Rex P Nielson and Dr. George Handley, Humanities, Classics and Comparative Literature

In an essay entitled “Quantity and Quality” written in 1990, Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz bespeaks the importance of poetry in our contemporary society. He contends that during classical times poetry provided an ethical code that significantly influenced the organization of society and government. Greek citizens memorized lines of Homer, Hebrew leaders quoted passages from the Torah and the Psalms, Roman Senators learned verse from the Aeneid, and Chinese emperors recited poems from the Shih Ching. “Our classics, apart from their being examples of formal perfection and sources of spiritual pleasure, were teachers of political wisdom for two millennia” (Paz 105). The ethics found in poetry, Paz argues, powerfully influenced societal formation and served as a mediating factor that helped to establish the proper relationships between man and his universe. But Paz laments that in many ways modern society has abandoned the ethics of poetry and has fallen out of balance.

The Brazilian Modernist movement of the early twentieth century was just such a period out of balance, full of contradictions and troubling ironies. During the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, Brazilian landscape and culture were dramatically altered by rapid industrialization and pollution. Significant urban growth resulted in many societal problems, similar to those faced by other industrial cities such as Manchester, England and Chicago, Illinois. These problems included class stratification, poverty, mass immigration and population growth, infringements on workers’ rights and unions, unequal government representation, a precarious relationship between the expanding city and the outlying farming areas, health issues, and pollution. Brazilian intellectuals struggled to identify themselves and their national identity in terms of the difficult social issues they faced. Furthermore, these issues were compounded by Brazil’s complex cultural heritage—an amalgam of European, African, and Native American traditions.

During this period Mário de Andrade, a professor of musicology and folklore in São Paulo, assumed a leading role in developing a new modern vocabulary, a new poetic voice, to engage the changes occurring within Brazil. A poet, painter, and critic, Andrade was known as the papa [pope] of the Brazilian Modernist movement. His first volume of poetry, Paulicéia Desvairada [The Hallucinated City] broke with the rigid Parnassian forms valued during the nineteenth century, to express in his view a more authentic, modern, and ironic Brazilian reality.

Andrade was a sincere and dedicated poet who struggled to understand and reconcile the ironies of Brazilian modern life: How does a colonized nation express its national identity in the language of the colonizer? How does the modern Brazilian reconcile his New World and Old World histories? How does one reconcile the richness of the Brazilian landscape with the industrialization, modernization, and pollution of a metropolitan landscape like that of São Paulo? How does the poet celebrate the beauty and uniqueness of the Brazilian people without privileging them above other peoples? How does the poet celebrate national pride and identity while at the same time rejoicing in the union and brotherhood of all humanity? Throughout his career, Mário de Andrade probed these questions with fervor and sensitivity.

In my research I examine and translate Andrade’s monumental poem A Meditação Sobre o Tietê [Meditation over the River Tietê], in which Andrade searches for an ethic that will reconcile the disturbing ironies of modernity. Andrade engages in the poem the River Tietê, one of the principal rivers of the city and municipality of São Paulo. Andrade sees the river as a troubling, ironic symbol that represents not only Brazil’s rich natural heritage but also Brazil’s common man, while foreshadowing a troubled future.

Through his meditation, Andrade discovers a radical ethic of love that can potentially reestablish balance and harmony not only between the poet and the river, man and nature, but also among all mankind and all living things. As Andrade writes the meditation, he unconsciously engages, lives, and embodies the ethic he ultimately discovers. When he does recognize it, he strives to teach it, explain it, and declare it to others, but his efforts are in vain as he realizes that the ethic he has discovered can only be experienced and learned individually. At this point the poet’s voice breaks off, and the poem concludes.

What remains in the end is the poem. The poem—poetry not the poet—stands as the lone mediating power that can reveal to the open and willing reader Andrade’s redeeming ethic of love. Poetry remains as the mediator that can reestablish the proper relationships in a world out of balance.