A Brazilian Poet's Private War with Germany

Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna Brazilian poetry is not as well known in the U.S. as, say, Brazilian music, Brazilian carnaval, Brazilian movies and TV, Brazilian movie actors and actresses, and Brazilian novelists like Jorge Amado. One writer who deserves to be better known is Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna, a major poet of Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century. His A Catedral de ColÙnia, the poem I've selected for a brief reading, represents the trail-blazing trend of his recent poetry. Published in 1985, it is in my view, a poetic tour de force, focusing on the Cathedral at Cologne , and the Germans, including their wars, but at the same time incorporating present-day Brazil , and its social problems, including religion. Not only epic but also lyric, the poem says much about the inner life of the poet himself.

Who is Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna? A man just turned sixty, a leader in cultural life and particularly well known as a poet because of his belief that the writer has an obligation to reach as wide a public as possible and he has done so. In the mid-1980s, the Jornal do Brasil invited him to succeed to the post of poet-critic then held by the reknowned Carlos Drummond de Andrade. There Affonso published dozens of his satirically aimed poems. He even wrote poems during actual Brazilian soccer games while millions of TV viewers looked over his shoulder. His interests range wide; he is the author of over 20 books including poetry, literary criticism, social and political commentary, music and art criticism, and especially the short pieces in the press on the passing scene that Brazilians call "cronicas".

A Catedral de Colonia was published in 1985, but much of it was written in 1978, while Affonso was lecturing at the University of Cologne. 1978 is important because, that same year, the poet published his first "poema longo", A Grande fala do Ìndio guarani: perdido na historia e outras derrotas (The great speech of the Guarani Indian: lost to history and other defeats). Affonso has called these two poems "twins" (poemas geminados). In O Indio, he vents anger against Latin American dictators, in A Catedral, against the Germans--his private war. Let me make clear, that to an important degree, his war with Germany is a metaphor for his war with others, including Brazilians, and not least with himself. Two of the cantos are titled "A Guerra alheia" (my war with others) and "Guerras religiosas" (religious wars)

Born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Grais, in 1937, Affonso emerged there as a poet in the midst of the so-called "second vanguardism"--an innovative movement that built upon the first vanguardism, or as it is called in Brazil, Modernismo, associated with the Semana de Arte Moderna, in 1922. Affonso was early cast as a vanguardist, but has, almost since the first moment, challenged the concept of vanguardism and has been at war with his fellow poets of the 1950s and 1960s, especially with the "concretista" or "concrete" poets of Sao Paulo. His polemics with them have been bitter--he has called them "castradores, autoritarios", even "fascistas," a charge based on the fact that the U.S. poet Ezra Pound was one of the models for the São Paulo "concretistas". Affonso calls the word "vanguard" a "dated" term. He says he is both "aquÈm e alÈm do vanguardismo" (both this side of, and beyond, vanguardism). Affonso prefers to be called a "post-vanguardist." More on this point later.

Sant'Anna conceives of his poem as a structure in which the twelve cantos are pillars of this "mountain of stone," the tallest cathedral facade in the world. Curiously, the Cathedral of Cologne is a metaphor both for his poem and for himself. Each canto, each verse, each trope or image is a "pedra." Stones are a constant poetic motif. For him the cathedral is "uma escura montanha/de pedra, palavra e espanto. . ."È a cachoeira de rezas/ o evangelho de pedras" -- the first canto itself is called "Pedra fundamental." Using a familiar vanguardist device, the poem's typographical arrangement can suggest the cathedral's form: for example:

E ela ali/ sedutora/ derrotada/ vencedora/ esfinge/ devoradora/ branca/ de neve/ e sangue/ aliciando/ anies/ poetas/ amantes/ oraÁies/ exÈrcitos/ de anjos/ jovens/ e demÙnios/ velhos/ / /a defendÍ-la/ a defender-nos/ a defender-me/ / / atroz-ateu/cristo-judeu/ preto-plebeu/ / / que esta catedral È o corpo vivo da Historia/ e a historia do proprio Eu. [end of ch. 4]

No doubt this is an exercise in Freudian "free association" but it contains many of the poem's "pedras" or building stones.

Canto five, "Um Õndio na catedral," offers something new in dramatic structure: The poet enters as an Indian, one of the tourists, "este anÙnimo franzino latino americano" - and through him, Brazil will increasingly share the center of attention, with Germany . Upon the arrival of the Indian we are again reminded of Affonso's other important poem of 1978, A Grande fala do Ìndio guarani. There, as here, the Indian is one of Affonso's alter egos, who sometimes serve as narrators. The "great speech" in the longer poem refers to an Indian tribe, the Mbya-guaranÌ of Paraguay , whose shamans deliver prophetic "speeches" in a kind of gibberish, or for Affonso, a kind of "secret" poetry. He identified personally wth the shamans,who help to narrate his "great speech. " Just as he was to embrace European history in A Catedral de Colonia, he would in the earlier poem survey Latin American history from the Popul vuh to the contemporary history of the continent's dictators. Actually, the first poem is his "war" against the dictators. These were symbolized by Felipe II of Spain . Brazil is never specifically mentioned, in that poem. In all probability because in 1978 Brazil was still a dictatorship (albeit a somewhat gentler one than, say, Argentina ). Certainly Affonso had reason to fear the "censors' scissors" or who knows, even exile?

There was no impediment now to his lobbing poetic granades/ at the German war-makers. In Canto 6 Sant'Anna shoots his first anti-German bolt at the great philosphers: Nietsche, Kant, Heidegger, Schopenhauer. Brash of this "Ìndio," very "innovative," we might add. He would "like to see them do their thinking in the backlands of Brazil-- "ali no agreste." (143), "ali/ onde o homem não tem essencia,/ só fome, e aparência È a carência/ do próprio ser." (There where man has no essence, just hunger, and appearance is the disappearance of one's own being. ) The poet implies that most of the ideas of these thinkers would have had little relevance, given the realities of Northeast Brazil . And he aims another bolt at the sixteenth-century German reformer Martin Luther: "Lutero não reforma mais os seus mourões/nem corta mato e o cupim/ do derreado castelo." (144) That is, Luther has neglected his "ruined castle" of Protestantism-- in Brazil . Here is a personal note that Affonso develops later.

"Minha Guerra Alheia" (My War with Others), canto 7, is the longest of all; it begins with the poet's childhood remembrances of the efforts Brazil made on behalf of the Allies in World War II, and that he himself made as a child in Juiz de Fora - "meu esforço de guerra," he calls it. Affonso remarks that "não é de hoje essa mania de meter-me/ em guerra alheia "(149). As a militant and independent critic of both literature and society, Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna seems always to have been mixed up "in wars with others." Angrily he takes up arms, now, in this war: "Levanto parede e texto/com a pedra de meus poemas/ e a minha infância na m„o" (147)--a pun on the word "pedra" as either building-stone or projectile. Actually in Germany , in 1978, he says, "esses garotos alem„es n„o parecem se lembrar de Hitler/ nem da Guerra de Cem Anos." (147): The young Germans do not care to remember. Affonso exclaims,

"Ah, meu Deus! como È difÌcil viver na Europa!". . . Seis séculos levaram os alemães na sua construção/ e o sÈtimo/ao invés de descansar/ iniciaram as guerras/ de autodestruição/ Essa catedral foi erguida para lembrar/ o que não restou de pé. Esta catedral foi salva/para lembrar/ --o que deve e pode ficar de pé." (149)

Of all the buildings in Cologne , the Allied Air Forces during World War II spared only the Cologne Cathedral--a fact of great meaning for the poet.

In canto 9, Affonso harks back to his childhood again, to the Lutheran origins of his own faith and to his Protestant church in Minas--a rarity in Brazil . He begins a series of irregular verses with the refrain "Agora entendo...agora entendo. . . " From the Germans in Cologne he, a Brazilian of European, Indian, and African extraction, is coming to understand better his Lutheran forebears. Thanks to the Cathedral of Cologne he understands more about his own identity, his suffering as a child--a Methodist-- in a nearly all-Catholic town: However,

"Nada, nada me livra/ das cenas de humilhação/que o menino metodista/ sofria todos os dias/ e noites/ de São Bartolomeu. . ."(163) In Canto. XI, "Carnaval em Colónia"--a cast of characters from the Brazilian carnaval dance and sing with the German funmakers. Here is a perfect example of Affonso's understanding of Bakhtin's "carnavalization theory" and (to me) the best--and the most light-hearted--canto in this long poem.

Time restraints have meant that I have had to skip over many of the riches of the poem. Suffice it to say that at the end (canto. 12 "A Catedral Inconclusa," [The Unfinished Cathedral], the poet begins to be reconciled with the Germans and with himself, though he is not sure how or why; and he is still half at war, half at peace, with himself and others :

"começo a compreender. O quê?/ N„o sei./ Começo a dissipar o porquê" (176) . . . Por isto, reconheÁo/que a Catedral de ColÙnia/ È o recomeÁo da pedra,/ È a tregua, é a guerra,/ È o texto do poeta/ e pedra que me arquiteta. . . .mais que pedra È a cinza,/ È a fÍnix renascida,/ o nosso eterno retorno,/o meu tardÌo começo/ a vida dentro da morte/ e a morte gerando a vida."

The poet has mixed feelings. He leaves his cathedral unfinished, as was historically the case at Cologne, until the mid-XIXth century. //The reconstruction of his life is not complete. But he is beginning to understand, not only himself but others. All his life a critic and a gadfly, he cannot suddenly embrace the targets of his satire, but he is beginning to understand the "why" (o porquÍ). He is still wary. History is "our eternal return. " He affirms a cycle of rebirth: No posso/ cortar das coisas/ seu normal renascimento (176: Let me translate the quoted passage into English: The Cathedral of Cologne, that is, this poem

"is ashes/,
the reborn Phoenix /
our eternal return/
my late beginning/
life at the heart of death,/
and death pulsating with life."

As a concluding hypothesis, let me say that A Catedral de Colonia defines for us what he means by the vague term "post-vanguardist". Indeed, Affonso himself has said that if people use the term "post" it's because it thus far has no accepted definition. Are these cathedral spires beckoning to a new generation of poets seeking to break out of their vanguardist fixation? Certainly, it is a challenging poem, daring in its notion that a late-XXth century poet could combine the histories of Europe and of Brazil , especially in certain social, political, and religious aspects. Its "stone" structure is indeed strange, as are the poet's flights of imagination, especially in interleaving German historical figures with those of the Brazilian carnaval. The poem is autobiographical, subjective, inward-looking, powerful in its projection of feeling, demonstrating, as Affonso believes, that subjectivism has been reborn. I am unable to say if the poem will mark a new trail in Brazilian poetry, in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, we begin to grasp what Romano de Sant'Anna means by stopping "this side of, and at the same time, going beyond" vanguardism. His trajectory, at least, is clear.

Fred Ellison