Guimarães Rosa: biography, characteristics, phrases

Guimaraes Rosa, considered the greatest Brazilian writer of the 20th century, produced Tales, soap operas and novels known by excellent work with language. “Reinventing” the Portuguese language, Rosa built new words that free it from its merely utilitarian function, recovering the poetic language. Representative of 3rd phase of Brazilian modernism, Rosa creates a literature that uses and absorbs the work of Generation of 30, offering another answer to the (same) Brazilian problems.

Guimarães Rosa Biography

João Guimaraes Rosa was born in Cordisburgo (MG), on June 27, 1908. Son of a small merchant, he moved to Belo Horizonte in 1918 to continue his studies. Graduated in Medicine, in 1930, and practiced in cities in the interior of Minas Gerais, such as Itaúna and Barbacena. During this period, published his first stories in the magazine the cruise and studied German and Russian on his own.

Guimarães Rosa is an illustrious figure in Brazilian literature. [1]

Verified in nine languages, Rosa joined the diplomatic career

in 1934. He was deputy consul in Hamburg, Germany, until the end of the alliance between the countries during World War II, which led him to jail in Baden-Baden in 1942. After his release, he became secretary of the Brazilian embassy in Bogotá, and then diplomatic adviser in Paris. Back in Brazil, he is promoted to minister first class.

In 1963 it is unanimously elected member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was also Brazil's representative at the II Latin American Congress of Writers and the Federal Council of Culture, in 1967. He died in Rio de Janeiro, on November 19 of that same year, victim of a heart attack.

Read too: Clarice Lispector's psychological prose prose

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literary features

A great researcher and connoisseur of several languages, Guimarães Rosa made numerous field trips, making his literature one fusion of archaisms, culture popular and erudite world. It is mainly rural locations and their universes of poverty, always peripheral to the world of capital and the division of labor, that appear in the author's work.

It is in this scenario that Rosa immerses herself in the illiterate man experience, based on nature, on religiosity, on the myth, in divine providence, in a sense of work linked to ancient rituals, etc. His characters, far from modernity, recover a mythical-magical thinking: they do not see the world primarily through the logical-rational universe. The magical world is not another's universe, but is diluted in the narrator's own voice. His literature adheres to the world of rustic man.

This universe of the illiterate, privileged by the author, involves a poetic quest and a latent discussion about the art. The worldview that Rosa recovers is that of the alogical. Children, crazy people, old people, disabled people, misfits, miracle workers and even animals: there is a predominance of these unusual voices in his work, far from empirical and concrete reality, closer to myth. These characters gain a status of scrying, because the author questions the order of the logical-rational world, who understands facts as truth and poetry as imagination.

Myth and the enchanted world are on the margins of modern society; they are in the mouths and in the imagination of these maladjusted characters. And it is in them that Rosa sees the origin of poetry, who would have been somehow infected by the needs of factual life, the wear of language by mere communication.

"Not understanding, not understanding, until becoming a child."

("The Bronze Face", in ball corps, J. G. Pink)

The truth is not in reality but in poetry. Rosa creates a universe tied to a style. It leverages various resources of the Portuguese language to carry out this creation, in order to overcome the utilitarianism of the language. He builds this magical world by language revitalization, in search of a language again poetized, and the universe of the “simple person”, of the illiterate, has a poetic potentiality.

Read more: Poetic function of language: code innovation

Grande sertão: paths

Grande sertão: paths is the great novel by Guimarães Rosa. This is the long account of Riobaldo, an ex-jagunço who, now aged and removed from his duties, puts himself in prose with a visitor, literate and urban, whose voice does not appear, and who wants to know the Minas Gerais hinterland. Narrated in first person, Riobaldo is the one who tells his story and the trajectory of his thoughts, remaking memories of the paths taken and bringing to light new reminiscences.

way not linear, as in the flow of memory and conversations by the fire, the storyteller tells the story of revenge against Hermogenes, traitorous jagunço, and enters the labyrinth of paths that led him to the jagunagem, to the depths of the backwoods, to little known spaces in Brazil.

Grande sertão: paths it is a unique novel, with a peculiar narrative. [2]

The landscapes through which Riobaldo traveled markedly point to the geographic places corresponding to the states of Minas Gerais, Goiás and Bahia. However, Rosa's sertão, at the same time, is and is not real. It's not just the geographic hinterland, but the projection of the soul: Grande sertão: paths it is the soul of Riobaldo.

That backcountry is the size of the world — there are the local problems, the colonelism, jaguncism, social differences. They are coupled with universal problems. Riobaldo's sertão is the stage of his life and his worries; all the episodes he recounts are permeated with reflections on good and evil, war and peace, joy and sadness, freedom and fear — the paradoxes of which its own history and the history of mankind is composed.

How to name and identify good and evil in the jagunço system, in which violence and the struggle for power prevail? Through Riobaldo's memories, hundreds of characters and information emerge, countless labyrinthine sertanejo speeches, voices of the people before a structure of inheritance colonials that does not resolve itself.

Also central is the love theme, embodied in the character of Diadorim, which interpolates Riobaldo's memories and which also does not resolve itself. Diadorim is a fellow jagunço of Riobaldo, and in the midst of this virile and structurally macho universe, homosexuality is not tolerable. Thus, while it arouses Riobaldo's desire, it also raises the discomfort and non-acceptance of the character with what he feels.

It's the conflict, again, between good and evil, in which Diadorim represents the diabolical, what Riobaldo rejects, and at the same time desires. The outcome of the novel, however, reveals unusual information about Diadorim, which generates even greater reflections on what was and what was not lived.

Read too: The poetic ingenuity of João Cabral de Melo Neto

Awards

• 1937: 1st Poetry Prize of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, for the book Magma
• 1937: Second place in the Humberto de Campos Award, from Livraria José Olympio, for the book Tales
• 1946: Felipe d'Oliveira Society Award, for the book Sagarana
• 1956: Machado de Assis Award, Carmen Dolores Barbosa Award and Paula Brito Award, all for the book Grande sertão: paths
• 1961: Machado de Assis Award, for the body of work
• 1963: Brazilian Pen Club Award, for the book first stories
• 1966: Receipt of the Inconfidência Medal and the Order of Rio Branco

Sentences

"We only know well what we don't understand."
“Boy! God is patience. The opposite is the devil.”
"Wanting the good too strongly, in a uncertain way, may already be if you wanting the bad to begin with."
"Harvesting is common, but weeding is alone."
“Heart grows everywhere. Vige heart like a brook running through hills and valleys, woods and meadows. Heart mixes loves. Everything fits.”
“Mister… look and see: the most important and beautiful thing in the world is this: that people are not always the same, they are not yet finished — but that they are always changing. Tune it in or out of tune. Greater truth.”
"The river doesn't want to go anywhere, it just wants to go deeper."
“Luck is never one, it's two, it's all… Luck is born every morning, and it's old by noon…”
"When the heart is in charge, all time is time!"

Image credit
[1] Luis War / Shutterstock
[2] Company of Letters (Reproduction)

by Luiza Brandino
Literature teacher