmos. He was also the chief editor of O Imparcial and when he returned to Minas Gerais in 1919, he founded the newspaper Estado de Minas. He got involved with the Minas Gerais politics. He published Viagem a Buenos Aires (1917) and Catecismo cívico e ilusões financeiras (a parliamentary speech). The couple had five children. One of them Inês Caldeira Brant married Abgar Renault, who served as the Education and Culture Minister (1955-1956) and in the Federal Accounts Office (1967-1973).

Further details from: Sir Richard Burton’s (1869)Explorations of the highlands of the Brazil; with a full account of the gold and diamond mines. Also, canoeing down 1500 miles of the great river São Francisco, from Sabará to the sea. Available from https://ia902702.us.archive.org/33/items/explorationsofhi02burt/explorationsofhi02burt.pdf Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS was an English explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat. His complete works are available from: http://burtoniana.org/ See for example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/burton_sir_richard.shtml On Elizabeth Bishop, see for example: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/elizabeth-bishop History of the Dayrell family and photos: www.familiadayrell.uaivip.com.br

View of Diamantina Attendance is free, but booking is essential: [email protected]

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