{"id":145088,"date":"2020-05-15T09:00:43","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T13:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=145088"},"modified":"2020-05-15T16:58:25","modified_gmt":"2020-05-15T20:58:25","slug":"graciliano-ramos-and-the-plague","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/05\/15\/graciliano-ramos-and-the-plague\/","title":{"rendered":"Graciliano Ramos and the Plague"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Graciliano Ramos.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1915, long before he became one of Brazil\u2019s most acclaimed novelists, Graciliano Ramos was a young man trying to make it as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro. I\u2019d always heard that he failed in his pursuit of this career. Shy, homesick, and unsuited to the sophisticated conditions of big-city life, he was a thousand miles and a world away from his remote provincial hometown of Palmeira dos \u00cdndios, located in Brazil\u2019s dry northeastern interior. I imagined him beating a retreat, returning to become a shopkeeper like his father before him, getting cranky at customers who interrupted his reading.<\/p>\n

In 1928, though, Ramos was elected mayor of Palmeira dos \u00cdndios and, by this unlikely route, came into national literary prominence. As a municipal leader, he was required to submit annual reports to the State of Alagoas on budgets and projects, income and expenditures. He treated these reports as a kind of formal challenge. In a narrative divided into subheads such as \u201cPublic Works\u201d and \u201cPolitical and Judicial Functionaries,\u201d he sketched drily hilarious portraits of small-town life, rivalries, corruption, bureaucratic waste. The reports went viral\u2014to import an anachronism\u2014circulating around the country in the press and attracting a publisher\u2019s query: Had he written anything else, by chance? His first novel, Caet\u00e9s<\/em>, was published shortly after, launching a luminous literary career.<\/p>\n

Ramos would eventually write three more acclaimed novels, a childhood memoir, a monumental account of his incarceration during the Vargas dictatorship, and numerous short stories, essays, and children\u2019s books. A 1941 national literary poll named him one of Brazil\u2019s ten greatest novelists. His influence in the years since has been profound and enduring. Most educated Brazilians have read at least one of his books. His last novel, Vidas secas <\/em>(Barren Lives<\/em>),\u00a0has gone into more than a hundred editions.<\/p>\n

Recently, though, I learned that a viral narrative of another sort lurks within his story. After a year in Rio working as a typographer and then proofreader with multiple newspapers, the young man who lamented his timidity in letters home received some ego-boosting news: a number of his nonfiction pieces would shortly be republished in Gazeta de Not\u00edcias<\/em>, one of the most prestigious newspapers of the day. Things looked hopeful, but fate soon intervened. In August 1915, Ramos\u2019s father telegrammed to say that three of his siblings and a nephew had all died in a single day from the bubonic plague then ravaging Palmeira dos \u00cdndios. His mother and a sister were in critical condition. \u201cThere was no longer any way for him to remain in Rio,\u201d the biographer D\u00eanis de Moraes writes in Velho Gra\u00e7a<\/em>, his account of Ramos\u2019s life. Ramos abandoned his big-city ambitions, boarded a boat home, married his local sweetheart, and settled down. He wouldn\u2019t move back to Rio for twenty-three years. <\/p>\n

I translated Ramos\u2019s municipal dispatches because they\u2019d never been published in English and I love their outraged rectitude and sly humor. Learning about the role of the plague in his biography, though, shifted my view on one mayoral passion that stands out in these reports: hygiene. \u201cI care deeply about public sanitation,\u201d he declared in the 1929 report<\/a>. He had communal washrooms built; he passed laws against littering. \u201cThe streets are swept. I have removed from the city the garbage accumulated by generations who have passed through here, and have burned immense trash heaps, which the Prefecture can\u2019t afford to remove.\u201d He got sarcastic when he mentioned detractors: \u201cThere are moans and complaints about my having messed with dust preciously saved up in back gardens; moans, complaints and threats because I ordered the extermination of some hundreds of stray dogs; moans, complaints, threats, squeals, screams and kicks from the farmers raising animals in the town squares.\u201d (I\u2019d forgotten about the dog killings when I read some of my translation of the 1929 report aloud to my kids. They\u2019d been laughing along till then, but now decided they hated this guy. If only I could have explained that dogs can carry fleas and fleas can carry plague and plague decimated the author\u2019s family. Or maybe I should have just skipped that bit.) Ramos even fined his own father for violating the law against letting pigs and goats roam the streets of town. When his father complained, he retorted: \u201cMayors don\u2019t have fathers. I\u2019ll pay your fine but you will round up your animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although he\u2019s still admired for the work he did as a mayor, Ramos got out of that game after two years. His writing career had taken off, though he netted more critical plaudits than cash in his lifetime. I\u2019m sure the writer in him enjoyed the acclaim, but as a father of eight, he had bills to pay. By 1950, he was living once more in Rio and well-connected in the literary community, and so was offered the chance to translate Albert Camus\u2019s The Plague<\/em> into Portuguese. I\u2019d previously assumed Ramos took on the project out of an interest in Camus. On learning about his own tragic losses from the plague, I speculated that he might have been drawn to the novel for what it says about the illness, perhaps even as a charm against some fear at having once more come south, away from his home region.<\/p>\n

As it happens, I didn\u2019t find much proof for either supposition: the critical consensus seems to be that, as one of Brazil\u2019s best-regarded novelists in a time when publishers wanted to bring more contemporary foreign literature to the Brazilian reading public, he was commissioned to translate The Plague<\/em>, though his name wouldn\u2019t appear in the book itself until the second edition. Ramos was originally reluctant\u2014he in fact didn\u2019t think much of Camus\u2019s writing, finding it too ornate\u2014but he needed the money. His solution was to retool the novel, sentence by sentence, in the image of his own chiseled prose\u2014to effectively, as the critic Cl\u00e1udio Veiga put it, treat Camus\u2019s novel as though it were an early draft of one of his own.<\/p>\n

The Plague<\/em> starts out with a description of a place that sounds familiar to readers of Ramos\u2019s books: an isolated provincial town where people are bored, where they work a lot, \u201cinterested most of all in commerce\u2014business keeps them busy, as they like to say.\u201d Camus\u2019s narrator is a reluctant amateur writer, unidentified until the very end. (Ramos, too, centered a couple of his novels on amateur writers, indirectly addressing, as does The Plague<\/em>, problems of self-expression and storytelling legacies.) We know the narrator is a resident of this place\u2014Oran, on Algeria\u2019s northern coast\u2014left to chronicle the mayhem wrought by an outbreak of the bubonic plague. He frequently slides into the collective first-person, speaking of \u201cour town\u201d and \u201cour citizens,\u201d though he refers to himself in the third-person. Among Ramos\u2019s many modifications to Camus\u2019s style and delivery is the elimination of those our<\/em>\u2019s and we<\/em>\u2019s, effacing the sense of community that comes along with those pronouns. And Ramos reduces: he boils sentences down to their essences, not only rendering the narration more distant but making the novel overall terser and tighter.<\/p>\n

It was no more rigorous than the process he used for his original prose, which he\u2014no surprise\u2014described in terms of hygiene. As he famously said in a 1948 interview:<\/p>\n

Writing should be done the way Alagoan laundry-women do their work. They start with an initial washing, wetting the dirty clothes at the edge of a pond or stream, wringing out the cloth, wetting it again, then again wringing it. They blue it and soap it, then wring it, once, twice. After rinsing it, they wet it again, this time by throwing water on it. They beat the cloth on a slab or rock, then wring it again and again, wringing it until not a single drop of water drips from the cloth. Only after having done all this do they hang the clean clothes on a washline to dry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scrub it, pound it, hang it out to dry: that, apparently, was his translation approach as well. I couldn\u2019t help noting a certain irony, reading all this as his translator: I was motivated in large part to translate Ramos into English because I felt he\u2019d been ill-served by translators insufficiently respectful of his stylistic exactitude. And now here he was, radically modifying a French Nobelist who was equally deliberate in his stylistic choices.<\/p>\n

But none of Graciliano Ramos\u2019s translators, present company obviously included, have been among their nations\u2019 premier novelists. So when we ask what Ramos was doing, shrinking Camus\u2019s sentences like a mad laundress, reshaping them to his own constricted vision, we need to remember that it\u2019s as if a late-career Faulkner (to whom Ramos has often been compared for his stark illuminations of an isolated region) were translating him. We\u2019d likely be unsurprised by the hubris and curious about the result.<\/p>\n

Many dogs are shot in The Plague<\/em>. Cats, too. But it\u2019s when the rats start reappearing, scurrying from place to place, busy with their business, that the townsfolk of Oran realize life as they knew it is once more resuming. Toward the end of The Plague<\/em>, Oran\u2019s citizens \u201cthrew themselves outside, in this breathless minute when the time of suffering was about to end and the time of forgetting not yet begun. There was dancing everywhere \u2026 The old smells, of grilled meat and aniseed liquor, rose in the fine, soft light falling on the town. All around him, smiling faces turned up toward the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ever since Susan Sontag crystallized the idea in \u201cAIDS<\/small> and Its Metaphors,\u201d it\u2019s become a commonplace that we think of plagues as invasions. \u201cOne feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else,\u201d she wrote, listing fifteenth-century names for syphilis\u2014the English called it the \u201cFrench pox,\u201d while it was \u201cmorbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese.\u201d We want to believe that plagues visit or are visited upon us from afar, that they are not our own, much less our own fault.<\/p>\n

Camus\u2019s radical innovation was to show the plague as arising spontaneously from within Oran\u2019s population\u2014the book ends by saying the bacterium can lie dormant for years before \u201cawakening its rats to bring death to some happy town\u201d\u2014though since the book is most often read as an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France, the alien-invasion metaphor isn\u2019t much of a reach. But what do you do if, like Ramos, you\u2019re trying to define and valorize a national literature in a country still emerging from colonization, when you can\u2019t make a living from your own writing (even though you think it\u2019s going to make a mint after you die) and your publisher wants you to help popularize European writing by translating a plague-y French novel? Maybe you make that novel your own.<\/p>\n

Despite its final, dark notes of warning, The Plague<\/em> is interested in being reassuring in a way that Ramos rarely is. Camus\u2019s narrator tells us he wrote this account as a testimony to the injustice and violence suffered by Oran\u2019s citizens and \u201csimply to say what a person learns in the midst of an epidemic, that there is more in men to admire than to despise.\u201d Ramos\u2019s novels tend to be circular, not linear. They don\u2019t end with faces upturned toward the sun and encomia on man\u2019s essential goodness. Rather, his books bear witness to the marvelous unseen ways people struggle against their fate and fail to change it, because of their own blindness as much as anything. His characters, despite their ambitions, never quite triumph over human nature, their own natures, or nature itself; plus \u00e7a change, plus c\u2019est la m\u00eame chose<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When Camus\u2019s narrator comes clean about his identity, we learn he is not, paradoxically, either of the two men we have seen actually writing. One of those, who has spent years compulsively revising the first sentence of what will surely be his magnum opus if he can ever make it beyond that opening line, finally achieves some small measure of satisfaction: \u201cI\u2019ve cut all the adjectives,\u201d he says\u2014words Ramos could have lived by.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Padma Viswanathan is the author of two novels, <\/em>The Toss of a Lemon and <\/em>The Ever After of Ashwin Rao,<\/em> as well as plays, personal essays, cultural journalism, and reviews. Her short stories have appeared in <\/em>Granta and <\/em>The Boston Review. Her translation of the Graciliano Ramos novel <\/em>S\u00e3o Bernardo<\/a> was recently published by New York Review Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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