"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.