Macunaíma, page 24
Macunaíma leaves the ceremony with Mário de Andrade’s carousing buddies in Rio de Janeiro: composer Jayme Ovalle (1894–1955); the wealthy bon vivant Geraldo “Dodô” Barroso do Amaral (circa 1882–1934); Manuel Bandeira (1886–1968), one of Brazil’s most celebrated poets and Andrade’s close confidant; Swiss-French poet Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961); modernist poets Ascenso Ferreira (1895–1965) and Raul Bopp (1898–1984); and art critic Antônio Bento de Araújo Lima (1902–1988), who introduced the author to Pixinguinha.
Notes to chapter 8. Vei, the Sun (pp. 63–69)
Most of this chapter is adapted from the Pemon tale “Akalapijéima and the Sun” (saga 13), about an ancestral hero who tries to catch a magic toad named Walo’ma and ends up on an island where vultures defecate on his head. The sun rescues him, and the hero is meant to marry one of the sun’s daughters but fools around with the vulture’s daughters instead.
In Andrade’s version, Walo’ma the toad becomes Volomã the tree, whose fantastical abundance recalls the Dzalaúra-Iegue tree in chapter 5. The phrase “Boiôiô, boiôiô! quizama quizu!” comes from a Brazilian Indigenous folktale, “The Turtle and the Fruit,” as transcribed by Sílvio Romero in Contos Populares do Brasil (1883). It’s unclear what language this is, but the words are the tree’s secret true name, which enacts a spell that makes it give up its fruit.
Alamoa is a wicked blonde fairy in Brazilian folklore who guards Dutch treasure on Fernando de Noronha, an island off Brazil’s northeast coast that was controlled by the Netherlands from 1629 to 1654. Her name comes from “German woman” in Portuguese (alemã).
Vei the Sun and Capei the Moon (see chapters 4 and 15) appear as male characters in the Pemon myth, but here Andrade makes them female. He turns the masculine Portuguese word for sun (o sol) into a feminine noun (a sol); the moon (a lua) is already feminine. Caiuanogue, the morning star (Venus), is also male in Pemon mythology but here takes the feminine pronoun for star in Portuguese (a estrela).
The scene in which flames puff out from Vei’s bottom comes from a Pemon myth on the origins of fire (saga 23), in which people tie up an old woman and squeeze her to make fire come out her rear; she “defecates” the flint stones called Vató, which Vei gives to Macunaíma in this chapter.
One of Vei’s daughters plays an urucungo (berimbau), an African percussion instrument made from a gourd and a bow, used in capoeira, the Brazilian martial art and dance.
Andrade calls Vei’s daughters chinoca (little China girl), a southern Brazilian word for young Indigenous women,which can also mean prostitute. It is a diminutive of china, a largely (though not always) pejorative term that carries the same meanings as above but can also refer to people of Chinese descent. Most Brazilians unfamiliar with chinoca would assume the latter association, though china also derives from the Quechua word, tchina, for a female animal.
Macunaíma’s ballad incorporates lyrics from different Amazonian songs in Nheengatu (modern Tupi). One of the verses goes: “When I die / put me in the woods / with the giant armadillo / as my grave-digger.” The refrain, “Mandu sarará,” combines a nickname for Manuel with sarará, which refers to people of African descent with reddish or light hair (from the Tupi word for a red ant in chapter 5). In Andrade’s notations of folk songs, an em dash seems to denote a second voice coming in.
The phrase Yerup France ’n Bahia (Oropa, França e Bahia) comes from a colloquial expression meaning “the whole world,” which appears in an old Brazilian country song.
Macunaíma’s declaration “Burn it all down!” is based on a Tupi saying, which a tortoise shouts before attacking a dangerous tapir in the legend “The Tortoise and the Tapir.”
The hero’s dictum, “Ants aplenty and nobody’s healthy, so go the ills of Brazil!” (Pouca saúde e muita saúva, os males do Brasil são!), evokes critical views of Brazil. French botanist Augustin Saint-Hilaire (1779–1853) is credited with saying, “Either Brazil must bring an end to the ants, or the ants will be the end of Brazil,” referring to the saúva leafcutter ants that devastate crops. “Brazil is a vast hospital,” declared Brazilian doctor Miguel Pereira (1871–1918). The dictum’s second part recasts the refrain of the seventeenth-century satirical poem, “Milagres do Brasil são” (“So Go the Miracles of Brazil”) by Brazilian baroque poet Gregório de Matos. It also echoes a popular rhyme that lists laziness and ants among Brazil’s misfortunes, quoted in Retrato do Brasil (Portrait of Brazil, 1928), by Paulo Prado.
The statue of Saint Anthony of Pádua at a Franciscan monastery devoted to the saint was credited for saving Rio de Janeiro from a 1710 French invasion and rewarded with a salary and the rank of infantry captain.
“Compadre Chegadinho” is a Portuguese song that was popular in Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth-century.
Mianiquê-Teibê is a warrior prince from an Amazonian Tupi legend who lost his head after putting on the cursed headdress of an enemy chieftain.
Selected flora, fauna, and food
Various Brazilian popular names for the pitiguari bird (rufous-browed peppershrike) translate its insistent, melodious whistle into some version of: “Look who’s a-coming down the road!”
Notes to chapter 9. Letter to the Icamiabas (pp. 71–84)
Macunaíma’s letter back home describing his encounter with the marvels and customs of a new civilization is a parody of the founding document of Brazilian history—scribe Pêro Vaz de Caminha’s 1500 letter to Portugal’s King Manuel I recounting the “discovery” of Brazil by the Pedro Álvarez Cabral expedition. The hero’s elaboration on the attributes of the “French” and “Polish” ladies (Brazilian euphemisms for prostitutes) echoes Caminha’s excessive attention to the native women’s bodies. Macunaíma’s praise for São Paulo rewrites rapturous descriptions of Brazil’s lush natural setting by Caminha and other “early chroniclers” of colonial Brazil, such as Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, author of a 1576 tract promoting Portuguese emigration to the colony, and Baroque poet Manuel Botelho de Oliveira, whose 1705 poem “À ilha de Maré” is a paean to Brazilian abundance—the “three A’s” here (aqueous bodies, air, and area) are inspired by his four ideal A’s: arvoredos, açucar, águas, ares (trees, sugar, waters, airs).
The hero shows off his newfound erudition using belletristic language and classical citations in the style of Brazilian scholars like Rui Barbosa (1849–1923), an influential statesman, jurist, and writer, and Friar Luís de Sousa (1555–1632), a Portuguese monk and historian whose writing is considered a model of classical Portuguese. He also cites Portugal’s revered national poet Luís de Camões; the line introducing the loss of the muiraquitã—“Not five suns had come and gone since we took leave of you . . .”—echoes the part of Camões’s epic poem The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas, 1572) in which the hero encounters a giant named Adamastor (Canto V, stanza 37).
His discussion of the Asian origins and orthography of the muiraquitã parodies O muryakytã (1889), João Barbosa Rodrigues’s study of the Amazonian artifact, including a passage in which the folklorist enumerates the word’s various written forms: muyrakitan, muraqé-itã, buraquitã, puuraquitan, uaraquitan, and more.
Embracing European influences, Macunaíma prefers to identify the Icamiabas with their classical Greek namesakes, the Amazons (see chapter 3 notes). He compares the muiraquitã to the golden fleece that Jason and the Argonauts set out to steal and references the opening of Virgil’s first Eclogue—“sub tegmine fagi” (in the shade of a beech tree)—as well as the Aeneid: “horresco referens” (I shudder to relate, 2.204) and “per amica silentia lunae” (through the friendly silence of the moon, 2.255). Macunaíma quotes Horace’s Satires to propose a “modus in rebus” or “middle ground” between his newly adopted Brazilian city customs and the Icamiaba way of life (1.1.106). He also draws parallels between São Paulo and ancient Rome, using the Roman term for city officials, aediles, and signing off as Imperator, Latin for Emperor.
Macunaíma sometimes lapses into ungrammatical Brazilianisms, misspellings, and malapropisms, which I’ve rendered as platina for patina, macrobes for microbes, Orpheus instead of Morpheus, the god of sleep, and texticles of the Bible (testículos for versículos). He confuses eugenia, the Portuguese term for eugenics—which influenced early twentieth-century Brazilian immigration and public hygiene policies—with a woman named Eugenia. He misspells urbi et orbi—the Latin name for a papal address, meaning “to the city (of Rome) and the world”—as “urbi et orbe.” And he writes the Latin Odor di femina (scent of a woman) as Odor di Fêmia, a phrase made famous by Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni.
The hero also picks up words in French, English, and Italian used in the cosmopolitan metropolis. The English word Bond refers to the origin of the Brazilian word for tram, bonde: “bond” was printed on tickets for Rio de Janeiro’s earliest trams in the 1860s, run by the American-owned Botanical Garden Rail Road Company. Macunaíma notes the Paulistanos’ fluency in Italian—Italians made up thirteen percent of São Paulo’s population in 1886 and thirty-seven percent by 1916—though he misspells the Italian chi lo sá (who knows) as qui lo sá.
Andrade refers to one of São Paulo’s founding fathers, Father José de Anchieta (1534–1597), a Spanish missionary who established the Jesuit education system in Brazil, wrote an influential Tupi grammar, and is considered a forefather of Brazilian literature. Andrade also calls São Paulo the “land of the bandeirante frontiersmen”; bandeirantes were colonial-era adventurers who explored and settled regions beyond the city, looking for gold, establishing trade, and capturing Indigenous people to sell into slavery.
The chapter also alludes to the politics of the time, in which coffee and cattle oligarchs in São Paulo and Minas Gerais colluded to control national elections, with tactics like inflating voter rolls. The list of warriors includes legalists, members of the military who supported the government during a series of lieutenant uprisings, including the short-lived 1924 Paulista Revolt. The “rogue bands of cannibal giants” that “topple honest Governments” may refer to the development of this movement into the Prestes Column, a group of rebels who roamed the country from 1925–1927 and eventually helped President Getúlio Vargas seize power in the 1930 revolution. Big Daddy (Papai Grande) was the nickname for the country’s last monarch, Pedro II, and for subsequent presidents, among Indigenous Brazilians.
Notes to chapter 10. Pauí-Pódole (pp. 85–92)
Antônio the Indian was a Tupi prophet who led a late-sixteenth-century religious uprising in the backlands of Bahia with his wife, Santa Maria, also known as Mother of God. Their millenarian movement blended Catholicism with Indigenous rites and was called Santidade (Sanctity)—Caraimonhaga in Tupi. The prophets challenged the dominance of Jesuits, Portuguese slaveholders, sugar-mill owners, and colonial authorities, and encouraged migration in search of the Land Without Ills (Terra Sem Mal), the Tupi-Guarani concept of paradise.
Flower Day alludes to young women in 1920s São Paulo who sold flowers to raise money for charity.
Master Cosme is a reference to Mestre Cosme Fernandes, who some historians believe was the colonial-era Bachelor of Cananéia (see chapter 4 notes).
The word puíto comes from a Pemon origin myth (saga 25) in which Pu’yito was the name of an anus that would sneak around farting in everyone’s faces until two parrots caught him, divvied him up, and passed out the pieces to every animal; and that’s how we all got our anuses.
Fräulein is a German governess hired by a wealthy São Paulo business man to seduce his son in Andrade’s 1927 novel Amar, verbo intransitivo (titled Fräulein in the 1933 translation).
The phrase a most mulatto of all mulattos (um mulato da maior mulataria) is a corruption of the line “a most leprous of all lepers” (um malato, da maior malataria) from a Portuguese medieval chivalric romance in which a maiden wards off a knight’s potential sexual advances by claiming to be the contagious daughter of a leper. The word malato became mulato in a nineteenth-century Azores version of this romance called “O caçador” (“The Hunter”), as noted in Sílvio Romero’s study of Brazilian popular ballads (Cantos Populares do Brasil, 1897).
The Southern Cross constellation is the Cruzeiro do Sul in Brazil, where it is a national symbol. Macunaíma tells the origin story of Pauí-Pódole, the Pemon version of this constellation (saga 20), in which a man tries to hunt three different ancestral fathers: Mauaí-Pódole, Father of the Crab; E’Moron-Pódole, Father of Sleep (see chapter 14); and Pauí-Pódole, Father of the Mutum (mutum is the Tupi word for the turkey-like curassow). The hunter’s shaman brother-in-law tries to help by transforming into three different ants—Andrade uses the word tacuri as if it were an ant, though it’s a Tupi word for a large anthill or termite nest. He takes the shaman’s name, Camã-Pabinque (dog-ear mushroom), from a Kaxinawa origin myth about mushrooms.
Notes to chapter 11. Old Ceiuci (pp. 93–109)
Macunaíma’s lies about hunting deer and finding tapir tracks come from the Pemon story cycle “Kaláwunség the Liar” (saga 50). The phrase “Tetápe dzónanei pemonéite hêhê zeténe netaíte” is an amalgam of Pemon words that Koch-Grünberg left in the original and can be paraphrased as: “The tapir hid its tracks under the people’s tracks, I found them right here.”
A ganzá is a cylindrical shaker of African origin used in Brazilian folk music.
The “land of the English” in the Pemon tales refers to Guyana, a British colony until 1966 (also in chapter 17).
The Matarazzos were a prominent São Paulo family, like the Rockefellers, whose patriarch immigrated from Italy and grew rich by selling canned pork fat.
The competition between Macunaíma and Drizzle to see who can scare Piaimã’s family is based on the Pemon tale “Jaguar and Rain” (saga 44).
The list of fishing implements includes both Indigenous and obscure regional Brazilian fishing methods. The scheme to steal a fishing hook comes from the Pemon tale “Makunaíma’s Other Feats” (saga 5). The Pemon word aimará (wolf fish, Hoplias malabaricus) comes from this story and is more commonly known in Brazil by its Tupi name, traíra (see Father of the Traíra in chapter 14). Tapuitinga (white man) is an amalgam of two words from Tupi: tapuia, which refers to non-Tupi speaking Natives, as well as people of Indigenous descent who have assimilated into Brazilian society; and tinga, meaning “white.”
Ceiuci is the Tupi name for the Pleiades constellation; she was originally the virgin mother of legendary Tupi patriarch Jurupari. She was adapted into Brazilian folklore as a voracious old woman cursed with eternal hunger in stories like “Legend of the Greedy Old Crone,” which forms the basis of the episodes from the fishing scene through the chase scenes that end the chapter. Andrade merges this character with the Caapora, a Tupi forest protector who appears as both male and female figures in Brazilian folklore (see chapter 5 notes). Andrade updates Ceiuci’s bird call, “Awooga!,” into the onomatopoeia for the klaxon, used for automobile horns.
The daughter’s three riddles are based on Brazilian popular rhymes.
The horse rhymes come from a Brazilian folk ballad, “The Devil’s Horses,” in which a young man gallops off with the Devil’s daughter, while Satan tries to catch them on various horses.
The galley slave from French Guiana alludes to the Devil’s Island penal colony where France sent its worst criminals from 1852–1953; the convicts were still called galerien, even after they were no longer used as galley slaves.
Araripe de Alencar refers to Tristão de Alencar Araripe, a judge and writer whose 1887 article about archaeological evidence of advanced pre-Columbian civilizations in Brazil cites various locations mentioned in this chapter. Araripe recounts how a farmhand duped the Comércio do Amazonas newspaper into reporting the discovery of a buried Greek sculpture. He also notes enigmatic inscriptions on huge boulders at Poço do Umbu, in the backlands of Paraíba state, which French scholar Ernest Renan identified as Phoenician.
The Hole of Maria Pereira (Buraco de Maria Pereira) is a depression along the São Francisco River in Alagoas state, named for a legendary Portuguese settler said to have hidden there during the seventeenth-century Dutch invasion.
Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão (1685–1724) was a Brazilian priest who was ridiculed and investigated by the Inquisition after presenting the designs for an airship resembling a huge bird to Portugal’s King João V.
Selected flora, fauna, and food
Paricá beans produce a hallicinogenic snuff used in Amerindian healing rituals. Maquiras are either hammocks (maqueira) made from tucum palm fiber, or trees in the fig family (Moracea). Mumbucas are not an ant but a stingless bee. Andrade defines caxipara as the male saúva leafcutter ant (sabitu), but none of my sources identify this word. Macunaíma rides on the back of the tuiuiú stork (jabiru) in an aturiá (or aturá), a large cylindrical basket, which shares a name with the shrub or bird in chapter 4.
Notes to chapter 12. The Perky Peddler, Shiny Cowbird, and the Injustice of Men (pp. 111–119)
Bento Milagroso was an early-twentieth-century miracle healer who cured people with water from the Beberibe River in the northeastern city of Recife.
The leper colony in Guapira operated from 1904–1930 in what is now the northern São Paulo neighborhood of Jaçanã.
Having a magic little woodpecker leaf is a northeastern Brazilian idiom for being lucky, based on an Indigenous belief in a miracle plant that only woodpeckers can find.
The fast-talking peddler and the monkey who fool Macunaíma are inspired by the Pemon trickster Kone’wó, who gets a man to exchange his hammock for an opossum that supposedly poops silver coins; the trickster also leads a jaguar to smash his own testicles and die (saga 49). None of my sources identify toaliquiçus, but it follows the novel’s pattern of using Indigenous names for genitals (it likely goes with toaquiçu in chapter 15).
