…de Mello e Souza is our topic today. On the theory of getting rid of one book, binder, or at least one file folder each day, no matter how good it is, I am getting rid of a binder of xeroxes of works by him (if I can — right now, the cat is sitting on it). I have intellectual and sentimental reasons to have it, but it has to go.
In his Literatura e sociedade there is an important 1950 article “Literatura e cultura de 1900 a 1945,” which also appeared in Spanish in the 1991 anthology of Cândido, Crítica radical (Ayacucho). It says the dialectic of localism and cosmopolitanism is key.
There is in that last volume the 1958 introduction to Formação da literatura brasileira, and a discussion of Raízes do Brasil … and a translation of “Literatura e subdesenvolvimento.” I’ve also got a copy of his book on Sílvio Romero.
There is new work out now by Cândido (who only died in 2017), and new work on him too, and I am sure I do not need these photocopies since the texts are available, so they are going.
Yet I remember voices like his, and days spent reading this kind of thing instead of bureaucratic things, legal things or commercial educational products … and I miss the humanities then, and the gentle and educated voices I used to hear, and the people I used to know.
(How then to listen now is of course the practical question here, but I am more interested in the last line of that last paragraph as statement.)
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 