BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB | | THE THREE MARIAS | 15th August 2019, 18.30-21.00

2019 – The year of adding marvellous Brazilian novels to your reading lists!

RACHEL DE QUEIROZ (1910- 2003)

As Três Marias (1939)

translated as

The Three Marias (1963)

The Three Marias is highly recommended reading for your holidays.

You will love this lyrical 1939 novel, partly biographical, by one of the great Brazilian writers.

Three friends become inseparable at their boarding school. One day a Vincent de Paul nun comes up with the sobriquet ‘as três Marias’, the Brazilian denomination of the asterism Three Sisters in the constellation of Orion.

What will the bond forged by the three Marias unravel? Maria Augusta, Maria da Glória and Maria José -

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met at the austere Immaculate Conception High School founded in 1865, a boarding school for orphan girls turned the top boarding school for the elites in , the capital of Ceará* in .

Rachel de Queiroz was born into two traditional families in Ceará: a distant relative of José de Alencar on her mother’s side and the Queiroz family line on her father’s side. Highly cultured, typical of the northeastern two-hundred-year old rural wealth (farming including livestock) of the northeast of Brazil.

The author’s parents had a huge library, which ignited her love of reading and writing.

Discover the soul and mind of a teenage reader in the northeast of Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century as she embeds a reading list of sorts in the narrative: the traditional French sugar sweet romances by M. Delly read by most Brazilian girls and stocked by all public libraries in Brazil, Countess Ségur, the Bibliothèque rose but also Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, Count d'Artagnan, Vitor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, La Mystique Divine (1836-42) by Johann J. von Görres and even Im Westen nichts Neues by Erich Maria Remarque and many more.

And hints of oddity in her shifting political allegiances, which feature in both her fiction and journalism.

* The land of Iracema and José de Alencar

Details of available publications:

ENGLISH (1963) The Three Marias (1963) translated by Fred Pittman Ellison, published by University of Texas Press: Austin. ISBN-10: 0292780796 ISBN-13: 978-0292780798 ASIN: B00CUP0E4U Free download: https://archive.org/details/threemarias00quei

PORTUGUESE (1939) As Três Marias - self-published first edition Various editions in Portuguese: ISBN-10: 8503008157 ISBN-13: 978-8503008150 ASIN: B07CJXB8S2

SHORT HISTORY OF THE BOOK AND TRANSLATIONS

As Três Marias was the fourth novel penned by Rachel de Queiroz and published in 1939. The novel contains significant autobiographical components. The novel opens with the depiction of the life of girls who attend the Immaculate Conception High School, a boarding school for girls which is now a 154-year-old educational institution and one of the best schools in Fortaleza. Shortly after its creation, it became a school of choice for the Ceará elites.

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The author attended the Colégio da Imaculada Conceição (Immaculate Conception High School), as a boarder from 1921 to 1925, where she completed a teacher training college (escola normal) as a young fifteen-year-old. It was originally founded as a boarding school for orphan girls which would offer accommodation, education but also vocational training to girls in Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceará, in 1865; it was run by the Vincent de Paul Sisters, from France. The Sister Margarite Bazet, who came from France, was the first head and followed by Clemence Gaigné, who arrived in 1867. In that year, the school moved to the current premises in the historic centre of Fortaleza, which was listed in 2015. The novel contains numerous references to French thought and history.

The Immaculate Conception High School website includes a documentary about its history in Portuguese: http://www.imaculadafortaleza.com.br/modulo.php#pointVideos

http://www.fortalezaemfotos.com.br/2010/06/colegio-da-imaculada-conceicao-igreja.html

The novel contains reference to the affluent way of life in Fortaleza in the first decades of the 20th century – the Belle Époque period of that capital city by the sea. The history of Fortaleza (Fortress) dates back to the discovery of Brazil and it has been a dynamic town and later as city in the Northeast of Brazil. It was occupied by the Dutch, with the Dutch West India Company building numerous forts and staying there until its defeat of the Dutch(1649–1654). Swift development and wealth accrued in the 19th century with numerous landowners and businessmen. From 1860 to 1930 it underwent a significant modernization inspired on the

3 | P a g e urban renewal of Paris by Baron Haussmann (1809-1891). Adolfo Herbster (1826-1893) was commissioned to do urban planning for Fortaleza.

Adolfo Herbster (1826-1893), architect and engineer produced exact blue print of Fortaleza in 1859

Rachel de Queiroz comes from old wealthy families, including those of José de Alencar and the Queiroz sides who were affluent landowners and successful livestock farmers. The author herself was a livestock farmer.

Her parents had a huge library, which ignited her love of reading and writing. She learned how to read early and received significant schooling from her parents at home. Noteworthy are some of the references to characters, novels, books and authors in The Three Marias. Those references could easily create an anthology or reading diary of a early 20th century reader. In terms of form of novel writing, she used a form of ‘modernist’ approach as there is no numbering or titles for the chapters in the narrative. A bigger space separates the parts/chapters in the original. The English translation brings illustrations.

Early in the novel, one of the Marias is reading Magali (1910) by M. Delly when a young nun ‘borrows’ the novel from her. M. Delly was the pseudonym of the siblings Frédéric Henri Petitjean de la Rosiére (1870-1949) and Jeanne Marie Henriette Petitjean de la Rosiére (1875- 1947), who were French authors of a highly successful series of stories for teenage girls and easy travel reading. Their novels have largely been neglected by intellectuals and book historians.

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Magali (1910) was translated in Brazil by Epaminondas de Albuquerque and published in 1929 with various reprints and editions (it is the volume 52 in Brazilian Biblioteca das Moças ‘Library for Girls’ series). The publishing house Companhia Editora Nacional (an offshoot of Monteiro Lobato’s publishing house), created in São Paulo in 1925, published thirty-five of the M. Delly books in Portuguese. The series published 180 titles until 1960. The Library for Girls series was stocked by virtually every public and high school library all over Brazil and was read by many generations of teenagers in Brazil.

The other author of the so-called the Bibliothèque rose mentioned in The Three Marias is the Countess of Ségur (born Sophie Rostopchine, 1799-1874). She mentions her Les Petites Filles Modèles (1858). Guy Chantepleure (1870-1951), the pen name of Jeanne-Caroline Violet (later Mme. Edgar Dussap) was another French author mentioned by Rachel de Queiroz.

However, the narrator in The Three Marias also mentions the historical novel Quentin Durward (1823) of the Waverly Novels series by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832); Count d'Artagnan (c. 1611 – 1673) and his well-known stories, the character Emerald in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) by (1802-1885).

There is a curious reference to one of the volumes of Die christliche Mystik (On Christian Mysticism 1836-42) by Johann Joseph von Görres (1776-1848); particularly, the notion of ecstasy in faith or religious imagination. In The Three Marias – the translator invents a title The Divine Mystique probably a direct translation from the French translation La Mystique Divine. The narrator in the novel seems to question the idea of worship and religious faithfulness of the nuns and the choice of a cloistered life. In addition to this, she also includes a record of devotion to two saints: Saint Joseph of Copertino (1603-1663) and Saint Aloysius de Gonzaga (1568- 1591).

A peculiar reference to the 1930 German novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) by Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1928) seems to have been intentional, considering that the gathering storm of World War II was beginning to unravel in Europe.

There are many more references to literature and to music, for example operas (e.g. Carmen), history (Edict of Nantes) and art (Surrealism). The quotations offer a mirror of the

5 | P a g e world thoughts and ideas with which the author was familiar and deemed relevant to include in her novel. It also shows how a woman author with relatively few years in formal education (she finished school at fifteen) gained much from her parents, who nourished the reading habits of their children.

The author seems to have purposefully included many women stories in her novel perhaps as an act of defiance or a deliberate accent on the role of women, albeit in a non- systematic manner. There is an account that she had a particularly daunting experience with her political exploits. She was informed that she would need to submit her new novel to the censors of the communist party. A rather scary meeting with party members in a dingy quayside place followed. She went alone and the party men wanted her to change various sections of her second novel João Miguel (1932) censoring it on ideological grounds. In her memoirs, she tells us how she gathered her manuscript bits and fled the place as fast as she could. She declared that she did not recognise their authority to censor her work. She broke off with the communist party and moved to the Trotskyites. She seemed to have remained an admirer of Leon Trostsky, the pen name of Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940). Her friend, Augusto Frederico Schmidt (1906-1965), founder of the Livraria Schmidt Editora (originally Livraria Católica) in published the novel João Miguel.

Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) commented that in As três Marias, Rachel de Queiroz seemed to be refining her art as a novelist and acknowledged how curious it was that she had switched her vision from the time of her debut novel O quinze. The latter was a politically engaged type of novel.

As Três Marias was translated in English as The Three Marias in 1963 by Fred Pittman Ellison (1922-2014). It was published in the Texas Pan-American Series, funded by a revolving publication fund established by the Pan-American Sulphur Company and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation through the Latin-American translation programme of the Association of American University Presses. It is illustrated by the visual artist, illustrator and sculptor Aldemir Martins (1922-2006). Sections of the book are separated by his illustrations. Further details about Aldemir Martins are available at the website in Portuguese http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa2273/aldemir-martins

The translation is fairly good. However, there are some weak points: the names of plants of the Brazilian northeast (e.g. jasmineiro is not a cape jasmine; carnaúbas, symbolic trees of life, lost in the translation as ‘palm groves’); the title of book by Johann Joseph von Görres (unaware of original translation in English?), Santa Casa, one the numerous Holy Houses of Mercy, created by Queen Leonor of Portugal in 15th century and set up by the Portuguese colonisers was rendered as ‘Charity Hospital’. These examples illustrate a degree of limited local cultural and historic awareness. An irregular use of sertão, at times rendered as ‘backlands’, appears in the narrative. The translations of in the 20th century were usually made by Spanish practitioners, who probably were not sufficiently aware of the significant differences in the language and culture. Fred Pittman Ellison’s introduction to the translation is now outdated. As I have argued elsewhere, it reflects the author’s views, tastes and interests in the 1960s. It may be of some interest to intellectual and cultural historians.

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Fred Pittman Ellison studied foreign languages, starting with Latin, Spanish, and French in high school and continuing with German, Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. He obtained a bachelor's degree in Spanish in 1941. His obituary tells us that ‘he went to New York to work for the FBI as a translator and later as a special agent with foreign language specialization until 1944. To be part of America's effort in World War II, he joined the U.S. Navy as an ensign, serving two years as a communications officer. After World War II he earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees in romance languages and literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1952.’ He was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, teaching experimental classes in Spanish and in 1962, he went to the University of Texas, where he started teaching Portuguese. He translated Brazilian authors and co-authored a university textbook Modern Portuguese. In the sixties he founded the Portuguese Language Development Group of the AATSP I the USA. He was elected as a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1983. In 1991, Brazil awarded him the Order of Rio Branco, Commander rank in recognition for his services in promoting Brazilian literature and language.

The Three Marias was adapted as a soap opera, Três Marias, by Wilson Rocha and Walther Negrão, in 156 chapters. It was exhibited by Rede Globo in 1980-81.

BIOGRAPHY

RACHEL DE QUEIROZ (17th November 1910- 4th November 2003)

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Rachel de Queiroz was born in Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceará. Her father Daniel de Queiroz was a judge and her mother Clotilde Franklin came from a line of the Alencar family. Her family’s parents came from affluent farmer and livestock farmers in the northeast of Brazil.

The family moved many times because of the employment of her father. Soon after her birth, her family moved to their farm, Fazenda do Junco, in the town Quixadá, in the hinterlands. In 1913, her father was appointed as a prosecutor in Fortaleza but would resign a year later and teach Geography at the local Lyceum. He also educated his daughter teaching her horse riding, swimming and reading. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1917 following a severe drought in Fortaleza in 1915. There are cyclical droughts in the Brazilian northeast as aptly described by (1866-1909) in his Os Sertões (1902). Her father was appointed as a judge for Belém, the capital of the State of Pará, and the family stayed there for two years before returning to Fortaleza.

In 1920, her father gifted a rural property to her, where later in 1955, she established her farm, Fazenda Não me Deixes. Rachel de Queiroz was a successful livestock farmer as well. The author’s father enrolled her at the Immaculate Conception High School, a boarding school as described in the section above, in 1921, where she completed her teacher training course at the age of fifteen and did not pursue any further formal education. On her return to the Fazenda do Junco, her mother instigated her to read broadly to complete her education. She had a very large private library of some five thousand volumes.

She also started writing at the time using a pseudonym Rita de Queluz. She returned to Fortaleza and began to write for the literary page of the newspaper O Ceará. She published a serial História de um nome (History of a Name) and a play Minha Prima Nazaré in that newspaper in 1927. Her first novel O quinze (The Year 1915) was published in 1930, one thousand copies in a self-funded run. The novel was welcomed by Mário de Andrade (1893 - 1945), Augusto Frederico Schmidt (1906 - 1965) and (1893 - 1983) but also received negative reviews in the local press. It was a politically engaged novel of a very

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She married the poet José Auto da Cruz Oliveira in 1932 and they had a daughter Clotilde in 1933. She would die as an eighteen month old from septicemia following meningitis. She later separated from her husband.

In Rio the Janeiro, she met members of the Brazilian Communist Party and on her return to Fortaleza, she helped set up a branch of that party. However, the adverse experience of censorship she experienced with the party when she wrote her second novel, João Miguel, made her leave that party. She moved to the town of Itabuna, in the state of Bahia and in 1933 to São Paulo where she became acquainted with the Trotskyite group led by the visual arts critic Mário Pedrosa (1900 - 1981). She also began to work as a translator. In 1934, she returned to Fortaleza to run as candidate for Socialist Party local elections, but failed, and moved to Maceió, the capital of Rio Grande do Norte in 1935. She met the writers (1892 - 1953), (1893 - 1953) and José Lins do Rego (1901 - 1957) there as well as the painter Tomás Santa Rosa (1909 - 1956) and the art critic Aurélio Buarque de Holanda (1910 - 1989). In 1937, her books were deemed to be subversive along with other authors at the time and were burnt. She was arrested for two months. In 1937, she returned to Rio de Janeiro and from 1939, she began to write for the newspaper Diário de Notícias and then for Correio da Manhã, O Jornal, Diário da Tarde and O Estado de S. Paulo. She co-founded the newspaper Vanguarda Socialista with Mário Pedrosa. Most Brazilias got acquainted with Rachel de Queiroz by way of the chronicles she published on the last page of the weekly illustrated magazine O Cruzeiro (1928-1975), which she penned from 1945 to 1975. Some of those chronicles are mundane and a few highly controversial (e.g. ‘Olhos Azuis’ published on 19th March 1949).

Visit www.memoriaviva.com.br/ocruzeiro/

In 1940, she met the physician Oyama de Macedo, a friend of her cousin Pedro Nava (1903-1984) a physician and author and they lived happily until his death in 1982. She published a collection of chronicles entitled A donzela e a moura torta (The Maiden and the Crooked Moor) in 1948. In 1953, her play Lampião was presented at the Municipal Theatre of Rio de Janeiro and at the Leopoldo Fróes Theatre in São Paulo. She was well connected and succeeded in her career as a journalist and writer. The Brazilian Academy of Letters awarded her the Prize for the oeuvre in 1957. Her 100 crônicas escolhidas (One Hundred Selected Chronicles) was published in 1958. In that year, she published her play A beata Maria do Egito (The Blessed Maria of Egypt).

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Her seeming ideological shift, somewhat coincided with the publication of the translation of The Three Marias in English, when in 1964 she supported the removal of the then President João Goulart. This did not carry favour with contemporary literary critics.

In 1966, President Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco (1900 - 1967) appointed her as a delegate of Brazil at the 21st General Assembly of the United Nations, (Human Rights Commission), and then became a member of the party Aliança Renovadora Nacional (ARENA). In 1967, she became a member of Federal Council for Culture (1967-1985). In 1975, she published the novel, Dôra, Doralina, which was translated in English. The fact that Rachel de Queiroz was elected as a first woman member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1977 marked a significant advance in her popularity.

Rachel de Queiroz was a respected translator. It was also a significant source of earning. She translated many key authors from French, English, Italian and Spanish to Portuguese published in Brazil. A cultural centre, the Centro Cultural Rachel de Queiroz named after her, was created in Quixadá in 2003. She died in Rio de Janeiro in 2003. Her library originally deposited with the Moreira Salles Institute with some three thousand items were handed over to the Federal University of Fortaleza.

Main Works

Novels: O quinze. (1930), João Miguel. (1932), Caminho de pedras. (1937), As três Marias. (1939), Dora, Doralina. (1975); O galo de ouro. (1985); Memorial de Maria Moura. (1992).

Theatre: Lampião, (1953); A beata Maria do Egito (1957); O padrezinho santo (unpublished) and A sereia voadora (unpublished).

Chronicles: A donzela e a moura torta. (1948); Cem crônicas escolhidas, (1958), O brasileiro perplexo; O caçador de tatu (selection by Herman Lima, 1967); As menininhas e outras crônicas. (1976); O jogador de sinuca e mais historinhas. (1980); Mapinguari (1989) and second edition O homem e o tempo. (1995); As terras ásperas. (1993); O Nosso Ceará. (with Maria Luiza de Queiroz Salek,1994), Um Alpendre, uma Rede, um Açude. (1994); Xerimbabo; Falso Mar, Falso Mundo. (2002).

Children’s Literature: O menino mágico (1967); Cafute e Pena-de-Prata (1986); Andira. (1992).

Memoirs with her sister Maria Luiza de Queiroz Salek: Tantos anos (1994), and O Não Me Deixes: Suas Histórias e Sua Cozinha (2000).

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Rachel de Queiroz Collection at the University of Fortaleza Library (Photo by Ares Soares/Unifor)

Additional sources:  http://www.academia.org.br/academicos/rachel-de-queiroz  https://ims.com.br/2017/06/01/sobre-rachel-de-queiroz/  http://www.fortalezanobre.com.br/2012/06/  https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/bjcIcQKXe9y/infografico-rachel-de- queiroz-unifor/?mode=movie  http://www.imaculadafortaleza.com.br/modulo.php#pointVideos  www.memoriaviva.com.br/ocruzeiro/  MARTINS, Wilson. Rachel de Queiroz em perspectiva. In: INSTITUTO MOREIRA SALLES. Rachel de Queiroz. Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira. São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, n. 4, set. 1997.

On Fred Pittman Elison – obituary:

 https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/statesman/obituary.aspx?n=Fred-Pittman- ELLISON&pid=172781190

2019: #AddBraziliannovels2yourReadingLists

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HAPPY READING! Attendance is free, but booking is essential: [email protected] ©Nadia Kerecuk Creator and Convenor of the © Brazilian Bilingual Book Club at the Embassy of Brazil in London

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