Veredas de João Guimarães Rosa

Vivre est une affaire très dangereuse comme ne se lasse pas de nous le rappeler notre narrateur Riobaldo.
Et qui le saurait mieux que ce jagunço* aguerri, rappelant un passé sanglant surtout passé à combattre/renverser des bandes rivales de hors-la-loi dans le sertão** brésilien. Il y a de bons bandits et il y a de mauvais bandits et parfois il est difficile de faire la différence – la frontière entre le bien et le mal étant trop mince et tout ça…
Désirer trop ardemment quelque chose de bien peut être à certains égards comme souhaiter quelque chose de mal. (11)
Dans un flashback ininterrompu s’étendant sur 492 pages, Riobaldo nous ouvre sa vie pour le juger : son apprentissage auprès de divers dirigeants comme Zé Bebelo, Medeiro Vaz et Joca Ramiro, et par la suite sa prise en charge du rôle de leader & une désillusion croissante face à une vie de criminel — tout est disposé avec un balayage narratif digne d’une épopée.
Le diable à payer dans les arrière-pays est très cinématographique avec plusieurs séquences d’action dignes du cœur dans la bouche.
Cela ferait un film fantastique aux proportions épiques qui feraient honte à des prétendants comme The Revenant !
Le paysage vaste et impénétrable ici devient une métaphore de l’obscurité du cœur humain et une quête d’une paix insaisissable. Sa description des paysages désertiques (36-44) rivaliserait avec l’évocation des marines de Coleridge dans The Ancient Mariner. Pas vraiment surprenant parce que son cadre est similaire au célèbre long poème de Coleridge alors que le narrateur raconte son histoire sinueuse de crimes et de rédemption à un auditeur silencieux dont les réponses sont transmises dans les réactions du narrateur. Doit être un auditeur très patient en effet! Comme les marins, les bandits sont aussi un groupe très superstitieux qui, bien qu’étant des voyous, se méfie des machinations du diable à chaque pas.
Une caractéristique frappante de ce livre est sa concentration sur le récit comme s’il faisait écho à la concentration de ses protagonistes sur la vengeance et la domination de leurs territoires. Le livre explore la folie et les compulsions inhérentes à un certain mode de vie – pensez Nostromo, pensez Heart of Darkness. Si les livres pouvaient être séparés par sexe, alors c’est essentiellement macho.
J’ai lu la première édition anglaise (en fait la seule traduction anglaise à ce jour) qui avait reçu de vives critiques parce qu’elle ne parvenait pas à transmettre la dextérité linguistique d’Ulysse du texte portugais original. En traduction, cela ressemble plus à Iliade qu’à Ulysse en ce sens qu’il marque beaucoup en rhétorique et en puissance descriptive, mais pas tellement dans les jeux de mots. Mais alors un lecteur natif serait mieux placé pour en juger.
Si la fiction est une expérience imaginative d’autres vies, alors ; pendant quelques jours, j’ai partagé le rude et le dégringolade de ces personnages dans un monde sauvage et imprévisible et si, malgré les allégations de mauvaise traduction, ce monde m’est apparu dans toute sa vivacité, alors cela en dit long sur la puissance de l’original texte.
C’est un livre avec un attrait limité en raison du sujet. Une version ancienne des guerres de gangs modernes, elle est toujours d’actualité dans un monde où les systèmes politiques se sont effondrés et les territoires sont détenus par des seigneurs en guerre qui extraient de l’argent aux riches pour étendre la protection et trouver des recrues parmi les masses appauvries.

* Jagunço : dans ce livre, un membre d’une bande sans foi ni loi de voyous armés à la solde de politiciens rivaux, qui se sont battus les uns contre les autres et contre les militaires, au tournant du siècle, dans le nord-est du Brésil.
** Sertão : arrière-pays, intérieur du pays peu peuplé ; en particulier, les arrière-pays du nord-est brésilien. Dans ce livre, le terme désigne principalement la moitié nord de l’État du Minas Gerais.

Voici quelque chose à lire :
Extraits d’interview de Miguel de The Untranslated :

(voir spoiler)[The Untranslated: You have mentioned The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, a book that received the highest accolades in the Portuguese-speaking world, but whose English translation proved to be a complete failure. As somebody who has read it in the original more than once (correct me if I’m wrong here) could you tell me what is the case with this book? What are its inherent challenges to the translator?

Miguel: Your question obliges me to address several matters. First of all, I’m not so sure about accolades in the “Portuguese-speaking world”. It earned tremendous renown in Brazil, and, curiously, in the Portuguese African colonies. Adolfo Casais Monteiro (1908-1972), an excellent poet and literary critic living in exile in Brazil because of political persecution, was one of its early champions. ACM, by the way, has the merit of having helped “discover” Fernando Pessoa, with whom he corresponded and whose poetry he organized in the 1940s. The equally extraordinary poet and critic Jorge de Sena (1919-1978), also in Brazil for having participated in a botched overthrow of the dictatorship, called the novel “an exceptional linguistic adventure.” It also had tremendous impact in the former colonies during the 1960s, when the Colonial War was raging on. José Luandino Vieira (b. 1935), who is considered the father of Portuguese-language African literature, read it and emulated JGR’s approach to language. It was a way of protest, of fighting back against the metropolis’ official literature. Vieira’s loose, heterodox syntax and grammar, full of African words, was a way of imbuing Angolan literature with its own national identity, in rejection of the empire (each colony was coming to terms with its own identity; Vieira was born in Portugal, but considered himself Angolan). And from Vieira’s seminal book, Luuanda (1963), JGR’s influence spread to many other African writers. For instance Mozambican Mia Couto’s (b. 1955) habit of inventing words owes something to his neologisms.

But I don’t think The Devil to Pay in the Backlands was that known or read (outside a few restricted intellectual circles) in Portugal for a long time. I told you before about the left-wing dictatorship of culture. Well, they decided that we needed to read Marxist Brazilian writers like Jorge Amado, or at least those writers closer to the spirit of the revolution: writings about the poor, class conflicts, abject misery, evil capitalist exploitation; so we got lots of Graciliano Ramos Érico Veríssimo, and José Lins do Rego, basically realists similar to the neo-realists in Portugal. I fear Guimarães Rosa was too metaphysical and aesthetic to interest them. It was the same reason Aquilino Ribeiro (they read each other with admiration) and the existentialist Vergílio Ferreira were somewhat shunned.

Up to this day, if the National Library’s online database is to trusted, there has been no edition of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands in Portugal. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can find copies of the Brazilian edition in bookstores. It’s one of the most expensive books I ever bought.

(…) I’ve read it twice now, indeed. The first time I strongly disliked it: I found it dull, static, verbally opaque, the characters lifeless, the story itself not very gripping. I smile at that now. Months later I got the silly notion of writing a novel; it’s not a very good novel, but it’s helped me gain a better appreciation for novelists who attempt complex, challenging, risky feats. While writing I realized that the reasons I had disliked his novel so much were the same reasons I was enjoying my novel writing so much: playing with weird syntax, filling it with obscure vocabulary, playing with sounds (JGR uses inner rhymes a lot in the tradition of Portuguese popular proverbs), digressing, interrupting the action, deforming spelling. Even though my novel isn’t very good, it did do strange things to my head. For instance I not only learned to like reading dictionaries, but making my own as well. I created an alliterative one, a lipogrammatic one, I have glossaries on countless themes, I had to create a rhyming dictionary just to write that short-story I sent you. I think most readers read in spite of language and not because of it, which is quite understandable; I used to be like that too. But since I wrote that novel I began leaning in the opposite direction; for me literature is a means to get to the language. And Guimarães Rosa has lots of it. So after I finished my bauble I decided to reread him. And then it became clear to me that it was one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

Here, let me quote JGM for you. This is from a 1966 interview with Portuguese writer Arnaldo Saraiva: “When I write I don’t think about literature: I think about capturing living things. It was the necessity of capturing living things, together with my physical aversion to common-places (and common-places are never confused with simplicity), that led me to the other intimate necessity of enriching and embellishing the language, making it more plastic, more flexible, more alive. Thus I don’t have any process in relation to linguistic creation: I want to use everything that’s good in the Portuguese language, whether it be in Brazil, in Portugal, in Angola or Mozambique, and even from other languages: for the same reason I often make use of popular and erudite spheres, or city and farm.” And he adds: “There are many words I reject because they’re inexpressive, and that’s what leads me to seek or invent others. And I always do it with the utmost respect, and with soul. I respect language too much. Writing, for me, is like a religious act. I have lots of notebooks with word relations, with expressions. I’ve ridden with many cow herders, on horseback, and I always took a notebook and a pencil fastened to the shirt’s pocket, to note down everything good to the ear – even the bird singing. Perhaps my work is a bit arbitrary, but if it sticks, it stuck.”

When I re-read his novel I felt delight, awe, and euphoria. The novel is about a jagunço, a hired gun called Riobaldo, a man with a history of violence who thinks he may have sold his soul to the Devil. Riobaldo belonged to a group of marauders involved in political wars in the Brazilian backlands, or sertão, which is short for desertão, meaning “big desert.” Curiously, when Portuguese sailors shipwrecked off the coast of Africa and had to travel deep into the territory they also used the word “sertão” to designate the African hinterland. In that same interview JGR claims to have been inspired by Tragic History of the Sea. And they are similar: both are about people in the middle of nowhere desperately trying to survive against nature and armed enemies. Riobaldo, after many incidents, becomes the band’s leader in order to avenge a betrayal, but the hunt for the traitors drags on and on because they think one of them made a pact with the Devil to become invincible. So Riobaldo, in order to put an end to the war, goes to a crossroads and sells his soul to the Devil. Or at least that’s what he thinks. The story is narrated decades after these events; Riobaldo has married, settled down, forsaken his violent ways, embraced Christianity. But now he lives in anguish and fear that he’s lost his soul, that he’s going to hell. He spends 600 pages worrying and reasoning that he didn’t, that the deal was void, that the Devil doesn’t even exist; but no sooner does he reach a conclusion that his soul is safe than he starts doubting again. The word “Devil” must show up over a hundred times. I don’t believe in God, but JGR makes his fear so palpable, and Riobaldo is such a seductive and likeable narrator, that I truly believed in his fear of losing his soul, and I felt very moved by his anxiety about salvation. It’s an incredibly violent novel, but it’s deeply affecting. And Riobaldo is a great narrator, you enjoy his company, like Ishmael’s.

When I reread it what immediately struck me was how Homeric the whole thing was. It starts in medis res before moving to the start and becoming more or less linear; it’s full of lists like in The Iliad: all those Greek soldiers Homer enumerates; several times Riobaldo just makes lists of his brothers of arms. And rhetoric also plays a role: there’s a scene where an enemy band leader is being tried and he saves himself because he argues his case eloquently. That’s Homeric too: those mythical characters were admired not just for their physical prowess but also for their rhetorical skills. And Riobaldo’s narrative is in itself a rhetorical feat to rival anything by the Muse. Ultimately it’s about honor, revenge, courage, family, and even compassion. There’s something ancient, primitive about the book, something incredibly powerful about it.

I never read the English translation; I don’t know why it failed, but I don’t think it’s impossible to translate it properly. I just gave it a look and don’t see anything very impeding. Perhaps the translator just wasn’t the right person for the job. It’s a complex book, yes, down to the letters inside words. Take the romantic triangle between Riobaldo/Diadorim/Otacília: names with just the vowels A, I and O, and consider the fact that “Devil” in Portuguese is “Diabo.” The vocabulary can be obscure, but a good translator can deal with that. He invents words sometimes, but that hasn’t stopped Mia Couto from being translated. Perhaps the main problem is the rhythm, the syntax; it’s choppy, synchises and anacoluthons abound; and JGR deforms spelling, brings it closer to the way people speak; he turns nouns into adverbs, and then adverbs into adverbial phrases! JGR captures the rhythm of an excited narrator talking without a plan: he stops, goes back, explains, explains differently. Riobaldo can read and write, but his speech shows his precarious education. There are many short sentences because he’s narrating out loud to a listener, an outsider travelling through the backlands, perhaps a stand-in for the author, so he talks in small bursts, hiccups of information. It’s a deceptive simplicity that reaches a poetic intensity filled with feeling. Perhaps it’s worse because they’re short sentences, because long ones impose proper grammar and correctness, whereas these short sentences get their effect from precise distortions, from putting a word in the wrong place, from an unexpected pairing of words, from a comma indicating a silence or a doubt. So you need someone who’s both good at breaking English grammar rules and has a poetic mind. I think that’s the main difficulty, you need someone talented enough to make gorgeous poetry out of horrible grammar. Maybe they should give the job to a poet. João Guimarães Rosa was evidently one. (hide spoiler)]