Manuel Bandeira

Manuel Bandeira (the 3rd left to right, back row)

Manuel Carneiro de Sousa Bandeira Filho (Recife, 19 april 1886 — Rio de Janeiro, 13 october 1968) was a poet, literary critic, and translator.

Bandeira wrote over 20 books of poetry and prose. In 1904, he found out that he suffered from tuberculosis, which encouraged him to move from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, because of Rio's tropical beach weather. In 1922, after an extended stay in Europe where Bandeira met many prominent authors and painters, he contributed poems of political and social criticism to the Modernist Movement in São Paulo. Bandeira began to publish his most important works in 1924. Bandeira became a respected Brazilian author and wrote articles in several newspapers and magazines, as well as teaching Hispanic Literature in Rio de Janeiro. Bandeira began to translate into Portuguese canonical plays of world literature in 1956, which he continued to do until his last days. He died in Rio de Janeiro.

Bandeira's poems are of a unique delicacy and beauty. Recurrent themes can be found in his works: the love of women, his childhood in the Northeast city of Recife, friends, health problems. His delicate health affected his poems, in a manner similar to the last poems of Jorge Luis Borges. Many of Manuel Bandeira's poems depict the limits of the human body.

It is one of Brazil's most admired poets, inspiring, even today, from writers to composers. In fact, the "rhythm bandeiriano" deserves in-depth studies of essayists. Sometimes writers inspires not only because of its theme, but also due to the sober style of writing Manuel Bandeira has a simple and direct style, but do not share the hardness of poets like Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, also Pernambuco. Indeed, an analysis of the works of Manuel Bandeira and Joao Cabral de Melo, one sees that, unlike that aims to purge the lyricism of his work. Flag was the most lyrical of the poets. It addresses universal themes and everyday, sometimes with an approach of "poem-a-joke", dealing with forms and inspiration that the academic tradition considers vulgar. Still, knowledge of literature, was used in everyday topics, forms taken from classical and medieval traditions. In his debut (and very short circulation) are rigid poetic compositions, rich rhymes and sonnets in perfect measure, on the same line where, in his later writings, we find as the rondo compositions and ballads. The image of a good man, gentle and friendly in part agreed to adopt that Bandeira, at the end of his life, tends to produce errors: his poetry, far from being a little sweet song of melancholy, is enrolled in a drama that combines his personal history and conflict stylistic lived by the poets of his time. Gray of the Hours presents a great view: the hurt, the sadness, resentment, framed by morbid style late symbolism. Carnival, which will come soon after, opens with the unpredictable: the evocation Bacchic and, at times, satanic carnival, but ends in the middle of melancholy. This hesitation between jubilation and joint pain will be figurative in several dimensions. Dissolute Rhythm in his third book, happiness appears in poems like "I'm off to Pasargadae," where the question is dreamy evocation of an imaginary country, the Pays de Cocagne, where every desire, especially erotic, is pleased, it is not elsewhere but an intangible, a locus of spiritual amenus. In Bandeira, the object of desire remain shrouded in mist and out of reach. Adopting the trope of the Portuguese "saudade", Pasargadae and poems as many others are similar in a nostalgic remembrance of childhood bandeiriana, street life, the everyday world of provincial Brazilian cities of the early twentieth century. The intangible is also feminine and erotic. Torn between a sheer ideality friendly and platonic unions and a voluptuous carnality, Manuel Bandeira is in many of his poems, a poet of guilt. The pleasure is not there in the satisfaction of desire, but in the excitement of algolagnia of abandonment and loss. In Dissolute Rhythm, eroticism, so morbid in the first two books, it is longing wonder dissolution liquid element in shipping, as is the case of wet nights in Loneliness.

Bibliography

A Literature professor, he was elected to the Brazilian Letters Academy where he was the third occupant of the 24th Chair whose patron was Júlio Ribeiro. His election took place on August 29, 1940, succeeding Luís Guimarães and he was formally introduced by academician Ribeiro Couto on November 30, 1940.

He died at the age of 82 on October 18, 1968 in Botafogo (a borough of Rio de Janeiro). His funeral took place at the grand hall of the Brazilian Letters Academy and he was buried at the St. John the Baptist (Port. São João Batista) Cemetery.

Example

CONSOADA

Quando a Indesejada das gentes chegar
(Não sei se dura ou caroável),
Talvez eu tenha medo.
Talvez sorria, ou diga:
- Alô, iniludível!
O meu dia foi bom, pode a noite descer.
(A noite com seus sortilégios.)
Encontrará lavrado o campo, a casa limpa,
A mesa posta,
Com cada coisa em seu lugar.

Manuel Bandeira

Translation:

Special dinner 

When the undesirable of the people comes,
(I don't know if tough or gentle)
Maybe I will fear.
Maybe smile and say:
- Hello, inevitable!
My day was good, the night can fall.
(The night with its mysteries.)
It will find the field plowed, the house clean,
the table prepared,
With each thing on its place.

Poetry

• Alumbramentos, 1960
• Antologia Poética
• Berimbau e Outros Poemas, 1986
• Carnaval, 1919
• 50 Poemas Escolhidos pelo Autor, 1955
• A Cinza das Horas, 1917
• A Cinza das Horas, Carnaval e O Ritmo Dissoluto, 1994
• Estrela da Manhã, 1936
• Estrela da Tarde, 1959
• Estrela da Vida Inteira. Poesias Reunidas, 1966
• This Earth, That Sky: Poems (English translation of Estrela da vida inteira), 1989
• Libertinagem, 1930
• Libertinagem. Estrela da Manhã. Edição crítica, 1998
• Mafuá do Malungo. Jogos Onomásticos e Outros Versos de Circunstância 1948.
• O Melhor Soneto de Manuel Bandeira, 1955
• Os Melhores Poemas de Manuel Bandeira Selected and edited by Francisco de Assis Barbosa, 1984
• A Morte, 1965. (special edition)
• Opus 10, 1952
• Pasárgada, 1959
• Um Poema de Manuel Bandeira, 1956
• Poemas de Manuel Bandeira com Motivos Religiosos, 1985
• Poesia Selected by Alceu Amoroso Lima, 197
• Poesia e Prosa, 1958
• Poesias, 192
• Poesias Completas, 1940
• Poesias Escolhidas, 1937
• Seleta em Prosa e Verso Selected and edited by Emanuel de Morais, 1971

External links

• Manuel Bandeira
• Academia Brasileira de Letras profile of Manuel Bandeira

Persondata
Name	Bandeira, Manuel
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1886
Place of birth
Date of death	1968
Place of death