Kitabı oku: «Brazilian Literature», sayfa 2

Brazilianisms, so-called, make their appearance very early; they are already present in the letters sent by the Jesuits, as well as in the old chronicles. New plants, new fruits, new animals compelled new words. Native terms enriched the vocabulary. Of course, as has happened with us, often a word for which the new nation is reproached turns out to be an original importation from the motherland. One of the oldest documents in the history of Brazilianisms appeared in Paris during the first quarter of the XIXth century and is reprinted by João Ribeiro as a rarity little known to his countrymen; it formed part of the Introduction à l’Atlas ethnographique du globe, prepared by Adrien Balbi and covering the races and languages of the world. The Portuguese section was entrusted to Domingos Borges de Barros, baron and later viscount de Pedra Branca, a warm advocate of Brazilian independence, then recently achieved. This, according to Ribeiro, is supposed to constitute the “first theoretical contribution” to the study of Brazilianisms. It is written in French, and because of its documentary importance I translate it in good measure:

“Languages reveal the manners and the character of peoples. That of the Portuguese has the savor of their religious, martial traits; thus the words honnête, galant, éate, bizarre, etc., possess a meaning quite different from that they have in French. The Portuguese tongue abounds in terms and phrases for the expression of impulsive movements and strong actions. In Portuguese one strikes with everything; and when the Frenchman, for example, feels the need of adding the word coup to the thing with which he does the striking, the Portuguese expresses it with the word of the instrument alone. One says, in French, un coup de pierre; in Portuguese, pedrada (a blow with a stone); un coup de couteau is expressed in Portuguese by facada (a knife thrust) and so on…

“Without becoming unidiomatic, one may boldly form superlatives and diminutives of every adjective; this is done sometimes even with nouns. Harshness of the pronunciation has accompanied the arrogance of expression… But this tongue, transported to Brazil, breathes the gentleness of the climate and of the character of its inhabitants; it has gained in usage and in the expression of tender sentiments, and while it has preserved all its energy it possesses more amenity…

“To this first difference, which embraces the generality of the Brazilian idiom, one must add that of words which have altogether changed in accepted meaning, as well as several other expressions which do not exist in the Portuguese language and which have been either borrowed from the natives or imported into Brazil by the inhabitants of the various oversea colonies of Portugal.”

There follow some eight words that have changed meaning, such, for example, as faceira, signifying lower jaw in Portugal, but coquette in Brazil; as a matter of fact, Ribeiro shows that the Portuguese critics who censured this “Brazilianism” did not know the history of their own tongue. In the XVIIth century faceira was synonymous with pelintra, petimêtre, elegante (respectively, poor fellow, dandy, fashionable youth); it became obsolete in Portugal, but in Brazil was preserved with exclusive application to the feminine. The Brazilian words unknown in Portugal are some fifty in number upon the Baron’s list.

Costa finds that Portuguese, crossing the Atlantic, “almost doubled its vocabulary, accepting and assimilating a mass of words from the Indian and the Negro. Through the influence of the climate, through the new ethnic elements, – the voluptuous, indolent Negro and Indian, passionate to the point of crime and sacrifice, – the pronunciation of Portuguese by the Brazilian acquired, so to say, a musical modulation, slow, chanting, soft, – a language impregnated with poesy and languor, quite different from that spoken in Portugal.”¹⁹

IV

A new milieu and a racial amalgamation that effect changes in speech are bound soon or late to produce a new orientation in literature. The question whether that literature is largely derivative or independent is relatively unimportant and academic, as is the analogous question concerning the essential difference of language. The important consideration for us is that the law of change is operating, and that the change is in the direction of independence. Much has been written upon the subject of nationalism in art – too much, indeed, – and of this, altogether too large a part has been needlessly obscured by the fatuities of the narrowly nationalistic mind. There is, of course, such a thing as national character, though even this has been overdone by writers until the traits thus considered have been so stencilled upon popular thought that they resemble rather caricatures than characteristics. True nationalism in literature is largely a product of the writer’s unconscious mind; it is a spontaneous manifestation, and no intensity of set purpose can create it unless the psychological substratum is there. For the rest, literature belongs to art rather than to nationality, to esthetics rather than to politics and geography.²⁰ The consideration of literature by nations, then, is itself the province of the historian of ideas; it is, however, a useful method of co-ordinating our knowledge and of explaining the personality of a country. If I bring up the matter here at all it is because such a writer as Sylvio Romero, intent upon emphasizing national themes, now and again distorts the image of his subject, mistaking civic virtue and patriotic aspiration for esthetic values, or worse still, deliberately exalting the former over the latter. The same Romero, for example, – a volcanic personality who never erred upon the side of modesty, false or true, – speaks thus of his own poetry: “… I initiated the reaction against Romanticism in 1870…” And how did he initiate it? By calling for a poetry in agreement with contemporary philosophy. Now, it is no more the business of poetry to agree with contemporary philosophy than for it to “agree” with contemporary nationalism. Goethe, reproached for not having taken up arms in the German War of Liberation, “or at least co-operating as a poet,” replied that it would have all been well enough to have written martial verse within sound of the enemy’s horses; however, “that was not my life and not my business, but that of Theodor Körner. His war-songs suit him perfectly. But to me, who am not of a warlike nature and who have no warlike sense, war-songs would have been a mask which would have fitted my face very badly… I have never affected anything in my poetry… I have never uttered anything which I have not experienced, and which has not urged me to production. I have only composed love-songs when I have loved. How could I write songs of hatred without hating!” Those are the words of an artist; they could not be understood by the honourable gentleman who not so long ago complained in the British parliament because the poet laureate, Mr. Robert Bridges, had not produced any appropriate war-verse in celebration of the four years’ madness.

If, then, we note the gradual resurgence of the national spirit in Brazilian letters, it is primarily as a contribution to a study of the nation’s self-consciousness. The fact belongs to literary history; only when vitalized by the breath of a commanding personality does it enter the realm of art. The history of our own United States literature raises similar problems, which have compelled the editors of The Cambridge History of American Literature to make certain reservations. “To write the intellectual history of America from the modern esthetic standpoint is to miss precisely what makes it significant among modern literatures, namely, that for two centuries the main energy of Americans went into exploration, settlement, labour for sustenance, religion and statecraft. For nearly two hundred years a people with the same traditions and with the same intellectual capacities as their contemporaries across the sea found themselves obliged to dispense with art for art.”²¹ The words may stand almost unaltered for Brazil. It is indicative, however, that where this condition favoured prose as against verse in the United States, verse in Brazil flourished from the start and bulks altogether too large in the national output. We may take it, then, as axiomatic that Brazilian literature is not exclusively national; no literature is, and any attempt to keep it rigidly true to a norm chosen through a mistaken identification of art with geography and politics is merely a retarding influence. Like all derivative literatures, Brazilian literature displays outside influences more strongly than do the older literatures with a tradition of continuity behind them. The history of all letters is largely that of intellectual cross-fertilization.

From its early days down to the end of the XVIIIth century, the literature of Brazil is dominated by Portugal; the land, intellectually as well as economically, is a colony. The stirrings of the century reach Brazil around 1750, and the interval from then to 1830, the date of the Romanticist triumph in France, marks what has been termed a transitional epoch. After 1830, letters in Brazil display a decidedly autonomous tendency (long forecast, for that matter, in the previous phases), and exhibit that diversity which has characterized French literature since the Romantics went out of power. For it is France that forms the chief influence over latter-day Brazilian letters. So true is this that Costa, with personal exaggeration, can write: “I consider our present literature, although written in Portuguese, as a transatlantic branch of the marvellous, intoxicating French literature.”²² There can be no doubt as to the immense influence exercised upon the letters of Spanish and Portuguese America by France. A Spanish cleric,²³ author of an imposing fourteen-volume history of Spanish literature on both shores of the Atlantic, has even made out France as the arch villainess, who with her wiles has always managed to corrupt the normally healthy realism of the Spanish soul. Only yesterday, in Brazil, a similar, if less ingenious, attack was launched against the same country on the score of its denationalizing effect. Yet it is France which was chiefly responsible for that modernism (1888-) which infused new life into the language and art of Spanish America, later (1898) affecting the motherland itself. And if literary currents have since, in Spanish America, veered to a new-world attitude, so are they turning in Brazil. From this to the realization that Art has no nationality is a forward step; some day it will be taken. As in the United States, so in Brazil, side by side with the purists and the traditionalists a new school is springing up, – native yet not necessarily national in a narrow sense; a genuine national personality is being forged, whence will come the literature of the future.

As to the position of the writer in Brazil and Spanish America, it is still a very precarious one, not alone from the economic viewpoint but from the climatological. “Intellectual labour in Brazil,” wrote Romero, “is torture. Wherefore we produce little; we quickly weary, age and soon die… The nation needs a dietetic regimen … more than a sound political one. The Brazilian is an ill-balanced being, impaired at the very root of existence; made rather to complain than to invent, contemplative rather than thoughtful; more lyrical and fond of dreams and resounding rhetoric than of scientific, demonstrable facts.” Such a short-lived, handicapped populace has everything to do with literature, says this historian. “It explains the precocity of our talents, their speedy exhaustion, our facility in learning and the superficiality of our inventive faculties.”

Should the writer conquer these difficulties, others await him. The reading public, especially in earlier days, was always small. “They say that Brazil has a population of about 13,000,000,” comments a character in one of Coelho Netto’s numerous novels. “Of that number 12,800,000 can’t read. Of the remaining 200,000, 150,000 read only newspapers, 50,000 read French books, 30,000 read translations. Fifteen thousand others read the catechism and pious books, 2,000 study Auguste Comte, and 1,000 purchase Brazilian works.” And the foreigners? To which the speaker replies, “They don’t read us. This is a lost country.” Allowing for original overstatement, the figures do not, of course, hold for today, when the population is more than twice the number in the quotation, when Netto himself goes into edition after edition and, together with a few of his favoured confrères, has been translated into French and English and other languages. But they illustrate a fundamental truth. Literature in Brazil has been, literally, a triumph of mind over matter. Taken as a whole it is thus, at this stage, not so much an esthetic as an autonomic affirmation. Just as the nation, ethnologically, represents the fusion of three races, with the whites at the head, so, intellectually, does it represent a fusion of Portuguese tradition, native spontaneity and modern European culture, with France still predominant.

We may recapitulate the preceding chapter in the following paragraph:

Brazilian literature derives chiefly from the Portuguese race, language and tradition as modified by the blending of the colonizers with the native Indians and the imported African slaves. At first an imitative prolongation of the Portuguese heritage, it gradually acquires an autonomous character, entering later into the universal currents of literature as represented by European and particularly French culture. French ascendency is definitely established in 1830, and even well into the twentieth century most English, German, Russian and Scandinavian works come in through the medium of French criticism and assimilation.²⁴

V

No two literary historians of Brazil agree upon a plan of presentation. Fernandez Pinheiro (1872) and De Carvalho (1919) reduce the phases to a minimum of three; the first, somewhat too neatly, divides them into that of the Formative Period (XVIth through XVIIth century), the Period of Development (XVIIIth century), the Period of Reform (XIXth century); the talented De Carvalho accepts Romero’s first period, from 1500 to 1750, calling it that of Portuguese dominance, inserts a Transition period from 1750 to the date of the triumph of French Romanticism in 1830, and labels the subsequent phase the Autonomous epoch. This is better than Wolf’s five divisions (1863) and the no less than sixteen suggested by the restless Romero in the résumé that he wrote in 1900 for the Livro do Centenario. I am inclined, on the whole, to favour the division suggested by Romero in his Historia da Literatura Brasileira (1902).²⁵

The fourth division allows for the decidedly eclectic tendencies subsequent upon the decline of Romanticism.

Accordingly, the four chapters that follow will deal succinctly with these successive phrases of the nation’s literature. Not so much separate works or men as the suffusing spirit will engage our attention; what we are here interested in is the formation and development of the Brazilian imaginative creative personality and its salient products.²⁶

CHAPTER II
PERIOD OF FORMATION (1500-1750)

The Popular Muse – Sixteenth Century Beginnings – Jesuit Influence – Seventeenth Century Nativism – The “Bahian” school – Gregorio de Mattos Guerra – First Half of Eighteenth Century – The Academies – Rocha Pitta – Antonio José da Silva.

I

It is a question whether the people as a mass have really created the poetry and legends which long have been grouped under the designation of folk lore. Here, as in the more rarefied atmosphere of art, it is the gifted individual who originates or formulates the central theme, which is then passed about like a small coin that changes hands frequently; the sharp edges are blunted, the mint-mark is erased, but the coin remains essentially as at first. So that one may agree only halfway with Senhor De Carvalho,²⁷ when he writes that “true poetry is born in the mouths of the people as the plant from wild and virgin soil. The people is the great creator, sincere and spontaneous, of national epics, the inspirer of artists, stimulator of warriors, director of the fatherland’s destinies.” The people furnishes rather the background against which the epics are enacted, the audience rather than the performers. Upon the lore and verses of their choosing they stamp the distinguishing folk impress; the creative inspiration here, as elsewhere, is the labour of the salient individual.

The study of the Brazilian popular muse owes much to the investigations of the tireless, ubiquitous Sylvio Romero, whom later writers have largely drawn upon.²⁸ There are no documents for the contributions of the Africans and few for the Tupys, whom Romero did not credit with possessing a real poetry, as they had not reached the necessary grade of culture. The most copious data are furnished, quite naturally, by the Portuguese. Hybrid verses appear as an aural and visible symbol of the race-mixture that began almost immediately; there are thus stanzas composed of blended verses of Portuguese and Tupy, of Portuguese and African. Here, as example, is a Portuguese-African song transcribed by Romero in Pernambuco:

 
Você gosta de mim,
Eu gosto de você;
Se papa consentir,
Oh, meu bem,
Eu caso com você…
Alê, alê, calunga,
Mussunga, mussunga-ê.
 
 
Se me dá de vestir,
Se me dá de comer,
Se me paga a casa,
Ob, meu bem,
Eu moro com você…
Alê, alê, calunga,
Mussunga, mussunga-ê. ²⁹
 

On the whole, that same melancholy which is the hallmark of so much Brazilian writing, is discernible in the popular refrain. The themes are the universal ones of love and fate, with now and then a flash of humour and earthy practicality.

Romero, with his excessive fondness for categories (a vice which with unconscious humour he was the very first to flagellate), suggested four chief types of popular poetry, (1) the romances and xacaras, (2) the reisados and cheganças, (3) the oraçoes and parlendos, (4) versos geraes or quandrinhas. In the same way the folk tales are referred to Portuguese, native and African origin, with a more recent addition of mestiço (hybrid, mestee) material. “The Brazilian Sheherezade,” writes De Carvalho,³⁰ “is more thoughtful than opulent, she educates rather than dazzles. In the savage legends Nature dominates man, and, as in the fables of Æsop and La Fontaine, it is the animals who are charged with revealing life’s virtues and deficiencies through their ingenious wiles… To the native, as is gathered from his most famous tales, skill was surely a better weapon than strength.” Long ago, the enthusiastic Denis, the first to accord to Brazilian letters a treatment independent of those of Portugal,³¹ had commented on the blending of the imaginative, ardent African, the chivalrous Portuguese, and the dreamy native, and had observed that “the mameluco is almost always the hero of the poetic tales invented in the country.” For, underneath the crust of this civilization flows a strong current of popular inspiration. At times, as during the Romantic period, this becomes almost dominant. “We all, of the most diverse social classes,” avers De Carvalho, “are a reflection of this great folk soul, fashioned at the same time of melancholy and splendour, of timidity and common sense. Our folk lore serves to show that the Brazilian people, despite its moodiness and sentimentality, retains at bottom a clear comprehension of life and a sound, admirable inner energy that, at the first touch, bursts forth unexpected and indomitable.” This is, perhaps, an example of that very sentimentality of which this engaging critic has been speaking, for the folk lore of most nations reveals precisely these same qualities. For us, the essential point is that Brazilian popular poetry and tale exhibit the characteristic national hybridism; the exotic here feeds upon the exotic.³²

II

The sixteenth century, so rich in culture and accomplishment for the Portuguese, is almost barren of literature in Brazil. A few chroniclers, the self-sacrificing Father Anchieta, the poet Bento Teixeiro Pinto, – and the list is fairly exhausted. These are no times for esthetic leisure; an indifferent monarch occupies the throne in Lisbon for the first quarter of the century, with eyes turned to India; in the colony the entire unwieldy apparatus of old-world civilization is to be set up, races are to be exterminated or reconciled in fusion, mines lure with the glitter of gold and diamonds; a nationality, however gradually and unwittingly, is to be formed. For, though the majority of Portuguese in Brazil, as was natural, were spiritually inhabitants of their mother country, already there had arisen among some a fondness for a land of so many enchantments.

José de Anchieta (1530-1597) is now generally regarded as the earliest of the Brazilian writers. He is, to Romero, the pivot of his century’s letters. For more than fifty years he was the instructor of the population; for his beloved natives he wrote grammars, lexicons, plays, hymns; a gifted polyglot, he employed Portuguese, Spanish, Latin, Tupy; he penned the first autos and mysteries produced in Brazil. His influence, on the whole, however, was more practical than literary; he was not, in the esthetic sense a writer, but rather an admirable Jesuit who performed, amidst the greatest difficulties, a work of elementary civilization. The homage paid to his name during the commemoration of the tercentenary of his death was not only a personal tribute but in part, too, a rectification of the national attitude toward the Jesuit company which he distinguished. It was the Jesuits who early established schools in the nation (in 1543 they opened at Bahia the first institution of “higher education”); it was they who sought to protect the Indians from the cruelty of the over-eager exploiters; Senhor Oliveira Lima has even suggested that it was owing to a grateful recollection of the services rendered to the country by the Jesuits that the separation between Church and State, decreed by the Republic in 1890, was effected in so dignified and peaceful a manner. Lima quotes Ribeiro to the effect that the province of Brazil already possessed three colegios in Anchieta’s time, and that the Jesuits, by the second half of the sixteenth century had already brought at least 100,000 natives under their guidance.³³ Romero, “scientifist” critic that he was, considered the Jesuit influence “not at all a happy one in the intellectual and esthetic formation of the new nationality.” Of one thing we may be quite certain, in any event: Anchieta’s position as precursor is more secure than his merits as a creative spirit. His chief works are Brasilica Societatis Historia et vita clarorum Patrum qui in Brasilia vixerunt, a Latin series of biographies of his fellow-workers; Arte da grammatica da lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil, a philological study; his Cartas (letters); and a number of autos and poems.

Next to Anchieta, Bento Teixeira Pinto, who flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century, is Brazil’s most ancient poet.³⁴ Much ink has been spilled over the question as to whether he was the author of the entertaining Dialogo das Grandezas do Brazil and the scrupulous Varnhagen, who at first denied Bento Teixeira’s authorship of that document, later reversed his position. Similar doubt exists as to the real author of the Relação do Naufragio que passou Jorge de Albuquerque Coelho, vindo do Brasil no anno de 1565, a moving prose account of a shipwreck in which figures the noble personage of the title, but wherein the supposed author nowhere appears.

To that same noble personage, governor of Pernambuco, is dedicated the Prosopopéa, undoubtedly the work of Bento Teixeira, and just as undoubtedly a pedestrian performance in stilted hendecasyllabic verses, ninety-four octaves in all, in due classic form. There is much imitation of Camões, who, indeed, entered Brazilian literature as a powerful influence through these prosaic lines of Bento Teixeira. “His poem (i. e., the Lusiads of Camões) is henceforth to make our epics, his poetic language will provide the instrument of our poets and his admirable lyrism will influence down to the very present, our own in all that it has and preserves of sorrow, longing, nostalgia and Camonean love melancholy.”³⁵

In the Prosopopéa occurs a description of the recife of Pernambuco which has been looked upon as one of the first evidences of the Brazilian fondness for the native scene. The passage is utterly uninspired; Neptune and Argos rub shoulders with the barbaros amid an insipid succession of verses. Verissimo sees, in the entire poem, no “shadow of the influence of the new milieu in which it was conceived and executed.” The earliest genuine manifestation of such nativism in poetry he does not discover until A Ilha da Maré, by Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, which, though published in the eighteenth century was, most likely, written in the seventeenth.³⁶

The chroniclers of the early colonial period present chiefly points of historic, rather than literary, interest. Pero de Magalhães Gandavo, with his Historia da Provincia de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil (with a verse-letter by Luiz de Camões as preface), published in 1576 in Lisbon, is regarded as the first in the long line of historians; even today he is valuable as a source. Gabriel Soares de Souza, is far better known for his Tractado descriptivo do Brasil em 1587, printed in 1851 by Varnhagen and highly praised by that voluminous investigator for its “profound observation.” … “Neither Dioscorides nor Pliny better explains the plants of the old world than Soares those of the new… It is astonishing how the attention of a single person could occupy itself with so many things … such as are contained in his work, which treats at the same time, in relation to Brazil, of geography, history, typography, hydrography, intertropical agriculture, Brazilian horticulture, native materia medica, wood for building and for cabinet-work, zoology in all its branches, administrative economy and even mineralogy!”

Of less importance is the Jesuit Father Fernão Cardim (1540-1625), whose work was made known in 1847 by Varnhagen under the geographic title Narrativa epistolar de uma viagem e missão jesuitica pela Bahia, Ilheos, Porto Seguro, Pernambuco, Espirito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, etc. It consists of two letters, dated 1583 and addressed to the provincial of the Company in Portugal. Father Cardim was translated into English as early as 1625, being thus represented by the manuscript called Do Principo e origem dos indios do Brasil e de seus costumes, adoração e ceremonias, if this is, as Capistrano de Abreu has tried to prove, really the work taken in 1601 by Francis Cook from a Jesuit bound for Brazil. For, “it was exactly in this year … that Father Fernão Cardim, who was returning to Brazil from a voyage to Rome, was taken prisoner by English corsairs and brought to England.”

There is little profit in listing the men and works of this age and character. According to Romero the chroniclers exhibit thus early the duplex tendency of Brazilian literature, – description of nature and description of the savage. The tendency grows during the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth becomes predominant, so that viewed in this light, Brazilian nativism, far from being the creation of nineteenth century Romanticism, was rather a historic prolongation.

III

The sporadic evidences of a nascent nativism become in the seventeenth century a conscious affirmation. The struggle against the Dutch in Pernambuco and the French in Maranhão compelled a union of the colonial forces and instilled a sort of Brazilian awareness. The economic situation becomes more firm, so that Romero may regard the entire century as the epoch of sugar, even as the succeeding century was to be one of gold, and the nineteenth, – as indeed the twentieth, – one of coffee. Agriculture even before the mines, – as Lima has pointed out, – was creating the fortune of the land.³⁷ “The new society of the prosperous American colony is no longer essentially Portuguese; the mill-owners, well off and intelligent, forming a sort of rural aristocracy, similar to that of the feudal barons, are its best-read and most enlightened representatives. Around this tiny but powerful nucleus revolve all the political and economic affairs of the young nationality. Two profoundly serious factors also appear: the Brazilian family, perfectly constituted, and a hatred for the foreigner, nourished chiefly by religious fanaticism. The Lutheran, English or Flemish, was the common enemy … against whom all vengeance was sacred, all crime just and blessed.”³⁸

In Brazilian literature, the century belongs mainly to Bahia, which during the second half became a court in little, with its governor as the center of a luxurious entourage. Spanish influence, as represented in the all-conquering Góngora, vied with that of the poets of the Italian and Portuguese renaissance; Tasso, Lope de Vega, Gabriel de Castro and a host of others were much read and imitated. And in the background rose a rude civilization reared upon slavery and greed, providing rich material for the satirical shafts of Gregorio de Mattos Guerra, well-named by his contemporaries the “hell-mouth” of Bahia. In Antonio Vieira and Gregorio Mattos, Romero discovers the two antagonistic forces of the epoch: Vieira, the symbol of “Portuguese arrogance in action and vacuity in ideas”; Gregorio Mattos, the most perfect incarnation of the Brazilian spirit, “facetious, informal, ironic, sceptical, a precursor of the Bohemios.” As we shall presently note, opinion upon the “hell-mouth’s” Brazilianism is not unanimous.

The salient chroniclers and preachers of the century may be passed over in rapid review. At their head easily stands Frei Vicente do Salvador, (1564-1636/39) author of the Historia da Custodia do Brasil, which was not published until 1888, more than two hundred and sixty years after it was written (1627). His editor, Capistrano de Abreu, has pointed out his importance as a reagent against the dominant tendency of spiritual servitude to Portugal. “To him Brazil means more than a geographical expression; it is a historical and social term. The XVIIth century is the germination of this idea, as the XVIIIth is its ripening.” The Historia possesses, furthermore, a distinct importance for the study of folk lore. Manoel de Moraes (1586-1651) enjoys what might be called a cenotaphic renown as the author of a Historia da America that has never been found. Little more than names are Diogo Gomes Carneiro and Frei Christovão da Madre de Deus Luz.