Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

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Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis [ ʒoaˈkĩ maˈɾiɐ maˈʃadu dʒi aˈsis ] (born June 21, 1839 in Rio de Janeiro ; † September 29, 1908 ibid) was a Brazilian author of novels, short stories and poems. He is the most important figure in Brazilian literature and had a great influence on Brazilian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Life

Of Portuguese and African descent, Machado de Assis was born in poor conditions in Rio de Janeiro . His father, Francisco José Machado de Assis , was a worker. He lost his mother, Leopoldina Machado de Assis , very early.

The Morro do Livramento : The arrow at the top right shows the house where Machado was probably born and where he spent his childhood

He grew up in the Livramento district of Rio de Janeiro. As a poor mulatto ( mulato : derogatory from mulo , mule) he did not have the means for a regular education and therefore learned where and when he could. Thanks to his stepmother, who made candles in a girls' school, he was able to attend classes there. At night he learned French from an immigrant baker.

At the age of 15 he published his first poem, Ela (Sie). It appeared in the Marmota Fluminense newspaper on January 12, 1855. The following year he began training as a typesetter in the state printing workshops. Later he also worked there as a proofreader. As early as 1859 he began to write as a journalist for Correio Mercantil , and in 1860 for Diário do Rio de Janeiro .

In 1869 he married the five years older Portuguese Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais, the sister of his friend, whose newspaper he also worked for, but who had died three months earlier. His educated wife introduced him to the classics of Portuguese and English.

While Machado relied on the rising Liberal Party, he was to his surprise supported by the multilingual and learned Emperor Dom Pedro II , who employed him in 1867 as a manager in the government gazette and made him Knight of the Order of Roses in 1888 .

From 1872 he worked as the first secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce and Public Works. In 1889 he was appointed director of commerce in that ministry. Nevertheless, he continued to work on his extensive work.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

He worked with his friends José Veríssimo and Lúcio de Mendonça for the magazine Revista Brasileira . It was in this intellectual group that the idea of ​​creating the Brazilian Academy of Literature was born, founded in 1879 and named its first president, Machado de Assis.

Throughout his life he wrote in all literary genres. His early works are classical, romantic poems and novels. From the 1880s onwards, his work cannot be assigned to any genre. The characters in his novels express his belief that you can't get ahead simply by following the rules of the game. Many of these characters win only to lose tomorrow.

Autobiographical traits are very difficult to find in his works; he believed that leaving things out could make an interesting book. This is intended to stimulate the reader's imagination. Little is known about the personal life of the most important figure in Brazilian literature, who always had to fight his epilepsy and stuttering .

Position of the work in Brazilian literature

Machado de Assis is the classic of early Brazilian modernism. He wrote 9 novels and 226 contos (German equivalent for example: novels , stories, but also legends , myths ). At first he made concessions to the romantic zeitgeist, but in the 1870s his tone became more realistic and skeptical, and later he tended towards literary impressionism. Until around 1880 he brought literature to the height of European modernity.

With Machado, doubt finds its way into Brazilian literature; He also breaks with the unrestricted patriotism of the white elite, exemplified by the work of the romantic Gonçalves de Magalhães (1811–1882). The war against Paraguay 1864–1870 - although it ended victoriously - left a trauma, the empire perished in 1889 from its dysfunctionalities and the resistance of the nationalist urban elite against the "Portuguese" emperor, but the new realities came with the white landowners in the country, which owed their wealth to the labor of slaves. Machado de Assis shows the repression and hypocrisy underlying the nostalgia of the haves. In his novel Dom Casmurro , the hero Bento exemplifies the Brazilians who cannot come to terms with the new realities. He encounters the problem of serfdom with the subtle irony that characterizes it. Again and again he steps out of the narrative and addresses the reader directly. Subsequently, literary criticism has mainly discussed whether his work can still be described as realistic or even as anti-realistic. However, his stylistic innovations lift him out of the realism of the 19th century, while at the same time creating a realistic representation of Brazilian society.

Works

Volumes of poetry

  • Crisalidas. 1865.
  • Falenas. 1870.
  • Americanas. 1875.
  • Ocidentais. 1880.
  • Poesias completas. 1901.

Novels

Volumes of stories

  • Contos fluminenses . 1870
  • Histórias da Meia-Noite. 1873.
  • Papéis Avulsos. 1882.
  • Histórias sem data. 1884.
  • Várias Histórias. 1896.
  • Páginas Recolhidas. 1899.
  • Relíquias da Casa Velha. 1906.
  • The secret reason: Stories , From the Brazilian Portuguese and with an afterword by Curt Meyer-Clason , Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn 1996, series Die Other Bibliothek , ISBN 978-3-8218-4142-7 .
  • The Babylonian Dictionary , Translated from the Brazilian by Marianne Gareis and Melanie P. Strasser. With an afterword by Manfred Pfister, Munich: Manesse Verlag 2018, Manesse Library series , ISBN 978-3-7175-2422-9 .

Dramas

  • Hoje avental, amanhã luva. 1860.
  • Queda que as mulheres têm para os tolos. 1861.
  • Desencantos. 1861.
  • O caminho da porta. 1863.
  • O protocolo. 1863.
  • Theater. 1863.
  • Quase ministro. 1864.
  • Os deuses de casaca. 1866.
  • Tu, só tu, puro amor. 1880.
  • Não consultes médico. 1896.
  • Lição de botânica. 1906.

literature

  • Harold Bloom : Genius. The 100 most important authors in world literature. Knaus, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-8135-0243-0 , pp. 871-879.
  • Sidney Chalhoub : Machado de Assis. Historiador, São Paulo 2007.
  • Alberto Manguel : Diary of a Reader. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-596-15943-1 . (Contains pp. 213–232: Machado de Assis, The subsequent memoirs of Brás Cubas ).
  • Alberto Manguel: Um homem célebre. Machado recriado. Publifolha, São Paulo 2008.
  • Carlos Fuentes : Machado de la Mancha. Fondo de Cultura Económica FCE, México 2002. (essay).

Web links

Wikisource: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis  - Sources and full texts (Portuguese)

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Maia Neto, José Raimundo: Machado de Assis, the Brazilian Pyrrhonian. Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana 1984.
  2. ↑ Manfred Pfister: Epilogue to: JM Machado de Assis: The Babylonian Dictionary. Munich 2018, p. 221 ff.
  3. ^ Literaturkritik.de from September 2003: Brazil's contribution to literary modernity - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis' "Subsequent Memoirs of Bras Cubas"
  4. ↑ Deutschlandfunk book market of September 29, 2008: Machadi vive - on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the death of Joaquim María Machado de Assis
personal data
SURNAME Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Brazilian author
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1839
PLACE OF BIRTH Rio de Janeiro
DATE OF DEATH September 29, 1908
Place of death Rio de Janeiro