Mário de Andrade

Mário Raul de Morais Andrade ( born October 9, 1893 in São Paulo, † February 25, 1945 ) was a Brazilian writer and musicologist. It is of paramount importance for the Brazilian literature of the 20th and 21st century, and in the field of ethnomusicology presented his influence far beyond Brazil.

Life and work

Andrade was born in São Paulo, where he spent most of his life. He was a child prodigy on the piano and later took a course of study at the Conservatory of his hometown. This study he interrupted in 1913, when his 14 - year-old brother Renato had died unexpectedly during a football game. Although Mário Andrade joined later studying piano from, but gave no concerts and began studying to become a music teacher with the intention of singing and music theory. At the same time he pursued autodidactic studies in history, art and French literature. He was an avid reader of the poems of Rimbaud and the Symbolists significant. 1917, the year he graduated at the Conservatory, he published his first volume of poetry: Há uma gota de Sangue em Cada Poema ( In each poem there is a drop of blood ), under the pseudonym Mário Sobral.

However, his first book was not very successful, and Andrade began to collect in the countryside of São Paulo and the Brazilian northeastern material about everyday life, folklore and especially the music of Brazil. At the same time he taught piano at the Conservatory in São Paulo. Also at the beginning of the twenties built Andrade in Sao Paulo on a circle of friends consisting of young artists and writers who followed the European model modernist goals. Some of them were later than Grupo dos Cinco ( Group of Five ) known: Andrade, the poet Oswald de Andrade (not related to Mário de Andrade ) and Menotti del Picchia, and the painters Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti. Malfatti had traveled before the First World War, Europe and resulted in São Paulo a Expressionism.

Under the title Paulicéia Desvairada, such as: "Crazy city of São Paulo ," Andrade collected be interrupted for two years poems of varying length and syntactic structure, which consist primarily of Impressionist and fragmentary descriptions and seemingly unrelated statements in the dialect of São Paulo. Upon completion of the collection of poems she added the author with a "Maximum interesting Foreword" to explain the theoretical background. 1922, when he was preparing the publication of Paulicéia Desvairada, he organized together with Malfatti and Oswald de Andrade, the Semana de Arte Moderna ( "Week of Modern Art " ) in order to make the works of the Modernists known to a wide audience. The highlight of the week art las Andrade from the " Paulicéia Desvairada ". Although the reading was interrupted by boos, a large part of the audience was very impressed, and the event was later referred to as a triggering event of the modern Brazilian literature.

Using the in " Paulicéia Desvairada " techniques developed Andrade wrote on two novels: The first, "Love, intransitive verb" ( Amar, Verbo Intransitivo ) was mainly a formal experiment. He appeared in 1933 in an English translation by Margaret Richardson Hollingworth under the title "Miss ". The second novel, published in 1928, was Macunaíma. The eponymous protagonist, a " hero without any character," takes a journey from the Brazilian jungle to São Paulo and back. On his way he meets various Orishas, rises at the end of his life in the sky, where it is the constellation of the Great Bear. Using techniques that are associated with the Magic Realism later, Andrade processed in this novel his studies on language and oral traditions of the indigenous population of Brazil, as well as his personal experience as a mulatto.

Throughout the 1920s undertook further Andrade traveled extensively in Brazil, studied the folklore and music of the interior and published in 1927 a travelogue under the title O Turista Aprendiz ( " The apprentice tourist ") for the newspaper O Diario Nacional.

From the Revolution of 1930 Andrade was not directly affected. After the establishment of a military dictatorship under the leadership of Getúlio Vargas Dornelles he was able to maintain his position at the Conservatory of São Paulo and now head of the Department of Music History and aesthetics. From 1938 to 1941 Andrade was director of the Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Rio de Janeiro, but returned later returned to his old job. His last poetic work, Meditação sobre o Tietê is a declaration of love to the Rio Tietê, which flows through São Paulo and is compared in Andrade's work with the Tagus in Lisbon and the River Seine in Paris.

Works (selection)

• Macunaíma: the hero without any character. From the Brazilian Portug. and with an afterword by Curt Meyer- Clason. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1992