Hej :3
Let's talk about one of the best Brazilian writers of all time? (Say "yes" u.ú )
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born on 21 June 1839 in Rio de Janeiro, then capital of the Empire of Brazil (yeah, we were an Empire). His parents were Francisco José de Assis, a mulatto wall painter, and Maria Leopoldina da Câmara Machado, an Azorean Portuguese washerwoman. He was born in a country house, owned by Dona Maria José de Mendonça Barro Pereira, widow of senator Bento Barroso Pereira, who protected his parents and allowed them to live with her. He studied in a public school, but was not a good student.While helping celebrate masses, he met Father Silveira Sarmento, who became his Latin teacher and also friend.
When Machado was ten years old, his mother died, and his father took him along as he moved to São Cristóvão. Francisco de Assis met Maria Inês da Silva, and they married in 1854. The writer had classes in a school for girls only, thanks to his stepmother who worked there making candies. At night he learned French with an immigrant baker. In his adolescence, he met the mulatto Francisco de Paula Brito, who owned a bookstore, a newspaper and typography. In 12 January 1855, Francisco de Paula published the poem Ella (“She”) written by Joaquim, then 15 years old, in the newspaper Marmota Fluminense. In the following year, he was hired as typographer’s apprentice in the Imprensa Oficial (the Official Press, charged with the publication of Government measures), where he was encouraged as a writer by Manuel Antônio de Almeida, the newspaper’s director and also a novelist. There he also met Francisco Otaviano, journalist and later liberal senator, and Quintino Bocaiúva, who decades later would become known for his role as a republican orator.
Francisco Otaviano hired Machado to work on the newspaper Correio Mercantil as a proofreader in 1858.[ He continued to write for the Marmota Fluminense and also for several other newspapers, but he did not earn much and had a humble life. As he did not live with his father anymore, it was common for him to eat only once a day for lack of money.
Around this time, he became a friend of the writer and liberal politician José de Alencar, who taught him English. From English literature, he was influenced by Laurence Sterne, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron and Jonathan Swift. He learned German years later and in his old age, Greek. He was invited by Bocaiúva to work at his newspaper Diário do Rio de Janeiro in 1860. Machado had a passion for theater and wrote several plays for a short time; his friend Bocaiúva concluded: “Your works are meant to be read and not played.” He gained some notability and began to sign his writings as J. M. Machado de Assis, the way he would be known for posterity.
His father Francisco de Assis died in 1864. Machado learned of his father's death through acquaintances . He dedicated his compilation of poems called “Crisálidas” to his father: “To the Memory of Francisco José de Assis and Maria Leopoldina Machado de Assis, my Parents.” With the Liberal Party's ascension to power about that time, Machado thought he might receive a patronage position that would help him improve his life. To his surprise, aid came from the Emperor Dom Pedro II, who hired him as director-assistant in the Diário Oficial in 1867, and knighted him as an honor. In 1888 Machado was made an officer of the Order of the Rose.
In 1868 Machado met the Portuguese Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais, five years older than he. She was the sister of his colleague Faustino Xavier de Novais, for whom he worked on the magazine O Futuro. He married Carolina on 12 November 1869; although her parents Miguel and Adelaide, and her siblings disapproved because Machado was mulatto and she was of purely European ancestry.They had no children.
Machado managed to rise in his bureaucratic career, first in the Agriculture Department. Three years later, he became the head of a section in it.
He wrote several romantic novels, such as: Ressurreição, A Mão e Luva, Helena and Iaiá Garcia. The books were a success with the public, but literary critics considered them mediocre. Machado suffered repeated attacks of epilepsy, apparently related to hearing of the death of his old friend José de Alencar. He was left melancholic, pessimistic and fixed on death. His next book, marked by “a skeptical and realistic tone”: Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, also translated as Epitaph for a Small Winner), is widely considered a masterpiece. By the end of the 1880s, Machado had gained wide renown as a writer.
Although he was opposed to slavery, he never spoke against it in public. He avoided discussing politics. Machado was caught by surprise with the monarchy overthrown on November 15, 1889.
The birth of the Brazilian republic made Machado become more critical and an observer of the Brazilian society of his time. From then on, he wrote “not only the greatest novels of his time, but the greatest of all time of Brazilian literature.” Works such as Quincas Borba (1891), Dom Casmurro (1899), Esaú e Jacó (1904) and Memorial de Aires (1908), considered masterpieces, were successes with both critics and the public. In 1893 he published "A Missa do Galo" ("Midnight Mass"), considered his greatest short story.
Machado de Assis, along with fellow monarchists and other writers and intellectuals, founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was its first president from 1897 to 1908, when he died. For many years, he requested that the government grant a proper headquarters to the Academy, which he managed to obtain in 1905. In 1902 he was transferred to the accountancy’s directing board of the Ministry of Industry.His wife Carolina Novais died on October 20, 1904.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquim_Maria_Machado_de_Assis
Hej då
No comments:
Post a Comment