On São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos
São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos, translated from the Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan.
NYRB, 2020. $15.95
Although judging the past by the standards of the present is something academics used to regard as a cardinal error of historical scholarship, the faux-populist identitarian Left has made something of a sport of it. Recent demands made by a committee of San Francisco education activists to rename more than forty schools for the perceived moral failings of their namesakes — including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Dianne Feinstein — not only exemplify the tendency, but demonstrate the degree of penetration that this sort of ahistorical moralism has achieved in popular consciousness.
In the literary field, a related trend of moralizing political activism has gained currency. First came the detective work of sensitivity readers, justified as necessary for eliminating “problematic or downright harmful” representations — rhetoric typically associated with student demands for trigger warnings on college syllabi, but which has, by now, infested any organization containing a critical mass of identitarian “progressives.” More recently, dreary broadsides calling for literature to perform a specific sort of social or political work have opened a new front in the identitarian campaign to force corporate publishers to narrow their lists to exclude work that offends the imagined reader, always presumed to be a person with liberal-progressive political affinities and alert to the struggles of various marginalized populations. Writing in Harper’s, Garth Greenwell bemoans this insistence for literature to be “relevant” — a word whose meaning, he intuits, has less to do with aesthetics than with social and political criteria for acceptability — a demand that has resulted in what Lauren Oyler calls “the moral obviousness of most contemporary fiction.” In this era of High Didacticism, humor is hard to come by, and satire often deemed unsafe to print.
Fortunately, the deadening moralism of “progressive” orthodoxy in corporate media does not enjoy universal reign, and special exemptions are sometimes granted to dead foreign writers with left-wing cred. And so it was that a new translation of Graciliano Ramos’s 1934 novel São Bernardo found its way into print last year. The novel is at once a merciless satire of social class in postcolonial Brazil, and a sensitivity reader’s worst nightmare.
Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, CA. NBC.
São Bernardo is a Horatio Alger story, Brazilian style. Unlike Alger’s nineteenth-century American tales of up-by-the-bootstraps self-reliance and entrepreneurial ingenuity, São Bernardo narrates the life and deeds of a Brazilian miscreant: Paulo Honório is fifty years old, weighs 89 kilos, and has “bushy gray eyebrows” and a “whiskery red face that have brought me quite a bit of respect.” He is also an incorrigible bigot who brags about sexually assaulting the women who strike his fancy and knifing or bullwhipping the men who get in his way. Styled as Paulo Honório’s memoirs and titled after his farming estate in the rural northeastern Brazilian state of Alagoas, the novel is anything but politically correct.
Paulo Honório is the literary personification of a very Brazilian archetype: he is a malandro, a devious and swindling lowlife whose lack of scruples makes him dangerous to anyone who crosses his path. The malandro isn’t necessarily poor, but is often depicted as a man on the make — usually at the expense of the hapless and naïve. Above all, the malandro is clever. Paulo Honório answers to this description: he is an orphan who never knew his parents, drifts through a childhood of vagrancy, and ends up working as a field hand at São Bernardo. He doesn’t remember much of his early years: “If I tried to tell you about my childhood,” he admits, “I’d have to lie.” A knife fight over a woman lands him in jail, “where I learned to read with Joaquim the shoemaker, who had one of those tiny Bibles, the Protestant kind.”
These privations, in our antihero’s mind, entitle him to whatever he can swindle or steal. After his release from jail, Paulo spends a few years scraping by as a grifter and ne’er-do-well: “I went hungry and thirsty, slept in the dry sand of riverbeds, fought people who only spoke in shouts, and sealed commercial transactions with loaded guns.” He saves his money and teaches himself math, “so as not to be robbed any more than suited me.” Newly literate in Portuguese and arithmetic, and possessing a small amount of capital, Paulo Honório puts his talents to work, becoming a loan shark of entrepreneurial aspiration and dubious reputation.
Avarice and ambition lead him back to his hometown, where his victims’ vices are familiar and therefore easier to exploit. São Bernardo’s master has died, and the heir to the property, Luís Padilha, has let the estate fall into ruin while he accumulates debts at the baccarat table. Before long, Paulo has used his meagre savings to extend a series of predatory loans to Padilha, whose bankruptcy results in a property transfer that makes the onetime orphan a wealthy landowner. Becoming a man of property does not alter Paulo’s character: deciding whether or not to encroach on a neighbor’s land comes down to the malandro’s brutal math: “I quickly counted his mestiços and counted mine.”
Through hard work and the “skullduggery” of his lawyer, João Nogueira, Paulo restores and enlarges São Bernardo. His progress inspires a new objective: “One day, I woke up thinking about marriage — an idea that came to me without a single skirt swishing by.” Paulo realizes he requires an heir. After briefly considering the daughter of his neighbor Sr. Magalhães — a “dish,” but caked in makeup and burdened with a lisp — he settles instead upon a prettier, younger girl named Madalena, who happens to be visiting Magalhães with her aunt, Dona Glória. From this chance encounter and Paulo’s dogged determination, a marriage is eventually made. The match is not propitious, and the marriage is visited, in turn, by quarreling, rancor, misery, and death.
As far as plot is concerned, this is a boring novel: the narrative turns out to be a conventional story of rags-to-riches-to-hubris-begetting-misery. As such, it depends on familiar clichés. Paulo’s narrative could be a cautionary tale, were it not for the caustic and irreverent tone in which he narrates its events. Much of the novel’s humor derives from his tactless and blunt way of describing his companions: “They don’t understand each other,” Paulo writes of Padilha and Casimiro Lopes, his estate overseer and general factotum: “Padilha, a skinny bourgeois, talks nonstop and reveres violent actions; Casimiro Lopes is lame, with a meager vocabulary…. He maybe knows a half a dozen words at most.”
The driving irony of the plot concerns Paulo Honório’s iconoclastic adherence to social norms of rural Brazilian postcolonial society, where possession is nine-tenths of the law: Paulo has seized his property and his position in society by any devious means necessary, and tries to force society to live up to its contract by bending to the will of a propertied man. Society then has its revenge by denying him any real satisfaction: São Bernardo’s mestiço laborers are just as “shifty” as they were under the estate’s previous master, and Madalena only costs him money and grief.
Paulo’s self-parody is complemented by the cast of characters who surround him, each of whom satirizes another familiar archetype of the rural Latin American postcolony: the radical priest, the lugubrious clerk, the mestiço overseer, the troublemaking local newspaper editor, the dissipated heir, the virtuous bride, and the fastidious spinster. Ramos is at his best in scenes where these caricatures interact: each is ridiculous in his own way, and Ramos deftly arranges their quarrels to highlight their absurdities, as well as the contradictions of Brazilian rural society. The text also contains a good deal of self-aware, metafictional commentary: in the Brazilian tradition inaugurated by Machado de Assis, himself an admirer of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Paulo Honório explains that his accounts of events and their protagonists will be informal and unfiltered because his lawyer, the priest, and the editor have all refused to help him ghostwrite his memoirs.
Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, "O chicote do diabinho": Estudo de figurino para o balé "Carnaval das Crianças Brasileiras " de Villa-Lobos, 1920. Google Arts and Culture.
Finding a Fortune by Horatio Alger Jr., 1904. AbeBooks.
The most amusing of the supporting characters is Luís Padilha, who quickly discovers political radicalism after losing São Bernardo to his gambling addiction. “After I had relieved him of the ranch,” Paulo Honório explains with contempt, “he’d gotten bloodthirsty ideas and preached, under his breath, the extermination of the bourgeois.” This was a rich tidbit indeed, as I read São Bernardo during 2020’s summer of unrest, between bouts of listless scrolling on Twitter, where today’s equivalent to the postcolonial scions of the landed gentry — the armchair academic Marxists, the trust-funded DSA activists, the communist son of a corporate lawyer — never risk our ignorance of their fashionable radicalism.
Against the midyear backdrop of honest outrage, earnest protest, anarchist chic, and the craven moralism of corporate BLM tweets, São Bernardo read like samizdat. Paulo’s flagrant sexism, for example, is meant to be funny — and it is. Ramos achieves his ingenious satire of the Brazilian landowning class by making his antihero a bigoted, avaricious arriviste who is forever consternated by the enmity and disloyalty of his subordinates, when of course he should expect nothing else. Therein lies the pleasure of the text: Paulo Honório defies any social convention that does not suit him: he is brutish, brash, and completely unconcerned with what anyone thinks of his behaviors. And the reader is invited to laugh at him, mainly for being such a horrible person.
Reading São Bernardo last summer, I wondered whether it was possible for a contemporary writer to get away with this sort of satire in an American publishing industry held captive by the politics of sensitivity and their aesthetics of earnest sentimentality. It seems to me that satire, like translation, must increasingly depend on the indie presses. But Ramos is also dead and safely canonized as a leftist jailed for his Marxist beliefs — and as a writer hailing from the Brazilian hinterland, he is somewhat immune to lazy accusations of various “-isms” launched by people who require political compatibility with the authors they read, or who lack a nuanced appreciation of satire.
The translator and the publisher deserve commendation in this regard: they have not shied away from Paulo’s assault on good taste. This is Padma Viswanathan’s first book-length translation, and she could not have assigned herself a more difficult task. The original Portuguese is stuffed with regional slang from a time when widespread illiteracy in Brazil led to highly differentiated regional dialects. Faced with this dilemma, Viswanathan chose to translate these idioms literally. Sometimes, this yields acceptable results: “I’ll show you how many logs it takes to make a canoe” is a turn of phrase whose meaning is easily intuited. Elsewhere the literal translations fall flat: “Now let’s see who’s got clothes in the rucksack” is clearly a challenge to an adversary’s mettle, but it reads like what it is: a made-up phrase that nobody would ever use in English, no matter how folksy or old-fashioned their diction. In a similar vein, “I tweaked the stern of her ass” is not only a mixed metaphor; it is a dysfunctional one. Lest I be suspected of cherry-picking examples, these three sentences appear on two adjacent pages. The book is jammed with similarly obscure idioms.
To ward off critique and to assist the perplexed reader, Viswanathan explains her method in a translator’s afterword. “The argot is so specific to the book’s region and epoch,” she writes, “that there is a published guide to interpreting expressions found in this novel.” She also observes that Paulo Honório is a character who comes to his literacy later in life; the abundance of regional metaphors opaque to the reader was part of Ramos’s intentional design to make him lifelike to his contemporaries, and she has translated them in ways that retain their illegibility. This, while logical, still seems a bit cheap, even as it fetishizes the source text to the point of near sacred inviolability. A translation is, by definition, an interpretation, and there were other options. Recondite regionalisms from, say, somewhere in the Deep South might have offered a more comprehensible and pleasing solution to the problem.
Still, we must be grateful to Viswanathan, and to the NYRB Classics, for daring this new translation: the work of the translator is already so lonely, so underpaid, and so unappreciated that wrestling with choices like these is not exactly a task anyone undertakes in anticipation of rich reward. Knowing that major works written in minor languages remain untranslated and unread merely because the Big Five publishers correctly judge the American reading public to be too small-minded to care for novels in translation means that the translator must derive intrinsic satisfaction from her labors of love. For the most part, Viswanathan nails the biting satire of São Bernardo because she was masochistic enough to undertake it at all.
