João Guimarães Rosa ( ZHWOWN ghee-mə-RYNEZ; Portuguese: [ʒuˈɐ̃w ɡimaˈɾɐ̃jz ˈʁɔzɐ, ˈʒwɐ̃w -]; 27 June 1908 – 19 November 1967) was a Brazilian novelist, short story writer, poet and diplomat.
Rosa only wrote one novel, Grande Sertão: Veredas (known in English as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands), a revolutionary text for its blend of archaic and colloquial prose and frequent use of neologisms, taking inspiration from the spoken language of the Brazilian backlands. For its profoundly philosophical themes, the critic Antonio Candido described the book as a "metaphysical novel". It is often considered to be the Brazilian equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses.In a 2002, poll by the Bokklubben World Library, "Grande Sertão: Veredas" was named among the best 100 books of all time. Rosa also published four books of short stories in his lifetime, all of them revolving around the life in the sertão, but also addressing themes of universal literature and of existential nature. He died in 1967 — the year he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature — due to a heart attack.
Guimarães Rosa was born in Cordisburgo in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, the first of six children of Florduardo Pinto Rosa (nicknamed "seu Fulô") and Francisca Guimarães Rosa ("Chiquitinha"). He was self-taught in many areas and studied several languages from childhood, starting with French before he was seven years old. He later claimed,
"I speak: Portuguese, German, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Esperanto, some Russian; I read: Swedish, Dutch, Latin and Greek (but with the dictionary right next to me); I understand some German dialects; I studied the grammar of: Hungarian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Polish, Tupi, Hebrew, Japanese, Czech, Finnish, Danish; I dabbled in others. But all at a very basic level. And I think that studying the spirit and the mechanism of other languages helps greatly to more deeply understand the national language [of Brazil]. In general, however, I studied for pleasure, desire, distraction".
Still a child, he moved to his grandparents' house in Belo Horizonte, where he finished primary school. He began his secondary schooling at the Santo Antônio School in São João del-Rei, but soon returned to Belo Horizonte, where he graduated. In 1925, at only 16, he enrolled in the College of Medicine of Federal University of Minas Gerais.
On June 27, 1930, he married Lígia Cabral Penna, a sixteen-year-old girl, with whom he was to have two daughters, Vilma and Agnes. In that same year, he graduated and began his medical practice in Itaguara, where he stayed for nearly two years. In this town, Rosa had his first contact with elements from the sertão. With the break of the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, Guimarães Rosa served as a volunteer doctor of the Public Force (Força Pública) heading to the so-called Tunel sector in Passa-Quatro, Minas Gerais, where he came into contact with the future president Juscelino Kubitschek, at that time the chief doctor of the Blood Hospital (Hospital de Sangue). Later on, he became a civil servant through examination. In 1933, he went to Barbacena in the position of Doctor of the 9th Infantry Battalion. Rosa later recalled that the experiences from his time as a doctor and a soldier were significant for his formation as a writer.
In the following year, Rosa began his diplomatic career. In 1938, he served as assistant consul in Hamburg, Germany, where he met his future second wife, Aracy de Carvalho Guimarães Rosa, the only Brazilian woman to be officially granted the title of Righteous among the nations for her assistance to Jews escaping the Third Reich.
In 1963, he was chosen by unanimous vote to enter the Brazilian Academy of Letters (Academia Brasileira de Letras) in his second candidacy. After postponing his acceptance for four years, he finally assumed his position in 1967, just three days before dying in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the victim of a heart attack, at the summit of his diplomatic and literary career.
Although Guimarães Rosa began to write with poetry, his only volume of verse, "Magma", was relinquished by the author and was only published posthumously. In turn, Rosa began pursuing a literary career by inscribing a collection of twelve short-novels in a contest, in 1938, whose jury was chaired by the then already prestigious Graciliano Ramos. The older writer denied him the first prize. Ramos himself later explained his devaluation of the first drafts of a work later known as Sagarana: in spite of the author's talent and the many beauties of the collection, he thought that the uneven quality of the stories and their often exaggeratedly long passages resulted in a work that was incoherent and immature.
Guimarães Rosa extenuously reviewed his work, until finally considering it ready for publication only in 1946.
In its mature form, already noticeable in Sagarana, Rosa's style differs from that of Ramos. The latter's succinct, dry expression is in contrast with the former's detail and quality of language, rich in vocabulary and adventurous in its exploration of the grammar of the Portuguese language, qualities the Ramos himself would endow as his fellow writer's greatest virtues.
"Sagarana" is a portmanteau word crafted from the union of "saga" (homonym in Portuguese for saga) and "rana" (Tupi for "in the manner of"), thus translating as "(stories) in the manner of folk legends". The book is composed of nine short novels, three less than the original version submitted to the contest eight years earlier. All of these find their setting in the sertão and nearly all revolve around the figure of the jagunço, a mercenary-like figure that serves as a militia to farmers and secures the order in the Brazilian backlands. Rosa, however, would craft this outlaw manner of living to a type of existential condition according to which bravery and faith are the two driving forces of life. Antonio Candido related this treatment to a view of the jagunço that was inspired by the medieval knights and their values.
Rosa brings to his narratives the regional aspects of the sertão. His use of language closely follows the dialect of the sertanejos – inhabitants of the sertão–, employing regional terms and variations of words, as well as borrowing their traditions and customs. Furthermore, he takes advantage of the geography and the wildlife of the sertão to structure the stories. Vivid descriptions of landscapes (most notably in the short-novel São Marcos, "Saint Mark", where mystical lore of popular witchcraft and the vividness of nature are blended together) and animals, especially bird flocks and groups of cattle, populate the pages of the book, not only in an attempt to capture the backdrop of the geographic sertão, but also in close correspondence with the plot of the stories and as an extended metaphor for the solitude of man and his pursuit of transcendence. This is not, however, limited to the content of his stories. The noted narrative O Burrinho Pedrês ("The Brindled Donkey"), for example, contains anthological passages where Rosa intensely manipulates the sonority of the sentences, whether mimicking the metric of the traditional verse form of the popular songs of the sertão or employing onomatopoeia and alliteration and juxtaposing several words that relate to the field of cattle breeding to textually recreate the sounds of the passing herds. Rosa would sustain and develop these characteristics through his later work.
The most prestigious of these stories is the last, A Hora e Vez de Augusto Matraga ("The Time and Turn of Augusto Matraga"), referred to by Rosa as a sort of "key" to the collection
The hagiography of a worldly man, recounts the redemption of a wealthy farm owner named Augusto Esteves, or Nhô Augusto, a vicious person likened to all sorts of debauchery, who is betrayed and beaten to nearly death, being finally left stranded in the deserted backlands and marked with a branding iron. Two old sertanejos rescue him and give him care in their house; during his convalescence, a priest administers blessings to him and promises the violated man that all persons are intended for a particular and decisive moment of salvation. Once cured, he proclaims his wish to go to heaven "nem que seja a porrete" ("even though by a cudgel"), and engages vigorously in farm work and good deeds and finds the companionship and friendliness of the jagunço leader Seu Joaõzinho Bem-Bem, who, reckoning the man's vocation to arms, invites him to his group, an offer which Nhô Augusto refuses in order to comply with his wish of ascending towards God.