"BRAZIL'S GREATEST BOOK": A TRANS- LATOR'S INTRODUCTION

HERE can be no doubt that Euclides da Cunha's Os SertOes 1 is T a work that is unique not only in Brazilian but in world literature as well. In no other instance, probably, has there been such una­ nimity on the part of critics of all shades of opinion in acclaiming a book as the greatest and most distinctive which a people has produced, the most deeply expressive of that people's spirit. On this the native and the foreign critic are in agreement. "Nosso livro supremo-our finest book," says Agrippino Grieco, in his study of "The Evolu tion of Brazilian Prose," and he adds that it is "the work which best reflects our land and our peo­ ple.'" Stefan Zweig, Brazil's tragic guest, saw in Os Sertoes a "great na­ tional epic .... created purely by chance," one giving "a complete psy­ chological picture of the Brazilian soil, the people, and the country, such as has never been achieved with equal insight and psychological comprehen­ sion. Comparable in world literature, perhaps, to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which Lawrence describes the struggle in the desert, this great epic, little known in other countries, is destined to outlive countless books that are famous today by its dramatic magnificence, its spectacular wealth of spiritual wisdom, and the wonderful humanitarian touch which is char­ acteristic of the whole work. Althougli Brazilian literature today has made enormous progress with the number of its writers and poets and its linguistic subtlety, no other book has reached such supremacy."3 "The Bible of Brazilian nationality," as it has been termed,4 Os SertOes has "enriched Brazil with a book laden with seed, filled with perspectives for our triumph in the world of culture."s It is commonly looked upon as marking, in the year I<)02, Brazil's intellectual coming-of-age. The site

, The title literally means "The Backlands." Serties (pronounced "sair-toh'-ensh") is the plural of sert60 (pronounced "sair-town"). The latter is a term, meaning the interior of the coun­ try or the hinterland, which is applied in particular to the backland regions of the Northeast, centering in the province of Bafa. The author's name is pronounced "oo-kleE-des dah co6n­ yah." • EvoZUfilo da prosa brasilei,a (Rio de Janeiro: Ariel, Editorial Ltda., 1933). On Euclides da Cunha and Os Sert6es see pp. 281-86.

3 B,azi~ Land of the Future (New York: Viking Press, 1942), pp. 159-60• • See ah article by Olimpio de Souza Andrade, "'Os Sert6es' numa frase de Nabuco," PZanalto, Vol. I, No. 14 (December I, 1941). s Grieco, op. cit., p. 282. iii iv A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION where it was composed has now become a national shrine, and the volume itself, heralding the "rediscovery of Brazil," is indubitably a historical landmark. Revealing "the profound instability of our existence," as one literary historian puts it,6 it was at the same time, in the author's own words, essentially based upon "the bold and inspiring conjecture that we are destined to national unity."7 Both book and author, it is true, remained more or less of an enigma to their age. As one Spanish-American critic has observed, Cunha was in reality taking arms against an era.8 Skeptical, sincere, bitter, uncompro­ mising, "almost brutal,"9 displaying at times an "anomalous pessimism,"'· particularly on the question of race, and endowed with an anguish­

ridden personality that has in it more than a little of the pathologic, II this "son of the soil, madly in love with it,"" nonetheless emerges, alongside the nineteenth-century novelist, Machado de Assis, as one of the two out­ standing figures in all Brazilian letters. As Zweig remarks, these are "the two really representative personalities" with whom Brazil enters "the arena of world literature." In the case of so exceptional a writer and a work so truly amazing as Os SertOes, it is perhaps not surprising that Euc1ides da Cunha's admirers should range far afield in quest of comparisons. Thus, this "Beethoven of our prose,"'J this "genia americana," or "Latin-American genius," as the venerable Monteiro Lobato describes him, has been likened to 'authors as diverse as Dickens, Carlyle, and the prophet Ezekiel!'4 As a reporter he has been compared to Kipling recording the exploits of Lord Roberts in the desert ;15 and a reporter of a most unusual kind he assuredly was, one who, writing amid the tumult of events and the emotional stress of the moment, succeeded in turning a journalistic account of a military cam­ paign into an epic treatise on the geology, the geography, the climatology,

6 Bezerra de Freitas, Hisl6ria da liJeralura brasileira (Porto Alegre: Livraria do GIObo, 1939), pp. 25 1-52• 7 See "Author's Notes," Note v., p. 481. • Braulio Sllnchez-Saez, "Euclides da Cunha, constructor de nacionalidad," A gonia (Buenos Aires), NO.4, October-December, 1939, pp. 50-56.

9 The phrase is that of the French historian of Portuguese literature, M. Georges Le Gentil (see La LilUralure porlugaise [Paris: Librairie Armand Collin, 1935), p. 191).

10 Andrade, op. cU.

II See Gilberto Freyre, Actualidade de Euclides da Cunha (Rio de Janeiro: Edicio da Cua do Estudante do Brasil, 1941). "See the biobibliographical sketch in the Revisla brasileira de geografia, April, 1940, re­ printed in separate form in Yul/os de geografia do Brasil, November, 1940, p. 13.

'1 Bezerra de Freitas. 14 Ibid. 15 Agrippino Grieco. A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION v the flora, the fauna, and the human life of the Brazilian back.lands. Os SereDes is all this and a great deal more. Among other things, it is the definitive early-century statement of the national-racial question in Bra­ zil, a problem that is a vital one today; and to his countrymen of the present its author remains "the representative genius par excellence of our land, of our people, and of our pure and lofty aspirations to heroism, beauty, and truth .... 6 Above all, however, it is a thrilling, vividly told tale, a "great docu­ ment, which, though not a novel, reads like fiction."l? Dealing with "one of the most virile episodes in our history," the incredibly heroic resistance of the back.land natives at the siege of Canudos in 18964)7, it is a tale that should hold a special interest for this war-torn age of ours. Here is a campaign in which it required three months for a federal army of some six thousand men to advance one hundred yards against a handful of backwoodsmen! Here is guerrilla warfare in its pristine form, with the "scorched earth" and all the other accompaniments. And here, finally, after a months-long, house-to-house battle that recalls the contemporary epic of Stalingrad, are one old man, two other full-grown men, and a boy holding out against that same army until the last of them falls back dead in the grave which they themselves have dug! "A cry of protest" the author calls his work, and it is indeed that. A protest against what he regards as a "crime" and an "act of madness" on the part of a newly formed republican government. For him, this "most brutal conflict of our age" was the "corpus delicti on the aberrations of a people," the "major scandal in our history." A clash between "two socie­ ties," between two cultures, that of the seaboard and that of the sertao, the Canudos Expedition appeared as a "deplorable stumbling-block to national unity." His book, accordingly, as he tells us:8 is not so much a defense of the sertanejo, or man of the backlands, as it is an attack. on the barbarity of the "civilized" toward those whose stage of social evolution was that of semibarbarians. In this connection we North Americans well may think of our own Indian wars of the early days!9 The author's chap­ ter on "Man" has been seen by Agrippino Grieco as "a precious lesson in things, given by a free man to the slaves of power, by a sociologist without a chair to the governors of the nation." Cunha, the same writer goes on to

16 From a manuscript, "Noticia sobre Euclides da Cunha," by Afr~nio Peixoto. 17 See the paper by Carleton Beals, "Latin American Literature," in TM Writer in a Chang­ ing World (New York: Equinox Press, 1937), p. 97. JI See p. 479 of the present translation ("Author's Notes," Note I).

II Cf. Washington Irving's story, "Philip of Pokanoket," The Sketch Book (New York: G. P Putnam's Sons, 1895), II, 168-96. vi A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

say, "told the truth in the land of lies and was original in the land of plagiarism." This honesty, set off by his originality and his boldness of attack, is perhaps his most prominent trait, the one on which all his com­ mentators are agreed. Whether or not his primary purpose was to defend the sertanejo, the au­ thor of Os SertOes certainly exhibits a passionate love of the mestizo back­ woodsman and his way of life. The latter's customs, occupations, diver­ sions, joys, and sorrows are all depicted with an affectionate wealth of detail. The "roundups," the merrymakings, the religious observances and superstitions of the region, are minutely chronicled, and the result is an authentic and unexcelled picture of the fJaqueiro, or North Brazilian cow­ boy. Indeed, a Portuguese critic, none too friendly to Brazil, has said that this portion of the book contains the sixty-one finest pages ever written in the language!O The description of the devastating backland droughts holds the tragedy of a people struggling with a blind fate as represented by the relentless forces of nature. How deeply Euclides da Cunha felt for this folk, how close to them he was, may be seen from any one of a number of vignettes that he gives us, each a small masterpiece in its kind: the cowboy's dead child and thejesta that marks its funeral; the cattle dying of thirst and starvation on the edge of the pool where they were accustomed to drink; the fJaqueiro and his lifelong vegetable friends, the umbli tree, the joaz tree, and the others; the homeward-bound herd and the herdsman's home-going song, the aboiadoj the stampede; and then the hours of ease and relaxation, swaying in the hammock, sipping the savory umbusaaaj2J. the festive gatherings and the "head­ strong" aguaritente;22 the poetic tourneys, or "challenges." It is the life of a race, the mestizo race of the backlands, that lives for us here. Those who are strangers to Brazil hardly will be in a position to realize that the picture which the author paints for us is by no means an anachro­ nistic one from the point of view of the present. As the country's latest sociological historian, Senhor Caio Prado Junior says, the contemporary Brazilian who visits the backlands may be a witness to his nation's past.23

a. The critic Bruno OoSlS Pereira de Sampaio), cited by Agrippino Grieco • .. Drink made from the umbU tree (see p. 37).

aa Brandy, the agUill'dienk of the Spanish-speaking countries (see p. 102, n. 91).

a3 Caio Prado Junior, F~lo do Brasil conlempor4_ (Colonia) (Slo Paulo: Livraria Martins, 1942), pp. 7-8: "Whoever traverses Brazil today is frequently surprised to come upon aspects [of our life) which he had imagined existed only in history books; and, if he studies them a little, he will see that they are not merely anachronistic reminiscences but represent deep un­ derlying facts ..... A professor from abroad once upon a time remarked to me that he envied Brazilian historians who were thus able personally to witness the most stirring scenes of their past." A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION vii

The "angry land"'4 still lives on and is still a national problem of the first importance, one which the airplane may eventually do much to solve.'s Euclides da Cunha, meanwhile, is the greatest of those literary trail-blazers who, in the later 1890'S, toward the end of the first decade of republican life, made their way into the serti'io, to bring back. its poetry, its tragedy, its myths, and the psychology of its inhabitants.·6 His fellow-explorers, however, were interested chiefly in the picturesque features of the locale, its Indian heritage of animistic beliefs and superstitions, its haunting, morbid, hallucinatory, dreamlike aspects. Cunha was the first to reveal its basic social life and implications; for he was not of those who believed that the hinterland, with all its backwardness, benightedness, and fratri­ cidal religious mania, had been decreed of heaven for all time. A military engineer by profession, or, in the words of Gilberto Freyre, "a social engi­ neer animated by a political ideal," he was at once reporter and scientist, man of letters and sociologist. To this day he is regarded as one of Brazil's greatest geographers. To quote a biobibliographical notice in the Revista brasileira de geograjia,'7 "if there is one dominant aspect of the work of Eu­ elides da Cunha, it is, certainly, the geographic ..... He wrote and made geography," and Os SertOes is "perhaps the most notable essay in human geography which a portion of our native soil has ever inspired in a writer." According to the well-known, present-day scientist, Roquette Pinto, Eu­ elides was essentially an ecologist, being concerned with the relations be­ tween organisms and their environment. As a social scientist he is a fore­ runner of the brilliant group today which is represented by Gilberto Freyre, Arthur Ramos, Edison Carneiro, and others, even though these men frequently would disagree with his findings. In literature, likewise, he was a pathfinder, being one of the two prin­ cipal fountainheadp of the modem Brazilian novel, the other being Ma­ chado de Assis. In the one case (Machado de Assis), the stress is on form; in the other, on content. Os Sertoes may be said to have posed the prob­ lem which faces tM twentieth-century novelist in Brazil: that of how to achieve an artistic synthesis of the rich social content which his country •• The phrase is Waldo Frank's (see his South American Journey [New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 19431, pp. 3Il-19, 50, and 339). Frank calls Os Serties "the greatest book in Brazil's literature," "Brazil's greatest book," etc.

'$ On this see Alice Rogers Hager, Frontier by Air (Brazil Takes the Sky Road) (New York: Macmillan Co., 1942). :a6 Cunha's immediate predecessors in this field were Coelho Netto, whose Sertao was pub­ lished in 1897, the year of the Canudos Expedition, and Afonso Arinos, whose Pelo sertao ("Through the Sertao") appeared the following year (1898). The former felt much the same attraction for the region that a surrea1ist might today. The latter was especially interested in the psychology of the mestizo. '7 See n. 12 above. viii A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION affords him. Because he grappled with this problem so valiantly and solved it in so extraordinary and individual a fashion, the author con­ tinues to be a symbol and an inspiration to creative writers. It is surely not without significance that there has grown up in this same general region, the Northeast, a school of novelists-Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, Jose Lins do R~go, to mention but a few-who are at this moment bringing new life to Brazilian letters, and whose influence on the national literary scene has been so profound as to constitute something very like an "invasion."·8 It is not surprising, therefore, if Os SertOes is rapidly taking its place as a great South American classic. Even though there are those who assert that it is untranslatable or should be read only in the original," there can be no doubt that the recent Spanish-language rendering by Senor Benja­ min de Garay of Argentina30 is a valuable contribution to the cause of cultural understanding in this hemisphere; and it is hoped that an English­ language translation may serve the same end, by bringing to readers who may have enjoyed a book like R. B. Cunningham-Graham's A Brazilian M ystic31 the work which provided its inspiration. In making the acquaintance of Euclides da Cunha, the North American has an experience awaiting him which is comparable in quality to that of the European of the last century listening for the first time to Walt Whit­ man's "barbaric yawp." The comparison is a particularly valid one on the side of form and style. Just as Whitman had to shape a new form, just as he had to forge a new vocabulary and a new style for a content that was quite new and which could not be run through the time-honored molds, so Cunha, in portraying the newly discovered, or "rediscovered," life of the Brazilian backlands, was compelled to hew out a literary imple­ ment that was suited to his needs. To his fellow-countrymen of the time, reared in a culture that was classic and prevailingly Gallic in character­ to a Joaquim Nabuco,3' for example-his "yawp" sounded quite as bar-

d For this "invasion" by writers of the Northeast see the review of Jose Lins do R~go's novel, Usina, by Rodrigo M. F. de Andrade, "Usina e a invasao dos nortistas," Bolelim de Ariel, V, No. II (August, 1936), 286-87; see also the Hand Book of Latin American Studies, 1936, p. 340, and ibid., 1937, p. 410. 29 See the article cited, by Braulio Sbchez-Saez, n. 8 above. 3° Los Sertones, trans. Benjamin de Garay (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Mercatali, 1938). 31 R. B. Cunningham-Graham, A Brazilian Mystic (New York, 1925). An account of the career of An tonio Conselheiro. 32 Consult Nabuco's treatise on his own cultural "formation," Minha forma<;ao, uniform edition of the Obras (Sao Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1934), where the author refers to the "constru,ao francesa do meu esp.rito-the French mold (or structure) of my thinking." From early colonial times the French influence has been a strong, and frequently the domi­ nant, one with Brazilian intellectuals, and it still persists today. A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION ix baric as did that of Whitman to an Emerson. It was Nabuco, the great abolitionist intellectual, who said of Cunha that the latter wrote "com cip6-with a liana stalk."33 This expression as applied to the author of Os Sertoes has since become a famous one and is proudly quoted by Cunha admirers as the highest tribute that could be paid him; for the Hana to a Brazilian is the symbol of the inhospitable serUi(). Of himself Euclides said that his was "the rude pen of a caboclo," that is, of an aborig­ ine. 34 His palette, he tells us, is composed of "hues taken from the earth, from the black mud of the pits, with vermilion from the coagulated blood of the jagun{os,3S and the sepia of bandit affrays in the hinterland."36 He does, in truth, paint the backlands, their suns and rains, their mountains, rivers, flora, with a barbaric brush, and this in a work which, starting out to be reportage, ends by being a blend of science, poetry, and color. It is easy to understand why this should have appeared as a "barbarous art" to another refined spirit of the age, Jose Verissimo, the historian of Brazil­ ian literature. The colors at times are laid on with an exuberance that is truly tropical, accompanied by a certain primitive naivete that puts one in mind of the Mexican canvases of a Douanier Rousseau. The style is then lush and sensuous in the extreme, marked by a verbal pomp that is almost purple-hued as "the adjective reigns with the splendor of a sa­ trap."37 This, however, is only in the author's more Amazonian moments, as they might be described. At other times-the greater part of the tim~ his prose is not tropical, but rugged, rugged as the sertiW itself; it is nerv­ ous, dramatically intense, sculpturesque as the backland hills, and is characterized by a definite, brusque avoidance of lyricism and emphasis to the point of appearing overwrought and painful. 38 Here is the "liana stock." "But this liana ensnares the reader, obliging him to remain and view the flowers and trunks of this magnificent WOod."39 In his passion for landscape, the depth and warmth of human feeling that he puts into the description of a paysage, whether it be the stricken

3J Souza Andrade, op. cit. l'Ibid. The statement was made by Cunha in a letter to his intimate friend, Francisco Escobar.

lS Term which comes to be synonymous with sertanejo,' originally, a backlands "ruffian" (see p. 148). 36 From Cunha's Amazon book, A M argem da hist6ria, cited by Bezerra de Freitas. l7 Grieco, op. cit., p. 285.

,I See Gilberto Freyre's Preface to the collection of newspaper articles on Canudos by Cun­ ha, recently given posthumous publication: Canudos: Diario de urna expedl,iio ("Documentos brasileiros," Vol. XVI [Rio de Janeiro: Jose Olympio, 1939]). ,. Grieco, op. cit., p. 286. x A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION hinterland flora in the time of drought or a geological formation, Cunha has been compared to a poet-naturalist like Darwin; and he might also in this respect--in capturing the emotional drama of inanimate nature­ be compared to a novelist like Thomas Hardy. He resembles Hardy, fur­ ther, in the Latinizing tendency of his vocabulary, a quality that becomes a defect of which he is conscious, and which got him into trouble with his critics upon occasion.40 If in respect to form-originality and rugged strength and the shaping of form to a novel subject matter-Cunha may justly be compared with the North American Whitman, what then is to be said of his content? Does he, here too, merit a comparison with the "poet of American democracy"? This question cannot be answered by a mere abstract consideration of his work. Os SertOes cannot be properly understood without an understand­ ing of its author and the age in which he lived. The dramatic life and the strange, tortured personality of Euclides da Cunha must be set against the background of his time.

It was in the year 1866, at the close of our own Civil War era, that the future historian of the Canudos Expedition was born. He was, according­ ly, twenty-two years of age when slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888 and twenty-three when Dom Pedro II and the Empire 'Were overthrown and the Republic was established in 1889. He lived, thus, in an era of deep-going social change that was manifest in the realm of politics. He grew up with a liberty-craving generation, a generation which intellectual­ ly had been nourished on Victor Hugo, Benjamin Constant, and Castro Alves, "poet of the slaves." Racial freedom, the achievement of political democracy, and, once the Republic had been set up, the forging of a true Brazilian nationalism, a unified Brazil-these were the vital problems of the age, and they were so intertwined as to be in reality inseparable. Thanks to an abolitionist movement which represented one of the great­ est, most edifying moral impulses on the part of an entire people that his­ tory has to show, the freeing of the slaves had been peacefully accom­ plished; but this act, accompanied by echoes of the French Revolution and the Rights of Man,4I dealt a deathblow to the imperial throne, which tumbled in a year. There came then a period of revolutionary stress and, to a degree, of democratic disillusionment, under the military dictator-

40 See "Author's Notes," Note VIII, p. 483, where Cunha defends himself against the charge of word coinages taken from the French (in reality, Latinisms). 4' The connection was brought out clearly when, in 1883, five years before abolition was achieved, Joaquim Nabuco exclaimed: "Slavery has now endured in Brazil almost a century after the French Revolution taught the world to know and to love liberty." A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION xi ships of Deodoro Fonseca and Floriano Peixoto, as the newborn Republic struggled for its life. In 1893-94 came the counterrevolutionary4> revolt of the fleet, with civil war in Rio de Janeiro harbor, provoked by Floriano's hard-fisted rule; and then, finally, in the autumn of 1894, civil government was restored in the person of President Moraes Barros. Such was the turbulent era in which Euclides came to maturity. A transitional epoch, with forces at work that were so dubious and events so disheartening as almost to shake the faith of those who, like Cunha, had fought most staunchly for the Republic. In the politics of the day, spoils and gangsterism-in the provinces, an open banditry-prevailed; and, moreover, with a campaign like that of Canudos against the back­ land natives, one that was to lead to the seizure of Indian lands and the extension of landlord monopoly, it seemed as if republican Brazil were imitating the imperialist behavior of older democracies. 43 In the mean­ time, lost in the heart of the sertiio, was that backlands race, constituting a third of the population of the country but forgotten by the rest of the nation for three whole centuries. 44 The social-political currents which were to give direction to his life and work were already flowing, visibly and strongly, when, on January 20, 1866, Euclides da Cunha was born, at Santa Rita do Rio Negro, in the old province of Rio de Janeiro. 4S His father, Manuel Rodrigues Pimenta da Cunha, who came from the province of Baia, where the Canudos back­ lands are, "belonged to the romantic generation of Castro Alves."46 Fond of literature and a great reader, the elder Cunha also wrote verses and gave his son a careful education. The death of his mother, D. Eudoxia Moreira da Cunha, when he was three years old is believed by some to have left a morbid imprint upon the lad's character. Certain it is that, from an early age, he was shifted about among relatives and boarding­ schools, in Baia and in Rio, his formal education having been begun when he was five. What we would call his liberal arts course was completed at

o' There is some disagreement among historians as to the precise political complexion of the revolt, which was brought to an end through the intervention of the United States Navy (see Samuel Flagg Bemis, A DiplomaJic Hislof'y 01 tile United SItUes [New York: Henry Holt, 193~1, pp. 7S8-S9). Bemis takes the view that it was, simply, promonarchist.

03 On this see Beals, op. cit.; see also his America SouIh (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1937), pp. 247-48. Cunha himself does not mention this phase of the matter.

00 See pp. 161, 4oS-{i, and 408 of the present translation.

os In connection with this brief summary of Cunha's life, use h¥ been made of Afrwo Peixoto's "Noticia" (n. 16 above), as well as of the standard sources (see the bibliography fol­ lowing this Introduction).

06 Peixoto, op. cit. xii A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

the CoIegio Aquino, in the capital, where he had a number of distinguished teachers, among them the republican leader and ideologist, Benjamin Constant. It was here, in company with his schoolmates, that he helped to found a youthful publication known as "The Democrat" (0 Democrata), in the columns of which his first work appeared in the form of lyric poems. 47 The picture that we get of the young Euclides of this period shows him as quiet and reserved, with few friends, fond of solitude and of reading. In the matter of his literary tastes, he would seem to have been especially fond of the poets, Castro Alves and Gon~lves Diaz among his country­ men and Hugo among the bards of republican France. With the other young men of his day he must have read Aluizio de Azevedo's 0 Mulato ("The Mulatto"), Joaquim Nabuco's classic treatise, 0 Abolicionismo, and other works of similar social import.48 Science, however, the positivistic science of the latter part of the nineteenth century, must have constituted a major portion of his mental diet; for his trend was in a scientific direc­ tion, as is evidenced by his choice of profession, that of military engineer. A Spencerian positivism, in philosophy and in science, was in the very air that was breathed by the Brazilian intellectual of the eighties and the nineties, and Cunha's work is impregnated with it-with its virtues and its errors, its scientific half-truths and untruths, as in the field of an­ thropology, for example. It was positivism which, through Constant and others, provided the philosophic impetus for the republican revolution in Brazil. 49 Euclides, like his fellows, drank all this in; and from Europe came such imported fare as Buckle, Bryce, Taine, Renan, Ratzel, Gum­ plowicz, and Gobineau.so He was also to be influenced in his thinking by the North American geologist and physiographer, Orville A. Derby,SI and by certain Brazilians as well.s, This led to a rigid biologic determinism,

47 Eighty-four of these poems were gathered in a notebook volume under the title of "On­ das" ("Waves") •

• 1 Aluizio de Azevedo, 0 Mulato (3d ed.; Rio de Janeiro, 1889). Nabuco's Abolicionismo was published in London in 1883 . •, On the positivist influence in the Brazilian republican revolution see Pedro Calmon, Hist6ria social do Brasil, Vol. III: A 2poca republicana (Sao Paulo: Companhia Editora Na­ clonal, 1939).

50 Gobineau is commonly given as one of Cunha's sources, but he is not mentioned in the present work. His influence, however, was strong in nineteenth-century Brazil, owing to his visit to that country and to his friendship and correspondence with the Emperor, Dom Pe­ dro II.

5' Of Cornell University, member of the Morgan Expedition to the Amazon, 1870-71, under Professor Charles F. Hartt (see p. 16 and n. 19).

5> E.g., Theodoro Sampaio and Arnaldo Pimenta da Cunha (see Freyre, op. cit.). A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION xiii tending to become fatalism, such as is apparent in passages of the present work.53 Yet through it all a large element of the poetic persisted. His "formation," as his compatriots would say, was at once poetic and scien­ tific. In 1884 he entered the Polytechnic School, and two years later the Mili­ tary School. Here, on the eve of the revolution, republicanism was rife, as is revealed by the organ of the student literary society, the Revista da familia militar. Then, of a sudden, in 1888, something appeared to snap with Euclides, and in an outburst of insubordination he hurled down his sword in the presence of the minister of war, thus ending his career as a soldier for a time. Mter a period of confinement in the military hospital, he was released from the army and, going to Sao Paulo, became a journal­ ist, an occupation to which he had been attracted from his early stu­ dent days. What is to account for his conduct at the Military School? To be sure, in his later writings, in the pages of Os Sertoes, even after he had been rec­ onciled with the authorities and was back in the army again, he was to show himself extremely antimilitaristic in spirit-an antimilitarist but not a pacifist. War, he assures us, is "a monstrous thing .... utterly illogi­ cal" and with "the stigmata of an original banditry behind it." The soldier is "the sinister ideal of the homunculus," and the author has only con­ tempt for "those doctors of the art of killing who today in Europe are scandalously invading the domain of science, disturbing its calm with an insolent jingling of spurs as they formulate the laws of war and the equa­ tions of battle." The latter portion of the book is by way of being a tract against militarism. How much of this did Euclides feel at the time he threw down his sword? How much of it came as the result of later experi­ ence, at Canudos and elsewhere? One thing we know is that he was to fight for the Republic, for the revolution and against the counterrevolution. But always he gave evidence of abhorring violence; for he was essentially "animated by a profound respect for the human personality."S4 Meanwhile, in Sao Paulo, under the pseudonym of 'IProudhon," Eu­ elides was, as we would say today, conducting a column, one which at first bore the rubric, "Social Questions," and later, "Words and Deeds." Mter a short time he returned to Rio to resume his studies at the Polytechnic, and he was in the capital when the Republic was proclaimed. Upon the pleas of his fellow-students and through the influence of Benjamin Con-

5J See pp. 84 If.

14 Ibid.: "animado do culto da personalidade humana." As a contemporary critic, A1mir de Andrade, has pointed out, the same may be said of Freyre himself. xiv A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

stant, he was reinstated in the army and promoted to the rank of student lieutenant; and, following a course at the Escola Superior de Guerra, he was made a second lieutenant and then a first lieutenant. Under Floriano Peixoto, he put in a year of field work as an engineer and had barely re­ turned to Rio de Janeiro when the revolt of 1893 broke out. Once again he was on the side of the government, constructing trenches and sanitary works, both sides, it is said, being equally grateful for the latter. He was a democrat at heart, no doubt of that, a progressive-minded man of his age, even though his skeptical temperament and the social-political condi­ tions of the time, the "fantasy of universal suffrage," may have caused him now and then to doubt the practical workings of democracy in Bra­ zil. In certain respects, as in his attitude toward the inhabitants of the backlands, he was in advance of his age. At other times he seems to have reacted instinctively, and not always with clarity, in obedience to a deeply imbedded impulse of his nature against violence. An instance of this oc­ curred upon the suppression of the revolt, when, by protesting in letters to a newspaper against the death sentence which had been imposed upon the dynamiters of a republican journal, he once more found himself in the bad graces of the army.ss Removed from posts of responsibility for a time, he was set to building barracks in the provinces; and in 1896 he left the army and took up civil engineering, being given employment on the public works of the state of Sao Paulo. He was engaged in this occupation when the Canudos "re­ bellion" broke out, and, in the company of the Sao Paulo battalion, he was sent to "cover" the uprising for the newspaper known as the Estado de Sio Paulo. The story of Canudos, of the fanatic Messiah, Antonio Conselheiro, and his backwoods followers and their one-year war-for a war it proved to b~against the military might of the Brazilian government, cannot and need not be told here. It is the theme of this book. It may merely be remarked that "disturbances" and uprisings of this sort have been all too common in modern Brazilian history. There was the sanguinary epi­ sode of Pedra Bonita; there was the "revolution" of Padre Cicero, in Joazeiro, in 1914.s6 This was the tragic page of his country's annals that Euclides da Cunha scanned as he watched the last heroic resistance of the sertanejos at Canudos, in October, 1897. What were his reactions to it all? They will be found clearly set forth in the concluding pages of his chap­ ter on "Man."S7 As he saw it, it was not the backland fanatics who were

S5 He also protested against the treatment of prisoners by the republican soldiers, an at­ tempt to suffocate some of them in a jail (Grieco).

57 See pp. 50-168. A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION at bottom to blame but rather their countrymen of a higher stage of civiliza­ tion who had left them in a centuries-old darkness, failing to prepare them for sharing the higher responsibilities of democracy. If he saw the cause, he also saw a remedy, the only remedy: "This entire campaign would be a crime, a futile and a barbarous one, if we were not to take advantage of the paths opened by our artillery, by following up our cannon with a constant, stubborn, and persistent campaign of education, with the ob­ ject of drawing these rude and backward fellow-countrymen of ours into the current of our times and our own nationa1life." Here again is the dream, the inspiring vision, of national unity-"the mystic concept of national unity," some have called it.s8 And this, when all is said, is the basic thesis of Os SertOes. But it may be objected, what of Cunha's views on the racial question? It is frequently stated, by Brazilians and non-Brazilians alike, that he is an exponent of the doctrine of superior and inferior races.S9 Phrased in this manner, without qualification, the statement is inexact and mislead­ ing. It is based upon a superficial reading of Cunha. It is true enough, as Gilberto Freyre observes, that he was guilty of "ethnocentric exaggera­ tions," that he was pessimistic with regard to the social-economic capacity of mixed races; but Freyre goes on to point out that this was due to that "rigid biologic determinism" which has been mentioned, and which in Cunha's case was inspired by the sources upon which he too completely and trustingly relied.60 It was due to his positivistic upbringing. The laws of heredity, for instance, have for him the fixity of a dogma.61 He was, in brief, to quote Freyre once more, "the victim of scientific preconceptions with the appearance of anthropologic truths" such as were common at the turn of the century;6. but he did not carry his racial theories to any mystical extreme. While he was passionately concerned with national unity, he was no narrow nationalist; and the author of Casa grande e " Freyre, op. cu.: "a mlstica da unidade brasileira." 59 Frank, SouIh American JI1fWMJ, p. 339: "Da Cunha wrote Brazil's greatest book, Os SerlOu, on the premise of Brazilian race inferiority." The Brazilian sociologist, A. Austre­ gesilo, classifies Cunha among the "devotees of AryanisJn" (see his paper, "A Mes~gem no Brasil como factor eug~," in the collection N I1l101 uludos afro-lwasileirol, ed. Gilberta Freyre [Rio de Janeiro, 1937], pp, 325-33). It should be noted that "Aryanization" in Brazil refel'S to the progressive "whitening" of the racial stock through intermaniage. 6. Particularly Sampaio, Pimenta da Cunha, and Orville Derby (see Freyre, AchMJlillaU de Eut:lides da Cunha). 6. His stress on atavism is, for example, to be noted; even the self-sacri1icing heroism and fervor of the young republican army oflicel'S are for him a manifestation of an atavistic mysticism (seePP.365--&i). He stresses heredity over environment. "Environment does not form races," he says (p. 66). A reliance upon anthropometric measurements, even, is a "quasi-philosophic materialism." Etc. 6r In a writer like Silvio Romero, for instance (see Freyre, AchMJlillaU de Eut:lides da Cunha). xvi A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION senzala63 is rightly convinced that Cunha, had he lived today, would not have been a totalitarian. The idea is indeed unthinkable. The whole trend of his thought, his temperament, and his work is against it. His essential humanity, his re­ spect for the human personality, his abhorrence of violence and militaristic aggression are too deep and all-pervading. If he was inclined to agree with Gumplowicz-inclined to fear?-that "strong races" were destined to wipe out the weak, this does not mean that he felt this was justifiable on the part of the strong. Os Sertoes is a document against that. Having come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a Brazilian race, a Brazilian type, he has no sooner written his "irritating parenthesis" on the inferiority of mixed stocks64 than he discovers a "strong race" in the mestizo cowboy of the backlands, while in the sertanejo at Canudos he finds "the very core of our nationality, the bedrock of our race."65 In the end it becomes a matter not of inherent inferiority but of the stage of racial evolution; and "biological evolution demands the guaranty of social evo­ lution..... We are condemned to civilization."66 The Argentine critic and student of Brazilian literature, Braulio San­ chez-Saez, sums it up when he remarks that Cunha "believed with all the strength of his heart that a Negro, an Indian, were as much Brazilians as the president of the nation, himself."67 Five years after the fall of Canudos, Euclides da Cunha had completed his magnum opus; but he encountered considerable difficulty at first in finding a publisher. When the book eventually appeared, in December, 1902, it had a startling overnight success, both critical and commercial; and two months later a second edition was under way. The present transla­ tion is made from the sixteenth Brazilian edition. The year following the publication of Os Sertoes, its author was elected to the Historical Institute and to the Brazilian Academy. Among the votes which he received for the Academy seat was that of Machado de Assis. The speech of reception was made by Silvio Romero. Whatever else he mayor may not have been, Cunha was a hard worker. lle was no ivory-tower inmate but a practicing engineer, toiling at his

63 Gilberto Freyre, Cua grande e s_ala (2d ed.; Rio de Janeiro: J. G. de Oliveira, 1936). This work is soon to appear in English translation. If Os Sert6es is the early-century state­ ment of Brazil's racial-national question, Cua grande e senzala is the contemporary one, indi­ cating the solution which Brazilians believe they have found or are finding. See the article by Dr. Lewis Hanke, "Gilberto Freyre, Social Historian," Quarterly Journal of Inte,.-American lWaJions, I, NO.3 Guly, 1939), 24-44. 6, See pp. 84 fl. 66 See p. 54.

65 "See Author's Notes," Note V, p. 481. 670p. cit. A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION xvii trade. From 1898 to H)02 he was engaged, simultaneously, in building a bridge and in writing his masterpiece; and the two were completed at one and the same time. Directing the work of construction by day, at night he labored on the curious, rough-hewn architecture of his prose. Sao Jose do Rio Pardo, where the bridge and the book were built, is today the Mec­ ca of "euclidianistnO," the Cunha cult, and the wooden shack in which as SertOes was composed is a venerated relic. 68 The closing years of Euclides da Cunha's brief life, from 1902 on, were spent as a sanitary engineer, as a government surveyor of frontiers-in which sense it was he "made geography"-and as a professor of logic in the Pedro II Institute. In 1905 we find him touring the Amazon region for the federal government and writing verses in his leisure hours.69 His life, however, was far from being a tranquil one, for he appears to have had the faculty of becoming involved in bitter quarrels and disagreeable incidents.7• In 1907 his book, Peru versus Bolivia, a treatise on the bound­ ary dispute between the two countries, was written in a month's time, which was considered something of a miracle in those days. The same year saw the publication of his collection of Brazilian and South American studies, Contrastes e confrontos ("Contrasts and Comparisons"), a work which is by way of being an expanded epilogue to as SertOes. This year, also, he delivered his lecture on "Castro Alves and His Times." In 1908 he entered the competition in logic at the Pedro II Institute and was awarded second place, first place going to Brazil's best-known philoso­ pher, Farias Brito. In connection with this competition, Euclides sub­ mitted two theses, one for the written examination on "Truth and Error" and one for the oral on "The Idea of Being." The following year, 1909, he was appointed to a chair in the institution and had given nineteen lectures when he was struck down by an assassin's bullet. It was on the morning of August IS, 1909, at the Piedade Station in the Estrada Real of Santa Cruz, that Euclides da Cunha was shot and killed in the street, by an army officer. The slaying, according to the com­ monly accepted account as given by Cunha's recent biographer, Sr. Eloy Pontes, came as the result of a grim domestic tragedy which long had

68 See the article by Francisco VenAncio Filho, "A barraquinha de Euclides da Cunha," Rnista do SenJi,o do Patrim8nio Hist6rico e Arlutico NlUionai (Rio de Janeiro), No.2, 1938, PP·241-54· 6, Agrippino Grieco. Cunha was a member of the Mixed (Peruvian-Brazilian) Boundary Commission of the Alto Pums. His Amazon papers are collected in his book, A M argem da hist6ria, published the year of his death (11)09). 10 The one with Estanlislau Zeballos, for instance. xviii A TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION rendered the victim's life a tormented one.7t At the time of his death the author of Os SerfOes was at work upon another book dealing with the backlands, to which he planned to give the title of Para1.so perdido­ "Paradise Lost." So died the man who had described himself in a verse couplet as "this caboclo, this tame jagun{o, mixture of Celt, of Tapuia," and of Greek." "And, indeed," says Agrippino Grieco, "there was a little of all this in him. An intimate acquaintance tells us of his disdain for clothes, of his face with its prominent cheekbones, his glance now keen and darting and now far away and absorbed, and his hair which fell down over his fore­ head, all of which made him look altogether like an aborigine, causing him to appear as a stranger in the city, as one who at each moment was con­ scious of the attraction of the forest." And Silvio Romero, upon seeing him for the first time, declared that he was the perfect type of Cariry Indian. Toward the end of his forty-three years, Euclides would seem to have mellowed somewhat, if we are to judge from a letter to a friend which is published for the first time in the Spanish edition of Os SertOes: 71 You ask me to send you a copy of as SertDes; but I must tell you in advance that I do not do so spontaneously; for this barbarous book of my youth, this monstrous poem of brutality and force, is so strange to my present tranquil way of looking at life that it is sometimes all that I myself can do to understand it. In any case, it is the first-born of my spirit, and there are audacious critics who assert that it is my one and only book. Can this be true, I wonder? It is hard to admit that with it I reached a culminating point and that I am to spend all the rest of my life coming down from this height. After you have read it, tell me, my distinguished friend, if I am to be condemned to so un­ enviable a fate as this. Your opinion will be most highly prized, and I should like to have it as soon as possible. However this may be, Os SertOes remains a towering peak of Brazilian literature. SAlruEL PUTNAM PlIILADELPHIA

7' See Eloy Pontes, A !lida dram4tiea de Euclides da Cunha (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Jo~ Olympio, 1938). For a different view of the matter, to the effect that Cunha's assailant acted in self-defense, see the rather sensational article, "Euclides da Cunha nao foi assassinado," by Francisco de Assis Barbosa, in the fortnightly review, Direlrizes (Rio de Janeiro), V, No. 72 (November 6, 1941), 2-4, 14-20 • .,. I.e., Indian. 71 Addressed to Mariano de V&lia, son of Agustin de V&lia, author of Martin Garda, for the posthumous edition of which Cunha had written an article.