Mario Quintana’s contribution to literature

The greatest legacy of Mario Quintana is contained, of course, in the writing that he left behind him. Quintana, one of the most distinctive Brazilian poets, was born in Alegrete in 1906. He began his literary career under the influence of French symbolism, but had extensive knowledge of the Iberian literary tradition that also influenced his thinking and writing. French was his second language and he translated classic French and English novels into Portuguese. He worked for many years as a translator for Livraria do Globo in Porto Alegre, one of the largest publishing houses in Brazil. He also worked as a journalist for the Correio do Povo newspaper, where he wrote a column titled “Caderno H”. The author of many volumes of verses, he wrote with remarkable economy and almost without rhetoric.

In Alegrete, Quintana worked with his father and older brother at Quintana Pharmacy. It was specifically trained to aid in the dispensing of medications. The care that must be exercised may explain Quintana’s careful and parallel structuring in many of his poems, which often move carefully from low-key openings to sensational endings. In 1926, Quintana participated in a contest sponsored by the Diário de Notícias newspaper, for the best story, and won the award. The story contains poetic and comic elements and is very well written. Quintana is a master of poetic forms, wit, and irony. The style is very clear and reflected, sometimes without being given a hint of what the climax of the piece is going to be, but always exposing exactly its points.

For more than forty years, Quintana wrote and fought against the atmosphere of pessimism and cynicism, since being an artist in the province was considered a “kind of sin.” It seems that the elite were initially hostile to literature. In any case, Quintana continued to write and revise his poems and epigrams, with great care. He used to say: “It is necessary to write a poem several times to give the impression that it was written for the first time.” Quintana devoted most of his time to his work. During these years, the poet became familiar with literary circles and characters, including Augusto Meyer, poet and critic, and Erico Verissimo, writer and editorial consultant for Livraria do Globo. Throughout his career Quintana would be encouraged and praised by other great writers such as Cecilia Meireles and Monteiro Lobato.

He caught the public’s attention with his first book A Rua dos Cataventos (The street of the weather vanes) in 1940; It was followed in 1946 by Canções (Songs). But it was O Aprendiz de Feiticeiro (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) published in 1950 that built his reputation as a poet of the first order. The exquisite mix between Symbolism and Surrealism, bringing a new music and a new language to Brazilian poetry, is responsible for the meaning of the book. As a great poet, he was able to identify with a more general experience and stand out as a voice of the human spirit. The book was received by Augusto Meyer, his companion in the glory days of the 1920s, as an expression of a new poetry and as an example of natural virtuosity. Let’s read a literal translation of one of the poems below:

The poem

The poem is a stone in the abyss,

The echo of the poem displaces profiles:

For the sake of waters and souls

Let’s murder the poet.

Thus, with notable economy and growing tension, Quintana manages to transmit the poetic language as the last word of spiritual enlightenment. The talent of the poet is presented as a threat to the new religion of logic.

I believe that the attributes of the poet’s work that keep her front and center in Brazilian literature include the use of lyric, a very personal form of poetry, the way poems manage to combine the intellectual with the emotional life, the way poems subvert expectations, the way poems move from everyday life to metaphysical issues, the way poems combine the colloquial and scholarly levels of language, the use of simple repetitions or anaphoric, the breaking of the regularity of the sonnet, the complex play of words and games of the poem. with alliteration and assonance, etc.

Pure poetry is tense in expression, as we see in the previous poem, and it is always unexpected and elegant. Quintana knew, as critics pointed out, preserve his joie de vivre and human spontaneity in times of cold technologies.