Joćo Cabral

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, October 23, 1999

João Cabral, 79, Unflinchingly Visual Poet

By LARRY ROHTER

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- João Cabral de Melo Neto, one of the century's
most distinguished and influential poets in the Portuguese language, died
here on Oct. 9 after a long illness. He was 79.

In a career that spanned more than 50 years and inspired two generations of
younger Brazilian writers, Cabral earned a reputation as a cerebral, even
difficult writer who in collections like "The Dog Without Feathers" and
"Museum of Everything" demonstrated an unflinching, cinematic eye but
showed little patience with romanticism or sentimentality. "To me, poetry
is something that is built, like a house," he once said.

Cabral's poetry never became widely known in the English-speaking world,
though the Wesleyan Press published an anthology, "Selected Poetry,
1937-1990," in 1995. But he had many admirers among his American
colleagues, including W.S. Merwin, who translated several of his poems, and
Elizabeth Bishop, who lived in Brazil for many years and came to know him
and his work well.

In "An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry," which she edited
with Emanuel Brasil, Ms. Bishop described Cabral as Brazil's "most
important poet of the postwar generation." His "work displays the highest
development and the greatest coherency of style of any Brazilian poet," she
wrote, characterized by "striking visual imagery and an insistent use of
concrete, tactile nouns."

Among his countrymen, Cabral's most popular work was undoubtedly "The Death
and Life of Severino," which describes the desolate existence of a peasant
from the poor northeastern region where Cabral himself was born and raised.
Ms. Bishop rendered one moving passage into English this way:

We are exactly alike: exactly the same big head
That's hard to balance properly,
The same swollen belly on the same skinny legs,
Alike because the blood we use has little color.
And if we Severinos are all the same in life,
We die the same death, the same Severino death.

Cabral liked to say that "The Death and Life of Severino" was one of his
weaker works because it was written in a hurry, at the request of a
producer seeking a text for a Christmas festival in 1954. But millions of
Brazilians can recite at least some of the verses of the poem, which was
also transformed into a play, put to music by the composer Chico Buarque de
Hollanda, filmed in 1977 and, more recently, made into a television drama.

"We have no other work that reaches these heights," the actor Paulo Autran,
who performed in an early theater version, said after Cabral's death. "It
is of a social, literary and poetic content that no other author has ever
reached. It is a terrible social indictment, but at the same time, poetry
of the highest level."

Cabral was born on Jan. 9, 1920, into a distinguished family in the city of
Recife: his cousins included Manuel Bandeira, also a well-known poet, and
the sociologist Gilberto Freyre. He moved to Rio de Janeiro, then the
nation's capital, in 1940 and published his first collection of poems,
"Stone of Slumber," at his own expense in 1942.

Like many Latin American intellectuals of his generation, Cabral was unable
to earn a living from his writings, which included occasional essays as
well as a score of collections of poems. Instead he entered the Brazilian
diplomatic service in 1945, serving in posts on four continents until his
retirement in 1990.

As a young vice consul stationed in Barcelona in the late 1940's, Cabral
became a friend of the Catalan painter Joan Miro. The two collaborated on a
book about the artist, now a much-valued collector's item in the
Ibero-American world, with Cabral supplying the text and Miro contributing
whimsical engravings.

In 1952, while serving in London, Cabral was summoned back to Brazil on
suspicion of communist sympathies and suspended from duty. But a supreme
court ruling two years later restored him to the civil service, and he
eventually rose to the rank of ambassador, serving in Senegal, Ecuador and
Honduras.

A complete edition of Cabral's poems was published here in 1994. But in
recent years he had become nearly blind and had stopped writing,
complaining that "I cannot separate my poetry from visual perception."

Cabral's first wife, Stella, died in 1986. He is survived by his wife, the
poet Marly de Oliveira; five children from his first marriage, Rodrigo,
Luiz, Isabel, Inez and João, and two stepdaughters, Monica and Patricia.


Louis Proyect
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