Translating São Bernardo

Notes at Random

Translated from Brazilian Portuguese with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic), verified by the author.

I

Unfortunately, I do not have the good habit of noting the date when I read a book. I often read several volumes at once, stopping and returning as the mood takes me or as circumstances allow. So I cannot say exactly when I first read São Bernardo. I can say, however, that I was still in my teenage years — perhaps twelve or thirteen. My reference point is another great novel by the same author, Angústia — that one I remember clearly, having read it after a heartbreak in my boyhood. In any case, São Bernardo came first, of that I have no doubt. And before it, most likely Vidas Secas, required reading in any Brazilian school.

In my grandparents' old house near the Serra da Cantareira in São Paulo, there were two book collections on the living-room shelf: one — which I do not remember very well — was a series of biographies of historical figures (I tried to read the one about Napoleon, but it was impenetrable); the other was the complete literary works of Graciliano Ramos published by Editora José Olympio in 1953. It included Caetés, São Bernardo, Angústia, Vidas Secas, Insônia, Infância, and the magnificent Memórias do Cárcere in all four of its fat volumes. The letters and travel writings are missing, but it is a fine gathering of the most celebrated titles of one of the most representative writers of twentieth-century Brazilian literature. How this collection ended up on my grandparents' shelf I cannot quite say — I never saw anyone touching those books — but when my grandfather died, and before my grandmother moved house, I took the volumes for myself. They are here on my shelf now, beside the Tridentine Sunday Missal my grandfather used his entire life. It was in those books that I read my Graciliano, and they followed me from Brazil to Japan.

Of all his novels, stories, and even his accounts of persecution, São Bernardo has always been my favourite. With so many extraordinary works in world literature, with so much good reading to be done — and reading being a large part of what I do with my life — it is difficult to single out one title and call it your favourite; I am not so bold. But if we take into account literary excellence, emotional attachment, and personal taste, São Bernardo is, without a shadow of a doubt, among my five most beloved books. It is no accident that even before translating it into Japanese I had already read it more than ten times. I return to it periodically — in full or only in passages that have stayed with me. Paulo Honório and Madalena have been companions for a long time; since that first reading they have never entirely disappeared from my horizon. Some characters are like that: one day they enter your consciousness and take up residence there, becoming reference points for future experience, fictional counsellors inhabiting the imaginary memory. To dissect such presences is half literary analysis, half self-analysis. Perhaps that is the impulse behind this text.

Before we continue, a fateful aside: being a translator was not and is not my priority. For years I kept my distance from this kind of work. The push came from a colleague — a true specialist in Brazilian literature and a translator. In conversations in university corridors, between classes, over a beer after some conference, we began to discuss the possibility of translating São Bernardo. Masayuki Kibe, more diligent than I, had noted that he finished reading the novel on April 29, 2005. Pondering Paulo Honório's capacity to speak Japanese, we decided, almost on a whim, to throw ourselves headlong into the endeavour — and what followed, roughly between 2024 and 2026, from the start of the project to the publication of our translation, is what I attempt to recount here.

II

The prologue has been long, so let us move to the narrative. I may perhaps fail to mention useful details that seem to me incidental and dispensable. Let us trust the readers.

The translation of São Bernardo, as I said, began as something rather playful. We both have our own lines of research to which we are committed, and the project was agreed upon without much seriousness and without a deadline for completion — though this changed later, as I will explain. Even so, we resolved to venture into Graciliano's prose and set to work.

Translation theory — the systematic study of linguistic transposition between languages, situated within theoretical discussions with ramifications across many intellectual fields — is not my area of expertise. Nor do I consider myself an authority on Brazilian literature, still less specifically on the work of Graciliano Ramos; anyone who glances at my profile will quickly see where my expertise lies. To be perfectly plain: I am here meddling where I was not called. Moreover, although the translation is a joint effort, the opinions expressed in this essay are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the view of Professor Kibe. I recommend reading two articles written by my companion on this journey, dealing respectively with Madalena and Paulo Honório; in both, the author dissects questions of translation far more systematically than I shall do from here on.¹

Having made those qualifications, I can write more freely. I do not think I am talking nonsense when I say that any translation is a process of reinvention: something will be sacrificed, many things will have to change, and the imagination and competence of the translator will be constantly tested. This is true of every literary work, but with Graciliano the task was somewhat more complex. Famous for his short, unadorned sentences, his terse grammar and finely cut periods, one cannot be too careful when transposing him into any language. (The same might be said of Ernest Hemingway and many other authors, and I have no wish to accuse the Old Graça of being the only one to impose such difficulties on the unfortunate translators of his work.) It happens that in the novel in question, the difficulty goes even deeper: the prose of São Bernardo is not Graciliano's typical prose, but rather a prose re-translated "from Portuguese into Brazilian" — as he himself recounts in a letter to his wife Heloísa (see Kibe's articles). This means that much of what is written in São Bernardo is coloured in the watercolours of the Brazilian Northeast, specifically of Alagoas. A simplistic way of describing the situation would be to say that São Bernardo is full of regionalisms. But it is not only that. The regionalisms are not used as seasoning to give an exotic flavour to Paulo Honório's story; they are his language, the only one in which he knows how to express himself when telling his story. To strip the text of the specificities of the narrator's language is to impoverish both the text and Honório enormously, and to do a disservice to Brazilian letters and to the art of Ramos. Awareness of this fact — however much it brings pleasure to the reader approaching the novel — torments anyone who intends to render it into any language other than Portuguese. Our translatorial ordeal began there: how to make this man speak in Japanese?!

Some examples may be illustrative. Let us begin with the title. In Portuguese, São Bernardo — or better still, S. Bernardo. The title is not the name of the protagonist, nor of his biography, nor anything of the sort: it is the São Bernardo farm, the setting of the action, that occupies the central role. Yet until we begin to read the novel, we do not know what the title refers to. Is it a saint's popular name? A city? A river? (Remember: the Northeast has the São Francisco — why not a São Bernardo?) Some other place name? The first-time reader does not know, but Paulo Honório needs no qualifiers: São Bernardo is São Bernardo. For him, the most important place in the world.

Thinking about it this way, Graciliano's choice to leave the farm's name without a determiner in the title seems to me no coincidence. For that very reason, one of our concerns was to eliminate the word fazenda ("farm") that is usually inserted when the title is cited in Japanese academic literature. No — it is not "Fazenda São Bernardo." It is São Bernardo, full stop. It may seem a minor matter, but it was a deliberate choice.

Another case: what kind of "I" should Paulo Honório use? For speakers of Portuguese (who have only their single "eu") or English (with the imperious I, always capitalised), the question may sound strange, but anyone who knows Japanese will be aware that there are several ways of expressing the first-person singular depending on age, sex, situation, era, and other factors. Should he say watashi or ore? Perhaps washi, since he is approaching fifty? Does the pronoun shift according to the situation? (For my own part, I am boku with friends, ore at the bar, watakushi in formal speeches…)² Complicated. A great deal of discussion went into this point. We settled on watashi for Paulo, written in Chinese characters (Madalena received a watashi in hiragana, a phonetic syllabary of feminine origin). Graciliano was probably laughing from the grave.

The examples are countless and I will stop here. To this day I am not entirely sure what Casimiro Lopes was doing without drinking water on the banks of the Navio. More than once we had to consult specialised bibliography, master's dissertations and doctoral theses, translations into English³, Italian and French, various dictionaries⁴, and endless internet searches, in order to clarify the meaning of an expression or a sentence. The process was long, but the first four chapters were the most arduous. Why? The answer seems simple: practice. The more one does something, the better one becomes at it. Our Paulo Honório had difficulty speaking Japanese in the first four chapters; after that, he seemed to hit his stride.

III

As I said earlier, the scholarship on São Bernardo is abundant and detailed. A quick search of the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations yields more than a hundred results. Classic theorists of Brazilian literature, such as Antônio Candido and Alfredo Bosi, also devoted considerable attention to Graciliano's work. All this existing critical wealth gave us solid footing to continue our project. Translating is not merely transposing from one language to another: it requires a foundation. All the more so in our case, introducing a work unprecedented in the Japanese publishing market (Vidas Secas already exists, but stands almost alone), and having to contextualise the First Republic, the voto de cabresto (the halter vote), clientelism, and the Revolution of 1930, among many other things.

It may be worth mentioning here the first film adaptation of the work, made in 1972 and directed by Leon Hirszman (1937–1987). Paulo Honório was played by Othon Bastos; Madalena by Isabel Ribeiro. The cast also includes Nildo Parente as Padilha, Mário Lago as Nogueira, Jofre Soares as Padre Silvestre, and Rodolfo Arena as Dr. Magalhães. The soundtrack — unforgettable, it must be said — is by Caetano Veloso, and the cinematography by Lauro Escorel. It was the first film distributed by Embrafilme — and it suffered seven months of detention by the censors of the military dictatorship, which caused the bankruptcy of the production company Saga. Nonetheless, the film was widely acclaimed: it received the 1973 Air France Prize for best film, director, actor, and actress, the Golden Owl for best director, and the best actor award at the Gramado Festival. In 2015 it was listed by Abraccine among the 100 best Brazilian films of all time.

As works of art, literature and cinema, though often in dialogue with each other in a dialectical relationship, must be treated as distinct expressions, neither one subordinate to or less important than the other. "I watched the film, but the book is better" or "without the film, the book doesn't come alive" are entertaining things to say, but they are deeply anchored in subjective opinion. No harm done, but it is worth remembering that cinema is also a form of translation. Having said that, the 1972 São Bernardo is possibly the most faithful distillation of Graciliano's text one could imagine. It is no accident that current editions of the novel — now that the writer's work is in the public domain — sometimes feature on the cover the Paulo Honório immortalised by Othon Bastos.⁵

IV

I am going to venture into the details of the plot, so if you do not want what are commonly called "spoilers," stop reading here.

A blunt question: what is São Bernardo about? It is the story of Paulo Honório, narrated in the first person by the protagonist in the form of his memoirs. An orphan and a poor man, Paulo Honório rises from the dust and, through hard work and considerable cunning, takes possession of the farm that gives the novel its name. He becomes a political boss, influential and wealthy. He marries Madalena, a schoolteacher much younger than himself, a literate woman also of humble origins but, unlike her husband, still sympathetic to the lower classes. Conflict is inevitable and manifests itself in the husband's irrational jealousy. The marriage ends in tragedy with Madalena's suicide and the dissolution of the household, including its dependants. Against this backdrop is the collapse of the First Republic and the transformation of the social order with the Revolution of 1930. Alone, Paulo Honório writes his story.

So stated, the plot is no more than the bare bones of the narrative. Thinking only of these basic features of the novel, it is not difficult to find parallels in other great works of world literature: a poor boy who becomes rich appears in David Copperfield and in countless other rags-to-riches stories; the jealousy that consumes the narrator and condemns the wife echoes Shakespeare's Othello; the unhappy marriage between two irreconcilable worlds, ending in the wife's suicide, recalls Flaubert's Madame Bovary; and the narrator's jealousy-driven obsession that destroys his own marriage is also present in Tolstoy's classic novella A Sonata a Kreutzer. And so on. It is perfectly clear that the art of São Bernardo lies not only in its themes but in the way the literary motifs are developed in intimate relation with language. Faced with the acuity of Graciliano Ramos, it is difficult to avoid the word ourives ("goldsmith") — that of Bilac's famous sonnet, "Profissão de Fé." Not by chance, Graciliano's Flaubertian character is a recurring point in the specialist criticism: like Flaubert, he was obsessed with the exact word, the unpadded sentence, the millimetric rhythm of prose. Such is the skeleton of the story. Nothing — I repeat, nothing — is coincidence or carelessness in São Bernardo: every term, every sentence, every scene is planned to the millimetre and plays a role in the construction of the final mosaic that is Paulo Honório's narrative.

V

A great deal of paper and ink has already been well spent analysing the writer's art in composing the plot set on the farm. It is not my intention to dissect the novel's structure in full here. What I would like to do is draw attention to the process of truly attentive reading and to how the process of translation helped me to perceive literary devices and hooks deployed by Graciliano in the construction of the narrative — even though I was certain I already knew it deeply. To do so, I will not dwell on Padilha — the prodigal son, the drunkard, the man of letters with revolutionary aspirations — nor on Madalena, the normal-school teacher who, even after marrying a wealthy farmer, does not forget the poor. Nor will I linger on other figures who would deserve greater attention, such as Gondim, Brito, Padre Silvestre, or Dr. Magalhães. No: what I really want to talk about is Mendonça.

Mendonça is Paulo Honório's first nemesis — a farmer, owner of the neighbouring property, Bom Sucesso, and apparently some twenty or thirty years older than the protagonist. After cheating Padilha and driving him into debt, Paulo Honório takes over São Bernardo, which was in a sorry state: the property produced little, the main house was in ruins, the fields were overgrown — and, above all, Bom Sucesso's fences were encroaching on São Bernardo's land, shrinking it year by year. There are references to Mendonça as early as the first chapters, but as a character he only appears confronting Paulo Honório at the very beginning, shortly after the acquisition of the farm, precisely over a question of boundaries — a fence that should be torn down or mended.

Mendonça is the archetypal northeastern coronel. His status as a large landowner places him at the top of the social pyramid that operates through the clientelistic system: by controlling the voters — that is, the people who work and live under his protection and who vote for the party he designates — Mendonça exercises a power that extends far beyond the fences of Bom Sucesso. How many people live there we do not know, but the old man is a widower with two daughters; there are certainly also workers, peasants, and dependants, many of them semi-literate men with the right to vote — and therefore his voters in the famous voto de cabresto system, an intrinsic feature of the Brazilian First Republic. Mendonça appears to be from an old family: the Bom Sucesso farm has a sugar mill, indicating that it produced — or had produced — sugarcane. Paulo Honório has no interest in that; São Bernardo is being developed with fruit growing, the cultivation of castor plant, imported cattle, a quarry, and a sawmill in mind. Mendonça is, in this way, simultaneously an endpoint — what Paulo Honório wishes to become at the culmination of his social ascent — and the inverse of the model he has in mind for a great landowner.

Between the two men there is a fraught relationship, made of conflict and of a respect that dares not speak its name. It is interesting to note that the name Mendonça contains within it both medo ("fear") and onça ("jaguar"). To maintain the animal metaphor: if Paulo Honório does not back down in his confrontations with the old landowner, it is clear that he also respects him — and that fear takes on concrete form here in the danger of violence, in the constant possibility of an ambush, of a shot from the undergrowth, in a society where the powerful still resort to violent means to get what they want.

Graciliano's genius in his description of Mendonça lies in how his physical appearance conveys his psychological traits. Mendonça has a beard as white as a lamb's; at the same time, his canine teeth are yellowed and pointed. There, in a single image, is the figure of the wolf in sheep's clothing. The old coronel's behaviour confirms this reading: he becomes excessively affable when circumstances persuade him to. In an especially important passage near the beginning of the novel, Paulo Honório goes to visit Mendonça at his home a few days before the elections. By that point we already know that people from Bom Sucesso have been prowling around the main house of São Bernardo — and that at night shadows and whistles surround Paulo Honório's dwelling, defended by Casimiro Lopes. Speaking about how he spent the night, Mendonça says he had troubled dreams and did not sleep well; at that moment he crushes a mosquito that had bitten him. Describing it, the old Graciliano writes:

Before taking his leave, Paulo Honório mentions the elections and says he will slaughter a lamb that day to celebrate with the voters on his return from the village. The following Sunday, after voting, Mendonça receives a bullet in the chest and dies near Bom Sucesso.

The image of the lamb's sacrifice is undeniable — interpolated with the kid that Paulo Honório ordered slaughtered on the same day. The Christian allusion to sacrifice, to holocaust, is reinforced by the detail that Paulo Honório was in the church at the moment of the event — not at prayer, of course, but discussing prosaic matters such as the price of a bell with Padre Silvestre.

VI

It is a commonplace, but since it is true I will repeat it here: to translate is to recreate. To render São Bernardo into Japanese, we had to scrutinise it in its finest details. It is, in this sense, a work of deconstruction. The image that comes to mind is taking a garment apart: removing each stitch, one by one, to see how the dress is made.⁶ The pressure to translate faithfully — and not literally, since these are different things: the flavour of the text must be reproduced in Japanese, and therein lies the challenge of making the characters speak convincingly and not like a mere machine translation — caused us to read and reread the same passage dozens of times. Sentences that would be read quickly even by an attentive reader were thus analysed and their Japanese equivalents sought at considerable cost. As I have already alluded to in this text, not everything came out perfectly, but every term was chosen deliberately. Offering a mea culpa: if there are any errors, the fault is ours.

Finally, I note that we deliberately inserted no footnotes in the translation. What is absolutely necessary for understanding — a basic knowledge of clientelistic relations, for example — was included in the afterword; beyond that, it is a matter of trusting the Japanese reader, long accustomed to foreign literature, and hoping that the work will be well received. Insônia is almost ready for publication; Angústia is next in line. Do read them.