Manuel Bandeira

Manuel Bandeira

Manuel Carneiro de Sousa Bandeira Filho (Recife, Pernambuco, April 19, 1886 – Rio de Janeiro, October 13, 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 20th century.

The intangible is also feminine and erotic. Torn between a sheer idealism of 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.