2017- Celebrating the love of reading Brazilian literature The year of #lovetoreadBrazil BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB| SYLVIO DINARTE[ A. d'E. T.]*|INNOCENCIA | * ALFREDO D'ESCRAGNOLLE TAUNAY, VISCOUNT OF TAUNAY (1843-1899) 17th August 6.30-9 PM 2017- the year of #lovetoreadBrazil Innocencia (1872) by Sylvio Dinarte .[ A. D'e. T.] – Alfredo D'escragnolle Taunay, Viscount of Taunay (1843-1899) translated as Innocencia. A story of the prairie regions of Brazil. (1889) Original cover 1872 ©BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB – CULTURAL SECTION - EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON All rights reserved - Creator & Convenor -©Nadia Kerecuk 14-16 Cockspur Street London SW11Y 5BL http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xml 2017- Celebrating the love of reading Brazilian literature The year of #lovetoreadBrazil Enjoy an extraordinarily enchanting love story and disregard clichés – romanticism/realism or any other -isms! Join in the ways of seeing of a multitalented wayfarer-narrator, who constructs the memory of Brazil with unstinting devotion. You will unveil a most vivid and true to life account of rural life in the 19th century sertões of Brazil: São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso and Goiás & more. Explore innermost areas of Brazil & find yourself beguiled by the landscapes of its mind - scientific & cultural! Accompany Cirino de Campos, the itinerant apothecary turned doctor (aided by the popular Dr. Pedro Chernoviz’ Vade Mecum) in his pursuit of cures for various maladies. Discover the joys of a hilarious German government-funded naturalist/explorer collecting loads of insects, dispatching them to his homeland and becoming famous on account of a beautiful blue butterfly! A pearl of novel crafting & delightful super-holiday read & the Brazilian novel, which had the largest number of translations into other languages immediately after its publication in 19th century, beaten only by Os Lusíadas by Camões. Discover the opera Papillio Innocentia (1915) by the Swiss composer Leonardo Kessler (1882-1924), who settled in Curitiba, with a libretto by the poet Emiliano Pernetta (1866-1921), inspired by the novel, recently premiered at the Second Opera Festival of Paraná. High time for the oeuvre of a most accomplished polygraph – Viscount Alfredo d'Escragnolle-Taunay – a Brazilian patriot, descendant of French nobility be deservedly read and appreciated. DETAILS OF AVAILABLE PUBLICATIONS: ENGLISH Innocencia. A story of the prairie regions of Brazil. (1889)by (A. d'E. T. [i.e. Viscount Alfredo d'Escragnolle-Taunay]). Translated from the Portuguese and illustrated by J. W. Wells (1889) ISBN-10: 1290872597 ISBN-13: 978-1290872591 ASIN: B006OICCUI NB..Various modern reprints available, but without the original illustrations. Free download of the text in English available in various formats: ©BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB – CULTURAL SECTION - EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON All rights reserved - Creator & Convenor -©Nadia Kerecuk 14-16 Cockspur Street London SW11Y 5BL http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xml 2017- Celebrating the love of reading Brazilian literature The year of #lovetoreadBrazil https://archive.org/details/innocenciastoryo1889taun PORTUGUESE (1872) Innocencia. Edicoes Melhoramentos Various editions available from various publishing houses. e.g. Free downloads- Various Portuguese: http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/pesquisa/DetalheObraForm.do?select_action=&c o_obra=2017 Various editions are available in Portuguese e.g. ISBN: 9788538011798 SHORT HISTORY OF THE BOOK AND TRANSLATIONS A reprint: 2012 edition The 1872 novel Innocencia gained immediate public acclaim for the author, who published it under his one of his pen names, Sylvio Dinarte. There were trifle reviews and contemporaries were somewhat sluggish in commenting on it. It is a masterful novel and ended up being reprinted at least some twenty-three times in book format by various publishers during the life time of the author. It was very popular in Brazil at the time. Additionally, it would appear in feuilleton format after its publication in various daily and weekly newspapers, for instance in Cara of the newspaper A Folha do Norte reprinted it from 9th July to 28th August 1899. ©BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB – CULTURAL SECTION - EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON All rights reserved - Creator & Convenor -©Nadia Kerecuk 14-16 Cockspur Street London SW11Y 5BL http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xml 2017- Celebrating the love of reading Brazilian literature The year of #lovetoreadBrazil It is always fascinating when an author leaves an account of how the idea or inspiration for a novel appeared. In Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay’s memoirs Reminiscências published posthumously in 1908, or in his Memórias (various volumes and published posthumously), we can ‘hear’ the author telling us what inspired him to write the novel. The author, a remarkable polymath, had accrued significant knowledge of the topography and geography of Brazil through his travels on military service, studies and other roles he came to play. A. d'Escragnolle Taunay’s had become deeply acquainted with Brazil having experienced it and was a very keen and punctilious observer of life and customs. He recorded ethnographical details of inhabitants of Brazil noting down all kinds of details including the use of varieties of language he encountered, which he subsequently incorporated it into his writings. His fiction is deeply seated in his rich experience of a wayfarer, who is both knowledgeable and open to amassing much learning from the places he visits. His works have remained an invaluable source for historiographers, ethnographers, lexicographers and historians of ideas. Innocencia conceals a reference to his own private life. In his Reminiscências, the author tells us that when he was on an military expedition in Mato Grosso (currently Mato Grosso do Sul) as an assistant engineer in depth of town Camapuã located close to the slightly more populated town of Santana do Paranaíba, that he was welcomed as a lodger at the farm of Mr José Pereira from Minas Gerais. That inspired one of his characters in Innocencia. Paranaíba was a town at the forefront of the colonization of the territory of Brazil particularly through the efforts of the Garcia Leal family, an important family from the southwest of Minas Gerais, southwest of Bahia, west of São Paulo, southeast ©BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB – CULTURAL SECTION - EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON All rights reserved - Creator & Convenor -©Nadia Kerecuk 14-16 Cockspur Street London SW11Y 5BL http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xml 2017- Celebrating the love of reading Brazilian literature The year of #lovetoreadBrazil of Goiás and east of Mato Grosso (do Sul). Paranaíba was to become an important town for the Paraguay War, where the author served during the war. In the same account, he tells us how he proceeded to the River Sucuriú (an affluent of Rio Pardo) the following day, where he saw a spritely deaf dwarf, who gesticulated vigorously and served as inspiration for his character Tico in the novel. Further on, the author tells us that he stopped at the house of João Garcia discovering that it was a house with leprosy sufferers and, again, he used it in his novel, supplying the raw matter for his novel. No dia 30 de junho estávamos no vasto rancho do Sr. José Pereira, bom mineiro que nos acolheu otimamente e era o primeiro morador que encontrávamos à saída do sertão bruto de Camapuã e à entrada do de Santana do Paranaíba, um pouco mais habitado. Acordando indisposto, bem tarde, saí do pouso, chegando, nesse dia 1 de julho, à margem do Rio Sucuriú, afluente volumoso do Pardo que leva as águas ao Paraná. Aí vi o anãozinho mudo, mas um tanto gracioso, sobretudo ágil nos movimentos, que me serviu de tipo ao Tico do meu romance “Inocência”. Passou-nos numa canoa com muito jeito, buscando conversar e tornar-se amável por meio de frenética e engraçada gesticulação. Dei-lhe uma molhadurazinha e pôs-se a pular como um cabrito satisfeito da vida, fazendo-nos muitos acenos de agradecimentos e adeuses com o chapéu de palha furado, que não esqueci de indicar naquele livro”. [Reminiscências] One finds a plethora of details about the sources for the inspiration of Innocencia in the aforementioned volumes. One salient account refers to his autobiographical sentimental memory. There is some congruence between the characters in Iracema (1865) by José de Alencar (1829-77) and Innocencia. Both Iracema and Innocencia are indigenous beauties with long black shiny hair and demonstrate unstinting love. The author reminisces about an episode from his life when he became deeply in love with an indigenous girl, Antonia, who was a lover of a lieutenant, and how he seduced her. An interesting fact is that his vocabulary of the Guaná language (or Chané, endangered) was born out of that episode with idyllic views of a hammock during a spell of malaria. Curiously, he states that ‘ Thinking sometimes and, as ever with huge saudades of those times, it seems to me that that naïve indigenous girl was, amongst all women, the one I loved most (NK).’ (Chapter XL). ©BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB – CULTURAL SECTION - EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON All rights reserved - Creator & Convenor -©Nadia Kerecuk 14-16 Cockspur Street London SW11Y 5BL http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xml 2017- Celebrating the love of reading Brazilian literature The year of #lovetoreadBrazil The first edition of the novel opens with a quotation from Waverly (1814) by Sir Walter Scott, ‘It is from the great book of Nature, the same through a thousand editions, whether of black-letter, or wire-wove and hot-pressed, that I have venturously essayed to read a chapter to the public.’ This is followed by a dedication of the novel to the author’s childhood friend José Antônio de Azevedo Castro (1839-1911) dated 8th July 1872, written in Rio de Janeiro. Azevedo Castro was the ‘president’ of the province (now state) of Rio Grande do Sul (1875 -76), but, more importantly, the counsellor of the Brazilian Treasury in London in 1885.