Macunaíma, page 1
Macunaíma
Mário de Andrade in São Paulo, 1929
Translation copyright © 2023 by Katrina Dodson
Introduction copyright © 2023 by John Keene
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cidadania do Brasil | Fundação Biblioteca Nacional em cooperação com o Ministério das Relações Exteriores
Published with the support of the Brazilian Ministry of Citizenship | National Library Foundation in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
First published as New Directions Paperbook 1560 in 2023
Manufactured in the United States of America
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Andrade, Mário de, 1893–1945, author. | Dodson, Katrina, translator.
Title: Macunaíma : the hero with no character / Mário de Andrade ; translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson.
Other titles: Macunaíma. English
Description: New York, NY : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2023.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022057388 | ISBN 9780811227025 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780811227032 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Magic realist fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PQ9697.A72 M313 2023 | DDC 869.3/41—dc23/eng/20221202
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057388
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
For Paulo Prado
Contents
Introduction, by John Keene
Chapter 1. Macunaíma
Chapter 2. Coming of Age
Chapter 3. Ci, Mother of the Forest
Chapter 4. Boiuna Moon
Chapter 5. Piaimã
Chapter 6. The French Lady and the Giant
Chapter 7. Macumba
Chapter 8. Vei, the Sun
Chapter 9. Letter to the Icamiabas
Chapter 10. Pauí-Pódole
Chapter 11. Old Ceiuci
Chapter 12. The Perky Peddler, Shiny Cowbird, and the Injustice of Men
Chapter 13. Jiguê’s Lousy Lady
Chapter 14. Muiraquitã
Chapter 15. Oibê’s Innards
Chapter 16. Uraricoera
Chapter 17. Ursa Major
Epilogue
Mário De Andrade’s Prefaces and Explanations
Afterword The Many Lives of Macunaíma
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
Landmarks
Cover
Introduction
Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character, Mário de Andrade’s fictional masterpiece published in 1928, may be one of the greatest twentieth-century epics, and major works of Brazilian and modernist literature that many Anglophone readers have neither read nor heard of. Initially composed in six days by Andrade, with a little less than a year and a half of revision to follow, this novel is as startling, mystifying, and enchanting today as when it initially appeared nearly a century ago, baffling and mesmerizing Brazilian critics and readers in equal measure. Macunaíma’s apparent obscurity in English mirrors that of its polymathic author, Andrade (1893–1945), who by the time of his death had become one of the central and most generative figures in Brazilian modernism, with an oeuvre spanning poetry, fiction, and travelogues, as well as photography, musicology, art criticism, folkloric, mythological, and cultural studies, filmmaking, and more. With this new edition of Macunaíma, superlatively translated by Katrina Dodson, I for one hope that English-language critics’ and readers’ interest in Macunaíma and Andrade will increase significantly.
Provoking astonishment and criticism were hardly novel for Andrade, a mixed-race São Paulo native whose queerness was as veiled, if nevertheless evident to those in his circle, as his racial background. A product of the country’s burgeoning, turn-of-the-century middle class, Andrade, tall, prematurely bald, a dandy in his dress and self-presentation, publicly telegraphed his aesthetic interests. In February 1922, six years prior to Macunaíma’s publication, he had sparked a public furor among São Paulo’s cultural leaders and bourgeoisie, and lit the modernist fuse for the country as a whole, as one of the chief organizers, along with painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, of São Paulo’s germinal and now legendary Modern Art Week (Semana de Arte Moderna). He was soon to become a member of the avant-garde Group of Five (Grupo dos Cinco), comprising the poets Oswald de Andrade, similarly named but not a relative, and a sometime antagonist, and Menotti Del Picchia; and visual artists Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral; Andrade had collaborated with most of this group and fellow vanguardists to present the weeklong exhibition in São Paulo’s Municipal Theater, featuring visual art, theoretical lectures, musical concerts, and readings that would herald and mark a giant shift in Brazilian art and culture. The Modern Art Week showcased new and at times shocking aesthetic works and modernist trends akin to those unfolding in a variety of movements (such as cubism, primitivism, futurism, etc.) across the continent and globe. At the end of the week, on the Municipal Theater’s stage, Andrade provided the gathering’s pièce de résistance, declaiming selections from his experimental, impressionistic poetry collection, Pauliceia desvairada (Hallucinated São Paulo), which melded European and Brazilian influences, to boos and catcalls from the audience.
Andrade’s stylistic leaps in Pauliceia desvairada and subsequent poetic works pointed the way to some of the linguistic and textual innovations of Macunaíma, as did Andrade’s novel Amar, verbo intransitivo (To Love, Intransitive Verb, titled Fräulein in its original 1933 English translation), published shortly before Macunaíma, in 1927. In both texts Andrade sampled and followed the organizational and semantic principles of everyday Brazilian speech, utilizing and juxtaposing colloquialisms, slang, neologisms, syntactic abruptions, and apparent solecisms; he was creating a new style and texture, in lyric and narrative form, that departed from the mainstream or canonical Brazilian and Lusophone literature of the time. Additionally, Andrade’s theoretical “Extremely Interesting Preface” to Pauliceia notes the relationship between his unique syntactic arrangement of poetic language and “oral harmony,” to produce a jarringly exquisite “genuine dissonance.” Macunaíma employs a version of this fruitful dissonance in numerous ways, as well as other linguistic experiments, on a grander scale, which is to say over the scope of an extended narrative; he produces a text of striking capaciousness despite its actual brevity, with leaps in logic and time, radical juxtapositions of style, character, and incident, and an insistent playfulness and ribald humor.
While Amar is a novel that portrays and sends up the domestic, bourgeois world of Andrade’s youth, in Macunaíma Andrade takes up the challenge of reflecting in novelistic form Brazil’s geographical vastness, its cultural diversity and complexity, and its distinctive capacity for change and reinvention. We see fewer of the European, fin-de-siècle figures and tropes, such as the repeatedly invoked “harlequin,” of his Pauliceia. Instead, Andrade centers Macunaíma within the originary sphere of Indigenous cultures, while also incorporating aspects of the country’s long history as a European colony, its later status as a New World empire, and finally, shortly before his birth, its development into a republic. The novel, which he considered a “rhapsody” in keeping with his poetic and musical interests, also incorporates the profound imprint left by centuries of chattel slavery and the African presence that has continued to powerfully shape Brazil. In true modernist fashion, however, Macunaíma does not depict this plenitude through the lens of realism, but instead refracts it, to produce a text that proceeds like a mosaic dizzyingly pieced together, bursting with story. Reading the novel, it can feel as if multiple storytellers are simultaneously telling parallel tales in different genres (satire, allegory, fable, etc.), as the plot figuratively races wildly forward, though Andrade never loses his central thread, which follows his “hero with no character.”
The eponymous Macunaíma, as the reader quickly learns, possesses a surfeit of character, much like the text itself, such that the epithet ironically comes to mean almost the opposite of what it suggests: Macunaíma, as a novel, a character, and a metonym for Brazil, has so much character, perhaps too much at times. Macunaíma is a character of such abundance, he contains so many multitudes, many of them seemingly in opposition, that he is a figure of supreme negative capability, and one of the thrills of the plot—which unreels as a fantastical tragicomic epic, often in picaresque fashion, as antic at times as a children’s TV cartoon—is to experience how Andrade manages or fails—if momentarily, which may be the point—to hold the narrative together. Even in physical terms Macunaíma is a contradiction; a fully grown human, he possesses a child’s head; born “jet black” in skin tone to an Afro-Indigenous mother, he turns fully white after bathing in an enchanted pool; he possesses magical powers and deploys them regularly throughout the novel, yet he is also as vulnerable as any human, especially after losing his special talisman, his “muiraq
Andrade’s white-heat compositional method was actually the result of a longer latent period of composition, in his head and notebooks. During the period between São Paulo’s Modern Art Week and Macunaíma’s publication, he had traveled throughout large swaths of Brazil’s interior, as well as along its coasts, documenting various aspects of local folk cultures, noting the music and tales, and also all manner of imagery and idioms, particularly the Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian influences. All of this research would provide a rich cache of material for Macunaíma. Another crucial source for Macunaíma—including the novel’s title and the protagonist’s name and exploits—was the second volume in German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s five-part study Vom Roroima zum Orinoco (From Roraima to the Orinoco, published from 1917 to 1928), which focused heavily on Indigenous myths, providing an invaluable foundation for Andrade’s novel. This borrowing would prove controversial to some critics, but Andrade later publicly acknowledged his debt. Additionally, the canon of earlier Brazilian, Lusophone, and European literature, which Andrade was very familiar with and drew upon, and against which he was writing, provided yet another foundation. Nevertheless, Macunaíma, with its collage-like melding and layering, is very much Andrade’s own, distinctive literary gem. Readers of this edition are fortunate to have the exceptional notes translator Katrina Dodson has compiled, illuminating many of the references, along with her insightful, contextualizing afterword, which delves more deeply into all of the points I touch upon here.
One motif that runs throughout Macunaíma is that of the cannibal, and it is linked directly and indirectly to the “Manifesto Antropófago” (“Cannibalist Manifesto”) and the corresponding Cannibalist Movement, published by the aforementioned Group of Five member Oswald de Andrade and inspired by the work of another member, his wife Tarsila do Amaral. Her painting Abaporu appeared in the movement’s journal, which also published an early snippet of Macunaíma. Oswald de Andrade’s and the Cannibalist Movement’s chief idea, distilled, was that Brazilian art could and should take whatever it wanted and needed from European sources, or in other words, “cannibalize” them, but also tap into the incalculably rich intellectual and cultural trove Brazil and the New World—beginning with Indigenous antecedents—provided, as a counterweight to European cultural and aesthetic hegemony. (I should note here the movement’s very problematic fascination with “cannibalism” and its connection to ideas of dehistoricized and racialized social and cultural “primitivism.”) Certainly Macunaíma, as a novel, and Macunaíma the protagonist, are desiring and devouring machines, and in most ways appear to manifest many of the manifesto’s chief tenets; the novel gathers up innumerable, sometimes incommensurate strands, from all the sources Andrade recorded or consulted, as well as from his fecund imagination, in its quest to create a coherent whole. Yet for Andrade the novel was not so much an exemplar of the movement’s ideas—however much it confirmed some of its key propositions—but rather it was sui generis, and any reading of Macunaíma will substantiate that it is anything but a programmatic text. Instead, from the opening page, one launches into a work that appears to defy any plan or program at all.
In addition to the cannibal motif and actual cannibalism in the text, contemporary readers may be taken aback by other elements and moments in the novel that are misogynistic and sexist, racist, and appropriative (truly, the novel itself represents on one level the epitome of cultural appropriation and remixing). Rather than dismiss these critiques outright, or argue that the novel’s comic through line leavens or excuses them, or turn to the fact of Andrade’s queerness and African ancestry, I will note that Macunaíma is, alongside its inventiveness, still very much a text in and of its era, with all the limitations that entails. I would also note that in some ways, Macunaíma’s transgressions represent—and here this word is key—Andrade’s attempt to embody in thematic, psychic, and synecdochic ways Brazilian culture in much of its fractious complexity, indexing aspects of the country’s ongoing social, political, and economic relations, in all their ugliness and brutality, through means other than realism (social, materialist, or otherwise). It is up to readers today, in Brazil and elsewhere, to decide how adroitly this approach succeeds or falters, without losing sight of or dismissing the work out of hand.
I will conclude by saying that English-language readers have a rare gift in Katrina Dodson’s translation. Again and again she has found a way to render this text—a marvel and puzzle in the original Portuguese—into an English that sparkles with the sense and spirit of its source. She thankfully has not prettified Andrade’s text for the Anglophone eye or ear, but she has captured its essential music and rhythms, its brio, in a way that brings it alive anew. Moreover, a crucial component of her translation involves her painstaking archival research into every aspect of the text, particularly those grounded in Andrade’s studies of Afro-Brazilian culture, uncovering information that has revealed greater insight into some of his experimentation and play, which had eluded or confounded some prior critics and readers. We thus have the best translation of one of the greatest novels, by one of the greatest figures in Brazilian, Latin American, and global literature.
Once we have concluded our reading of the novel and marveled at the work the translator and Andrade have undertaken for us, we will surely be able to recall without hesitation our hero Macunaíma’s mythic roller coaster of a life, his epic journey which was and is Brazil’s, so full of character, and conclude by recalling the novel’s simple and perfect ending, recounted, like the entire text, by Macunaíma’s parrot: “And that’s all.”
John Keene
MACUNAÍMA
Chapter 1. Macunaíma
In the depths of the virgin-forest was born Macunaíma, hero of our people. He was jet black and son to fear of the night. There came a moment when the silence grew so great listening to the murmuring Rio Uraricoera, that the native Tapanhumas woman birthed an ugly child. That child is the one they called Macunaíma.
Even as a boy he did bewildering things. First off he went more than six years without talking. If they coaxed him to talk he’d holler:
“Ah! just so lazy! . . .”
and not a word more. He kept to a corner of the family maloca, perched on a platform of paxiúba palm, watching the others work, specially his two brothers, Maanape the geezer and Jiguê in the prime of manhood. For fun he’d pick the heads off saúva ants. All he did was lie around but if ever he set eyes on money, Macunaíma would toddle for a penny. And he’d perk up whenever the family went to bathe in the river, all naked together. He’d spend the whole time diving underwater, and the women would squeal in delight on account of those guaiamum crabs said to inhabit the freshwater there. Back at the family mocambo if a girl came up to cuddle, Macunaíma would stick his hand on her charms, the girl would jump back. As for the males he’d spit in their faces. Nevertheless, he respected the elders and wholeheartedly joined in the murua the poracê the torê the bacororô the cucuicogue, all the religious dances of the tribe.
When it was time for bed he’d climb into his little macuru, always forgetting to pee. Seeing as his mother’s hammock was right under his hanging cradle, the hero’s steaming piss would splash onto the old woman, shooing the mosquitoes real good. Then he’d drift off dreaming of bad-words and outrageously immoral acts, kicking at the air.
At the peak of day the women’s chatter always came round to the hero’s naughty pranks. They’d laugh knowingly, remarking, “Though you may be expectin’ a little tickle, even a pipsqueak thorn packs a prickle,” and during a Pajelança ceremony King Nagô gave a speech and revealed that indeed the hero was intelligent.
