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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Antônio de Castro Alves was born on 1 March 1847 on the Fazenda das Cabaceiras (Cabaceiras Farm) in the state of Bahia, and died in July 1871 in Salvador, the state capital. For this short twenty-four year span of his life he represented, as no one else in Brazil did, the myth of the Romantic poet and hero.
His literary vocation became clear very early on. Coming from a well-to-do family, he studied law in Recife (the capital of Pernambuco), Salvador and São Paulo. He fell in love with a Portuguese actress, Eugênia Câmara, ten years older than himself, and had the deep experience of a love affair with her that shocked the moral provincialism of contemporary Catholic monarchist Brazil. Like many writers of the period he wrote plays, and had great success with the drama Gonzaga, or the Minas Revolution, about the (abortive) attempt to free Brazil from the Portuguese yoke, which had been made in Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century. But it was in poetry – Espumas flutuantes (‘Floating Foam’, 1870) as well as the posthumous A cachoeira de Paulo Alfonso (‘Paulo Alfonso's Waterfall’, 1876) and Os escravos (‘The Slaves’, 1883) – that Castro Alves stood out on the country's literary scene.
1. This poem shows signs of Castro Alves's possible reading (in a French or Portuguese translation?) of a poem by Heinrich Heine: Das Sklavenschiff (‘The Slave Ship’). In any case, the Brazilian poet often put quotations from Heine (in French) at the head of his libertarian poems. But though Heine's influence may be glimpsed in Castro Alves's O Navio Negreiro, the difference in tone between the two poems is evident. It is possible to recognize Castro Alves's own originality and the alterations in sense he made to these few memories if one reads the new French translation of Das Sklavenschiff (forthcoming) by Nicole Taubes, who has most pertinently drawn our attention to this point. We have here a good example of intertextuality and creative reading. (Editor's note)
2. This is a translation into English of the French text which was published in 1998 in Anthologie de la poésie brésilienne, trans. Isabel Meyrelles (Paris: Chandeigne).
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