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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Francisco Alvim, 1997.
After its inauguration in 1960, the city of Brasília, an artificially engineered center for the federal government with no local economy, projected to the nation an image of a sterile environment lacking in tradition and culture. With the progressive dismantling of the military grip on power in the late 1970s, however, culture in Brasília all of a sudden became surprisingly alive, in ways different from the traditional models proposed by Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The considerable concentration of intellectual capital helped the city feel more like a university campus than a center of government power. In the early 1980s, a typical Friday night party would bring together a number of scholars from the University of Brasília, diplomats, and visiting as well as local luminaries, like the artist Athos Bulcão, who designed most of the mosaic surfaces for Oscar Niemayer’s buildings. It was around that time that I met Francisco Alvim, who had moved to the city in 1979 after a five-year hiatus from a distinguished diplomatic career.
Alvim cannot simply be characterized as a “poet from Brasília,” because his intermittent relationship with that city has been punctuated by extended periods abroad—in France, Spain, Holland, and Costa Rica—as a member of the Brazilian diplomatic corps. Neither can one describe him as a poet from Minas Gerais, his birthplace, an area steeped in literary traditions, and home to Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a poet to whom Alvim has often been compared. Least of all, one cannot claim Alvim as a product of Rio de Janeiro, although he wrote his first books of poetry in that city. Nevertheless, in approaching Alvim, one will inevitably be led to consider these three locations and their distinct cultures as a tripartite basis from which his poetry springs forth. The enduring power of Alvim’s work comes perhaps from a sense of dislocation, the nostalgia of having belonged somewhere while living in different places. In his first book, Sol dos cegos (Sun of the Blind, 1968), the poet’s attention appears split between the placidity of Minas and the urban frenzy of Rio, as one micro-collection, Fazenda (Farm), recollects country life through lakes, mountains, and orchards, while another, Cidade (City), juxtaposes images of smoky bars, grass growing amidst asphalt, and the sound of a “sax and clarinet / in the quiet night.” Cryptic observations about power, authority, and the workplace start to appear in the next two books, Passatempo (Pastime, 1974), and Dia sim, dia não (Some Days Yes, Some Not, 1978), threatening to obscure the purely lyrical tenor of the earlier work. A balance of sorts is suddenly achieved around 1981, with Lago, Montanha (Lake, Mountain), a remarkable collection in which the anecdotal fuses with the lyrical to produce a poetry where the urban landscape is captured not without a tinge of ennui—the line “O nada a anotar” (nothingness to be notated), comprises the entire poem Diário (Diary)—filtered through the sensibility of an outsider. The next two collections, O Corpo Fora (The Body Outside, 1988), and Elefante, display Alvim’s mastery of this hard-won style through a series of exquisitely phrased poems that marry the vernacular of these many places to a rich tradition in Brazilian literature that includes Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and João Cabral de Melo Neto.
Francisco Alvim was born in 1938 in Araxá, a small city in Minas Gerais famous for its mineral springs. His father, the local mayor for 10 years, relocated the family to Rio in 1940 in response to an invitation from then President Getúlio Vargas to run the retirement fund for employees in the private sector. His allegiance to Vargas, a populist dictator who twice held power as president, was broken within a few years, and the family returned to Minas Gerais, where his father took a central role as one of the organizers of the insurgent democratic government that opposed Vargas. In 1953, Alvim returned to Rio, where he completed his high school degree and entered law school, which he quit to pursue diplomacy. He graduated from Instituto Rio Branco, the governmental school for diplomatic training, in 1964, the year the military expelled president João Gulart from power and abolished elections for the next 20 years.
