João Cabral de Melo Neto, also called poet-engineer, bearing in mind the calculation, cutting and objectivity of his work with verses, he was a writer, diplomat and one of the most important intellectuals of his time. Still little read by the general public, although consecrated immortal by the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the first Brazilian to win the Camões Award, the author developed his own style, very far from the characteristics present in the poetry of his contemporaries of the generation of 45.
Your stone style reverberated a intense and extensive poetic production, which still reserves unpublished. The author's collection at Casa Rui Barbosa revealed around 40 unpublished poems and more than 20 texts in prose, in addition to interviews, gathered for publication in 2020, the centenary year of his birth.
Read too: The engineering of the word of the pre-modernist Euclides da Cunha
Biography of João Cabral de Melo Neto
Born in Recife (PE), on January 6, 1920, João Cabral de Melo Neto spent a good part of his childhood away from the capital, on the family's plantations, in the rural areas of São Lourenço da Mata and Moreno. He returned to Recife at the age of ten, where he remained until 1938, when his family moved to Rio de Janeiro.
The move to the then Brazilian capital still took a few years to be definitive: it was only in 1942 that the author actually established himself in Rio de Janeiro. That same year, published his first book, stone of sleep, volume of poetry well received by critics – with reservations. Antonio Candido, a great name in Brazilian literary criticism, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, at the time a poet already consolidated, they reproach him for the hermetic nature of his words, considered to be inaccessible to the general public.
![Statue in honor of João Cabral de Melo Neto, located in Recife (PE), looks out over the Capibaribe river, so often mentioned in his work. [1]](/f/c6a3b9904c08ea6d2dd21cdbc58f3e10.jpg)
In parallel to literary production, he was an employee of the Administrative Department of the Public Service (DASP) until 1945, when started career in diplomacy. A member of Itamaraty, he lived in several countries, without ever leaving the profession of writer. Much of his work, awarded multiple times, was written abroad. He even assumed the position of Minister of Agriculture during the management of Janio Quadros and João Goulart, until the 1964 military coup, when he resumed diplomatic activities. He returned to live permanently in Brazil only in 1987.
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In addition to his exquisite and extensive work in literature, João Cabral also carried out an important historical-documentary research about the Spanish and Portuguese navigations that led the Europeans to the American continent. Edited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the name of The Archive of the Indies and Brazil: documents for the history of Brazil in the Archive of the Indies in Seville, it is an extensive document of great value to Latin American historians.
He retired as ambassador in 1990. In 1992, he began to suffer from a progressive blindness, which gradually prevented him from reading. practically blind and depressed, died in his apartment in Rio de Janeiro on October 9, 1999.
See too: Clarice Lispector – author of the intimate style
Brazilian Academy of Letters
João Cabral de Melo Neto was elected immortal of the Brazilian Academy of Letters on August 15, 1968, occupying seat number 37, a position previously assumed by Assis Chateaubriand, one of the greatest names in Brazilian journalism and a renowned public figure of his time. João Cabral assumed the post at the ABL on May 9, 1969 and, in his inaugural speech, paid homage to his predecessor.
![Portrait of the poet (left) with journalist friend Félix de Athayde (right). [2]](/f/6ac3e003737899442ef3a6b570f69596.jpg)
Literary characteristics of João Cabral de Melo Neto
Considered hermetic, anti-lyrical, toorational, João Cabral de Melo Neto distanced himself from the literature produced by his contemporaries. A poet par excellence – with the exception of a few scattered prose titles –, he revolutionized the conventional standards of lyricism, developing his own style, in objective and rigorous language.
His poetry initially received influences from the trend. surrealist, to which a proper and rational ordering was mixed, anti-surrealist by definition: to the oneiric images of stone of sleep (1942), his debut book, joined the ordering spirit of the author.
Contrary to most authors of the Generation of 45, João Cabral rejected sentimentality, irrationality or subjective verse, adopting a posture of critical reflection (and also self-reflective and self-critical) and a formal rigor that is unique in Brazilian literature. His poetry is an exercise in language, based on intense work with words and in a permanent state of tension.
In 1950, with the publication the dog without feathers, social themes started to appear in his compositions. Violence, exclusion and misery they are approached exhaustively and deeply by the author, always in an objective and reflective way, inquiring about the human condition and the dehumanizing factor of the exploratory logic of money. THE stone is a figure of speech constantly explored in his verses, evoking the harshness of the raw and overwhelming reality captured by his attentive, analytical eyes.
The characteristics of the author's work are:
- Objectivity;
- Counterlyricism and departure from subjective themes;
- Formal rigor;
- Poetry metalinguistics;
- Vocabulary economics;
- Image evocation;
- Reflective and critical poetry;
- Presence of social themes.
Main works by João Cabral de Melo Neto
- stone of sleep (1942);
- The engineer (1945);
- composition psychology (1947);
- The Featherless Dog (1950);
- The river (1954);
- Death and Severe Life (1955);
- two waters (1956);
- Poetry and composition (1956) [prose];
- From the modern function of poetry (1957) [prose];
- Education through Stone (1966);
- Friar's Record (1984);
- first poems (1990);
- Education through Stone and After (1997).
Death and Severe Life
First published in 1955, Severina Death and Life, Pernambucano Christmas é the best known work by João Cabral de Melo Neto. It received adaptations for the theater and for the cinema and was also set to music, which probably increased its dissemination to the general public. More recently, it also received a comic book adaptation.
The scope of the work is also due to a change in style: in Death and Severe Life, the poet assumes a less hermetic language (difficult to understand) – but no less polished for that.
It is a long dramatic poem centered on the life of Severino, a retreatant from the Northeastern Agreste that departs towards the coast, encountering death at every stop: the dead, gravediggers and funerals multiply in each of the scenes, as well as hunger, dryness of the land, hardness, despair, lack of exit and lack of solution.
Severino is the metaphor of the marginalized; his journey, an allegory of the life of the retreatant who sets out in search of his own survival. the work is full of speech figures, like that of the Capibaribe river, which represents the migrant's own course of life – and according to its dry bed, Severino is terrified that the tenuous thread of his miserable survival will be broken. Critical and stony, it is a raw reading of the Brazilian social situation, which goes beyond geographical reasons – as the precarious life haunts Severino, although the walk changes the surrounding landscape.
Structured into eighteen scenes (or "parts" or "frames"), most of the verses of Death and Severe Life é written in larger rounds (verses of seven syllables), referring to the popular and medieval culture (hence the subtitle “auto”). The hard and dry language, which evokes the landscape of the sertão, is joined by the alliteration and assonances that bring great musicality to the verses.
See too: Anguish: novel by Graciliano Ramos
João Cabral de Melo Neto Awards
- 1954 – José de Anchieta Award
- 1955 – Olavo Bilac Award
- 1958 – Best author (Student Theater Festival, Recife)
- 1966 – Jabuti Award
- 1966 – National Book Institute Award
- 1974 – Grand Prize of the São Paulo Association of Art Critics
- 1984 – Golden Dolphin Award from the State of Rio de Janeiro
- 1984 – Recife Mill Award
- 1987 – Brazilian Union of Writers Award
- 1988 – Nestlé Literature Biennial Prize
- 1988 – Lily de Carvalho Award
- 1990 – Creators of Culture Award (City Hall of Recife)
- 1990 – Camões Award
- 1990 – Grand Cross of the Order of Judiciary and Labor Merits
- 1991 – Pedro Nava Award
- 1992 – Home of the Americas Award
- 1992 – Neustadt International Prize for Literature
- 1992 – Grand Cross of the Order of Elizabeth
- 1993 – Jabuti Award
Phrases by João Cabral de Melo Neto
“Writing is being on the edge of oneself.”
"A rooster alone does not weave a morning."
"Love ate up my name, my identity, my portrait."
“That's why the sertanejo speaks little: the stone words ulcerate the mouth and in the stone language they speak painfully; the native of this language speaks by force.”
"There is no umbrella against the weather, river flowing under the house, current carrying the days, hair."
"This cave you are in, with measured palms, is the land you wanted to see divided."
Image credits
[1] victorian junior/Shutterstock
[2] John of Athayde /commons
by Luiza Brandino
Literature teacher
