GUIMARÃES ROSA, João

Nationality: Brazilian. Born: Cordisburgo, Minas Gerais, 27 June 1908. Education: Medical School of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, M.D. 1925-30. Family: Married 1) Lygia Cabral Pena in 1930; 2) Aracy Moebius de Carvalho in 1938. Military Service: Medical officer , 1932-34. Career: Public servant, Statistical Service, Minas Gerais, 1929-31; physician, private practice, 1931-32; joined Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1934; vice-consul, Germany, 1938-42; interned in Baden-Baden, 1942; secretary, Brazilian Embassy in Colombia, 1942-44; head, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Documentation Service, 1944-46; secretary, Brazilian Delegation to Paris Peace Conference, 1946; secretary general, Brazilian Delegation to Ninth Pan-American Conference, Bogotá, 1948; counselor, Brazilian Embassy, Paris, 1949-51; cabinet chief, 1951-53, and budget chief, 1953-58, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; ambassador, 1958-62; chief of borders division, 1962-67. Vice-president, First Latin American Writers Conference, Mexico City, 1965. Awards: Brazilian Academy of Letters Poetry award, 1937; Felipe d'Oliveira prize, 1946; Machado de Assis prize, 1956; Carmen Dolores Barbosa prize, 1957; Paula Brito prize, 1957; Brazilian Pen Club award, 1963. Member: Brazilian Academy of Letters, 1967. Died: 19 November 1967.

Publications

Collections

Selecta, edited by Paulo Rónai. 1973.

Contos, edited by Heitor Megale and Marilena Matsuola. 1978.

Short Stories

Sagarana. 1946; revised editions, 1951, 1956, 1958; translated asSagarana, by Harriet de Onís, 1966.

Corpo de baile: Sete novelas. 1956; third edition as Manuelzão e Miguilim, No urubùquaquá, no pinhém, and Noites do sertão, 3 vols., 1964-65.

Primeiras Estórias. 1962; as The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories, 1968.

Tutaméia: Terceiras estórias. 1967.

Estas estórias. 1969.

Novel

Grande Sertão: Veredas. 1956; as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1963.

Other

Ave, palavra (prose and verse). 1970. Sagarana emotiva: cartas de Guimarães Rosa [a] Paulo Dantas. 1975.

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Critical Studies:

by Mary Daniel, in Studies in Short Fiction 8, Winter, 1971; Structural Perspectivism in Guimarães Rosa by W. Martins, 1973; Guimarães Rosa by Jon S. Vincent, 1978; The Synthesis Novel in Latin America: A Study of Grande Sertão by Eduardo de Faria Coutinho, 1991.

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João Guimarães Rosa stands as one of the dominant and most innovative of modern Brazilian prose writers, his collected works comprised primarily of short fiction. With his first book, Sagarana, a collection of nine short stories, he attracted critical acclaim, winning the Felipe d'Oliveira prize of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. There followed in 1956 Corpo de baile: Sete novelas (Dance Corps), seven novellas later published in three volumes. Also in 1956 there appeared his principal work and only novel, Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands). Primeiras Estórias (The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories) appeared in 1962, comprising 21 brief short stories varying in length from a half dozen to a dozen pages. A volume of even briefer stories, Tutaméia, double in number, followed in 1967. Estas estórias (These Stories) was released posthumously in 1969, containing, like his first book, nine stories. In 1970 appeared in one of his final works, Ave, palavra (Hail, Word), a miscellany of reminiscences, chronicles, and notes. Other short fiction of Guimarães Rosa includes stories he published in magazines during his early writing career, beginning in the late 1920s, and chapters he contributed toward the end of his career for two novels collectively written by a group of authors.

The book that first brought critical acclaim to Guimarães Rosa, Sagarana, contains the alluring blend of contrapuntal opposites that came to characterize his work: compelling narratives in settings of regional primitivism, quickened by a resonating treatment of sophisticated modernism. The setting and characters of the stories are of the primitive backlands. The protagonists are as easily animals as human beings, lending the narratives an air of folklore or fable. But the narrative treatment does not occur in so elementary or transparent a fashion. Well-reflecting this complexity is the story "Conversation among Oxen." This narrative about (and by) a team of oxen pulling a cart shifts in point of view from man to animal then melds between them, reinforcing tensions between truth and fiction, right and wrong, justice and revenge. Another tale, "Bulletproof," focuses on a sorcerer and the atmosphere of magical belief in the backlands. But essentially the tale is a consideration of the manipulation of diction, the irony and humor of such play upon reality, and the subtle, unsteady, gradually emerging perception of the difference between magic and reality.

The novellas or longer short stories of Corpo de baile elaborate upon the baroque character of Guimarães Rosa's work. Its tales, which can be reduced to spare plot lines of men and women grappling with desire, reality, or identity, are embellished with extensive subplots and marginal characters and observations. Described by the author as poems, the embellished narratives possess a prose enhanced by poetic devices of rhyme, alliteration, and invented words, yet also bear a complexity and ambiguity that can be obscure. Among the stories most commented upon in this volume is "Campo Geral," with its insightful perspective on a child viewing adults and being incorporated into adulthood.

The publication of Corpo de baile together with The Devil to Pay in the Backlands obtained for Guimarães Rosa the coveted Machado de Assis prize of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, recognizing the collective achievement of his work; his books henceforth began to be translated in Europe and the United States. The literary uniqueness and influence of his work lay in the phenomenon of tales of Aesopian frugality being told in Joycean layers of narrative dimension, with a charm that could be as homely as it was multifaceted and challenging.

As if anticipating the brevity of life that remained for the author, the last two books published by Guimarães Rosa in his lifetime present progressively leaner, briefer narratives, recounting moments of transforming discovery or epiphanies. The impact of the rapid, concise tales in The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories suggests mystical assurance and peace—or resignation. In "The Horse that Drank Beer" a man discovers the beautiful in the ugly; in "Hocus Psychocus" children acting in a school play begin to perceive the truth in illusion; and in "Sorôco, His Mother, His Daughter" a village breaks out in sympathetic song, understanding the permanence of separation as a man's mentally unstable mother and daughter depart for a distant asylum. In Tutaméia the brevity of its stories makes them hardly more than anecdotes bearing aphoristic insights in an atmosphere of alienation and separation. Interspersed with these tales are prefaces, reflections on writing and the sources of literary inspiration. The cumulative effect of the rapidity of insights in these works gives the reader a sense of accompanying, then becoming, a magical seer.

The posthumous Estas estórias is unique for having tales that take the reader outside the traditional backlands setting and atmosphere of Guimarães Rosa to the Andes and to Mato Grosso. Yet in other aspects, such as the length of the stories and appearance of animal protagonists, it harkens back to Sagarana. It also has a sense of the author who was so representative of and sympathetic to the Brazilian backlands, recognizing himself as having been part of the larger modern Latin American literary phenomenon of magical realism. Ave, palavra blends small pieces of reflection and recollection, and is only short fiction to the extent the author embellished on those memories and thoughts.

As a major figure in Brazilian literature and short fiction, Guimarães Rosa is preceded only by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Among the Brazilian contemporaries of his time, one of the most brilliant generations of the national culture, Guimarães Rosa possessed a modernist perspective and regionalist focus that were comparable to the writings of Mário de Andrade. But Guimarães Rosa possessed a more thorough integration with and encompassing perception of his environment together with a greater subtlety of insight and complexity of technique. Among world writers, he has been compared to James Joyce for the breadth and detail of his universe and the originality of his literary technique. Fortunately in this comparison, however, Guimarães Rosa is not so often as opaque.

—Edward A. Riedinger

See the essay on "The Third Bank of the River."