Macunaíma, page 26
Selected flora, fauna, and food
Puraquê (or poraquê) is an electric eel, and pitiú is a small Amazonian river turtle. None of my sources identify arezi, though arebé is a cockroach in Martius’s 1863 glossary of Tupi animal names. The catalog of fish includes various catfish, aviú shrimp, and big game fish, including the guarijuba (or guarajuba), or horse-eye jack. The sabatira tapir is a version of a Brazilian variant for tapir (anta-sapateira). Colonial chronicles of Brazil describe the “belly button” (a dorsal scent gland) on the back of the peccary, a New World pig whose genus name, Tayassu, comes from Tupi. The head spike of the anhuma (horned screamer) was used to treat snake bites. This chapter lists various leafcutter ants: tanajura (the female leafcutter), saúva, tracuá, and guiquém (from guikem in Martius’s glossary, likely the same as quenquém). None of my sources identify the jaguataci or aqueque ants. Mumbuca is a black stingless bee (Melipona capitata). The “forest fruits and roots” include biribá and guacá, in the same Sapotaceae family as sweetsop; cajuí, a wild cashew fruit; and uxi (Endopleura uchi), which has a yellow pulp and medicinal properties. Tamorita is a spicy Pemon broth, according to Koch-Grünberg. The tuberous roots of the umbu hold substantial water, making it “the sacred tree” of Brazil’s arid sertão backlands. The hero hides under a mucumuco, a Pemon word for an arum with arrow-shaped leaves (Montrichardia linifera), which the mythical Makunaíma transforms into a stingray (saga 7). The list of vultures includes the camiranga from chapter 15; none of my sources identify ruxama, though its usage implies the king vulture (Sarcoramphus papa).
Notes to chapter 17. Ursa Major (pp. 167–177)
Venus appears in three incarnations: Papaceia, the northeastern Brazilian evening star (see chapter 1); Taína-Cã, from the Karajá people of central Brazil; and Caiuanogue, the Pemon morning star (see chapter 8). All take feminine pronouns when referred to as stars (estrela is a feminine noun in Portuguese), though both Caiuanogue and Taína-Cã are male characters. Andrade follows the Karajá myth of Taína-Cã but adds the Pemon Emoron-Pódole, Father of Sleep (see chapter 14), changing the father’s name to Zozoiaça, from the Pareci people, and calling him morubixaba, a Tupi word for leader.
The lagoon’s gold-and-silver face alludes to a popular Brazilian nursery rhyme based on a Portuguese ballad, which opens: “Senhora Dona Sancha, / Covered in gold and silver / Reveal to us your visage / We wish to see your face.” This Dona Sancha comes from the late 1570s, a century prior to Dona Sancha of the jasmine-mangoes in chapter 6.
Uiara is the same as Iara (see chapter 5 notes).
None of my sources identify nuqiiris (likely the same as Bahian-coconuts).
The Ururau Gator Monster comes from southern Brazilian folklore; the ururau is a broad-snouted caiman.
The hero’s lament that begins with “My memento!” echoes a line from the Brazilian fairytale “The Three Swans” (see chapter 14 notes).
The blue forget-me-nots come from a Brazilian folktale in which the blue-eyed Virgin Mary’s tears stain a field of white flowers.
Macunaíma contemplates going to live on the Isle of Marajó (Ilha do Marajó) in the Amazon River—“the only place in Brazil where traces of a superior civilization remain,” Andrade once said, referring to the pre-Columbian Marajoara culture—or joining Delmiro Gouveia (1863–1917), an industrialist who brought hydroelectric power and running water to the town of Pedra (Stone), a stop on the British Great Western railroad line in Alagoas state. In a newspaper column, Andrade called him “a genius of discipline,” who achieved “an urban mechanical perfection” in Pedra “that remains unparalleled in our land” (“O Grande Cearense,” 1928).
“I didn’t come into this world to be a stone.” Macunaíma writes this Tupi saying for throwing caution to the wind with an itá (stone); it’s what the jabuti tortoise shouts before seeking revenge on a tapir in the Amazonian tale “The Tortoise and the Tapir.”
Macunaíma’s farewell verse is based on an Amazonian song that mixes Tupi and Portuguese; its original refrain, “Mandu sarará” (see chapter 8) is replaced here by “Taperá” (a swallow, see chapter 15).
Andrade changed the name of this chapter from “Eiffel Tower” to Ursa Major (the Big Dipper) sometime after he saw the constellation in the Amazonian night sky in 1927 and wrote: “Equatorial Sky, dominion of Ursa Major, the great Saci . . .” (The Apprentice Tourist). Macunaíma is once again mistaken for the one-legged Saci (see chapter 4 notes). The Saci can also transform into the tincuã (squirrel cuckoo), a harbinger of death or misfortune. The German professor who claimed that Ursa Major was the Saci was anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche (1872–1938). The Pemon have a myth about a one-legged man, Jilijoaíbu, who goes up to the sky to become Tamikan, the Pleiades (saga 18). In another myth collection, Indianermärchen aus Südamerika (Tales of the South American Indians, 1927), Koch-Grünberg recounts the story of “Makunaíma and Piá,” in which Makunaíma loses his leg in a snare and becomes the Pleiades; his leg is Orion’s belt.
Selected flora, fauna, and food
Ajuru-catinga means “stinky parrot” in Tupi. The aruaí is a white-eyed parakeet (the same as araguaí and maracanã in chapter 15). The araponga (bare-throated bellbird) is known for its loud call; it disrupts the quiriri, an obscure Tupi word for the never-absolute “silence” of the nocturnal forest (though here it’s the diurnal forest). Matamatá is a vine (the same Tupi word refers to a turtle in chapter 15).
Notes to Epilogue (pp. 179–180)
The guanumbi (Tupi for hummingbird) is a messenger from the dead in Brazilian Indigenous myth and another bird associated with the Saci (see chapters 4 and 17 notes).
The parrot who preserves the Tapanhumas language is based on an anecdote from German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt: on the Orinoco River in Venezuela, he encountered a parrot that none of the local Maypuras could understand because it spoke the language of the extinct Atures people (Views of Nature, 1807).
The parrot flying to Lisbon recalls how the colonial Portuguese would teach the birds to say “Royal parrot, for Portugal,” claiming them as property of the crown (Vicente do Salvador, História do Brasil, 1627).
The story-ending refrain, “And that’s all,” which closes the novel, comes from the Kaxinawa tales collected by Capistrano de Abreu (see also chapters 10, 14, and 17).
Acknowledgments
This version of Macunaíma is dedicated to Macuxi artist Jaider Esbell, who left us too soon, and to all the heirs of Makunaima. Jaider and others expanded my thinking about this book at the 2019 Amazonian Poetics conference hosted by the Brazil LAB at Princeton University, including Maria Virgínia Ramos Amaral, Denilson Baniwa, João Biehl, Jamille Pinheiro Dias, Carlos Fausto, Marília Librandi, Pedro Meira Monteiro, and Lilia M. Schwarcz.
My translation is the fruit of conversations across North and South America and the support of various institutions. I am indebted to: the National Endowment for the Arts; the Brazilian National Library Translation Residency and participants in my workshops at the Biblioteca Nacional and the Casa Guilherme de Almeida; colleagues at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and MacDowell; and students and faculty at universities where I spoke, hosted by César Braga-Pinto, Christopher Dunn, Patrícia Lino, Marcelo Lotufo, Alfredo Cesar Barbosa de Melo, Ramona Naddaff, José Luiz Passos, Luiz Fernando Valente, and Nelson Vieira. Thank you to Eduardo Navarro for Tupi instruction (USP), Marco Antonio Gonçalves for your 2020 anthropology seminar (UERJ), and Júlio Diniz for my introduction to Macunaíma in your 2004 Brazilian literature course (PUC-Rio).
The team at the Mário de Andrade archive at the Instituto dos Estudos Brasileiros (IEB-USP) was central to my research, including Marcos Antonio de Moraes. Former archive director Telê Ancona Lopez and her co-editor Tatiana Longo Figueiredo helped inform where my version would diverge from the text they established for the 2016 edition of Macunaíma (Companhia das Letras). Other interlocutors in Brazil were: Cristhiano Aguiar, Beatriz Bastos, Paula Berbert, Milena Brito, André “KIDIDS” Czarnobai, Alison Entrekin, Emilio Fraia, Angélica Freitas, Marília Garcia, Noemi Jaffe, Bia Lessa, Denise Milfont, Antonio Prata, Iara Rennó, Tiganá Santana, Eduardo Sterzi, Verónica Stigger, and José Miguel Wisnik.
I am indebted to the ideas and support of: Rafaela Bassili, Eric Becker, Sam Bett, Krista Brune, Kathryn Crim, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Isabel Gomez, Tiffany Higgins, K. David Jackson, Madhu Kaza, Erin Klenow, Ananda Lima, Bruna Dantas Lobato, Simeon Marsalis, Erín Moure, Lúcia Sá, Julia Sanches, Kit Schluter, Shook, David Simon, Renata Wasserman, and Tristram Wolff, as well as my MFA students at the University of Iowa and Columbia University. Brenno Kenji Kaneyasu Maranhão was my secret weapon for going over the Brazilian text.
Thank you to Triple Canopy, especially editors Alexander Provan and Matthew Shen Goodman, for publishing the excerpt “Piaimã the Giant” and the essay “Impure Speech,” the basis for my afterword; and for partnering with the Brooklyn Academy of Music to let me program the “Brazilian Modernism at 100” film series, which began a dialogue with Rodrigo Séllos, director of Searching For Makunaíma.
I am grateful to New Directions for taking on this strange book, especially publisher Barbara Epler and my editor Declan Spring, as well as Tynan Kogane and Brittany Dennison; and to John Keene for your wisdom and generosity.
For your loving support, thank you to the Sharnoff family and to the Dodsons: my parents Thao and Jerry, siblings Tran, Minh, and Stephen, and their families. And infinite love to Dan Sharnoff, who has nourished me in countless ways.
Mario de Andrade, Macunaíma
