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61-652: Born in a family of Portuguese, Spanish, and German descent, Galvão was an "advanced" woman for the moral and social standards of the time. When she was 15 years old, she collaborated with the Brás Jornal newspaper, using the pen name Patsy . She completed secondary education at the São Paulo Normal School in 1928, and joined the Movimento Antropofágico , influenced by Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral . The nickname "Pagu"

122-538: A "violent prejudiced patriarchal society" confronted to "all manner of sexual repression, perversions and taboos". It was this viewpoint that explained Rodrigues' antipathy towards the higher middle-class intelligentsia that made much of the political Left of the period ("I'm not moved by marches of the ruling classes", was he to say before a march of protesters against the military dictatorship ). Conversely, for those Brazilian writers that equated modernism in literature with support for social change, Rodrigues' longings for

183-428: A deeply felt conservative streak shared by other Modernist Brazilian writers ( Raul Pompéia , Octavio de Faria , Lúcio Cardoso , among others) a moral anguish before modern society and the menaces offered by it to traditional religiosity and morals: the flaunting of traditional sexual taboos, specially, being felt as sharply increasing an awareness of moral guilt for living in a society felt as increasingly amoral, where

244-532: A false identity, and was repatriated to Brazil. She broke up with Andrade, after many quarrels. Pagu then resumed her journalistic activity, but was again arrested and tortured by the forces of the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship, and was jailed for five years. During those five years her son was raised by Andrade. Upon leaving prison in 1940, she broke away from the Communist Party, choosing to follow

305-512: A jigsaw puzzle—we are left to interpret the truth from the disjointed hallucinations of a woman lying on an operating table who mixes her life story with the story of a prostitute whose diary she once read. Slowly we discover the mystery of the woman's accident. Nelson Rodrigues married Elza Bretanha Rodrigues (1918-2017) on April 29th, 1940 in Rio de Janeiro (formerly known as Guanabara). They had two children; Joffre (1941-2010) and Nelson (1945). Nelson

366-531: A local doctor. At her trial the woman admitted that she had intended to kill Rodrigues' father Mario, the newspaper's owner; unable to find him, she settled for his son instead. Devastated by his son's death, Mario Rodrigues died a few months later of a stroke, and shortly after that the family newspaper was closed by military forces supporting the Revolution of 1930 , which the newspaper had fiercely opposed in its editorials. The ensuing years were dark ones for

427-472: A lost old order made it impossible to accept the reality of his formal innovations: for the modernist Oswald de Andrade , Rodrigues' literature was "nothing but a wretched newspaper feuilleton", and Rodrigues himself "an ill-educated, [albeit] illustrious, pervert". However, in 1962, Rodrigues' 1958 play Boca de Ouro (The Golden Mouth) - the tragedy of a mobster of the illegal Brazilian animal lottery ( jogo do bicho ) known for his set of gold false teeth, hence

488-464: A middle-aged businessman who gradually realizes his incestuous love towards his daughter on the eve of her wedding, was withdrawn from circulation by government censorship for alleged indecency. As a playwright, Rodrigues is frequently considered a realist , mostly on account of the self-acknowledged influence exerted on him by the dramatic work of Eugene O'Neill - specially in his earlier, "mythical" plays. Actually, in terms of style, Rodrigues' work

549-465: A middle-class neighborhood in Zona Norte to what was then the exclusive neighborhood of Copacabana . In less than two years the family's fortunes would be reversed spectacularly. In 1929, older brother Roberto, a talented graphic artist, was shot and killed at the newspaper offices by a society lady who objected to the salacious coverage of her divorce, allegedly involving an adulterous affair with

610-427: A militant opponent of the regime. In one of his last political interventions, he asked for a general amnesty of political prisoners. Afterwards, in poor health and unable to write during most of the late 1970s, Rodrigues died in 1980 in Rio de Janeiro. After his death, landmark productions of his plays in the 1980s and '90s as well as the publication of several collections of his writings helped secure his reputation as

671-401: A military tribunal in favor of jailed student activist Wladimir Palmeira. He managed to keep among his friends several people who were confirmed leftists at the time, people like theater director Augusto Boal , actor and black activist Abdias do Nascimento , and filmmaker Arnaldo Jabor . In his later years, such support for the dictatorship was tempered by the arrest and torture of his son,

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732-598: A post-colonial cultural politics. In the 1960s, introduced to the work of Oswald de Andrade by concrete poet Augusto de Campos , both visual artist Hélio Oiticica and musician Caetano Veloso saw the Manifesto as a major artistic influence on the Tropicália movement. Veloso has stated, "the idea of cultural cannibalism fit us, the tropicalists, like a glove. We were ‘eating’ the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix ." On

793-411: A powerful local politician. In Rio, Mario rose through the ranks of one of the city's major newspaper and, in 1925, launched his own newspaper, A Critica, a sensationalist daily. By age fourteen Nelson was covering the police beating his father; by fifteen he had dropped out of school; and by sixteen he was writing his own column. The family's economic situation improved steadily, allowing them to move from

854-412: A socialism of Trotskyist line instead. She joined the newspaper A Vanguarda Socialista along with Geraldo Ferraz , art critic Mário Pedrosa , Hilcar Leite and Edmundo Moniz . She married Geraldo Ferraz and from this union her second son was born, Geraldo Galvão Ferraz, on June 18, 1941. She moved in with her two children and her husband. Around the same time she travelled to China, obtaining there

915-418: A week eleven years, writing an estimated 2,000 of these stories. The stories in the column became a laboratory for many of his full length plays. They have since been republished in several collections. Rodrigues also wrote soap operas, movie scripts, and novels. In the 1960s and 70s, he became a well-known TV persona and sports commentator. His fanciful columns on soccer , where he melded scant commentary on

976-472: Is a kind of belatedly Expressionism , combining an appearance of empirical reality (the accurate portrayal of small everyday happenings and the use of the contemporary Brazilian vernacular ) surrounding a kernel of mythologized, intense and unrealistic - to the point of "cartoonish absurdity" - psychological dramatic action. In it, the viewpoint is always that of the small man who acts as the writer's alter ego, with his "obtuse, fanatic, delirious obsessions" -

1037-441: Is a surreal play in which Rodrigues anticipates Ionesco and Beckett's theater of the absurd. Filled with guilt after the death of her son, Doroteia abandons a life of prostitution and seeks redemption in the house of her three cousins, all widows. The cousins disdain all sensuality and live a puritanical life of chastity and privations. To accept Doroteia, they impose one condition, she must disfigure her appearance and become ugly. In

1098-516: Is buried in Cemitério de São João Batista , in Botafogo. Ironically, the writer of tragic stories died a few hours before he won the lottery with his younger brother, Augusto and friends. Much of Rodrigues's career was filled with controversy, a state of affairs he often courted and even relished. He called his theater "the theater of the unpleasant" and had an almost messianic conviction that it

1159-409: Is held up as the symbol of chastity by the family is no longer a virgin. Amid an atmosphere where seemingly realist outlook becomes unreal vulgarity - the mother writes obscenities on the bathroom wall, the father prohibits the family from using toilet paper - the family's many unspoken secrets climax into a gruesome last scene. "Doroteia" (1949), is one of five plays Magdali classified as mythical. It

1220-455: Is its greatest strength, while playing on the modernists ' primitivist interest in cannibalism as an alleged tribal rite. Cannibalism becomes a way for Brazil to assert itself against European post-colonial cultural domination. One of the Manifesto's iconic lines, written in English in the original, is " Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question ." The line is simultaneously a celebration of

1281-482: Is the book she wrote “ Parque Industrial ” which was published in 1933 gives detailing insight of the social and economic issues that Brazil faced during the post World War period. This book follows three young women during the 1930s, a time when the workforce was very misogynistic towards women. Marxism was a major theme throughout this novel as it reflected its significance in the real world specifically during this time period. This book gets pretty gruesome and real due to

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1342-440: Is the self-appointed guardian of his father's celibacy. When Herculano's brother introduces him to a lively prostitute and nightclub singer he is smitten and brings her home to live with him, unwittingly creating a menage á trois with his own son and wreaking havoc on the entire household. Much of the film's humor revolves around Herculano's need to make everything look right and proper to his bourgeois neighbours and friends. In 1973,

1403-520: The Communist Manifesto to "prove" that Rodrigues's column was part of a Communist conspiracy to subvert family values; in 1957, a conservative Rio de Janeiro councilman, present at the opening night of Rodrigues' play Perdoa-me por me traíres (Forgive me for cheating on me) pointed a gun at the applauding audience for condoning what he regarded as an immoral play. During the military dictatorship, Rodrigues' 1966 novel O Casamento , about

1464-460: The Tupi , who practiced certain forms of ritual cannibalism (as detailed in the 16th century writings of André Thévet , Hans Staden , and Jean de Léry ), and a metaphorical instance of cannibalism: it eats Shakespeare . On the other hand, some critics argue that Antropofagia as a movement was too heterogeneous for overarching arguments to be extracted from it, and that often it had little to do with

1525-494: The 1968 album Tropicalia: ou Panis et Circensis , Gilberto Gil and Torquato Neto explicitly refer to the Manifesto in the song "Geléia geral" in the lyric "a alegria é a prova dos nove" (happiness is the proof of nines), which they follow with "e a tristeza é teu porto seguro" (and sadness is your safe harbor). In 1990, Brazilian visual artist Antonio Peticov created a mural in honour of what would have been Andrade's 100th birthday. Momento Antropofágico com Oswald de Andrade

1586-530: The Asphalt), all considered classics of the Brazilian stage. Rodrigues' plays were divided into three categories by critic Sábato Magaldi: psychological, mythical and Carioca tragedies. The latter plays, which include some of his later and best-known productions, are mostly tragicomedies where Rodrigues explored the lives of Rio’s lower-middle class, a population never deemed worthy of the stage before him. From

1647-621: The Left. During much of the 1960s and early 1970s, he included incendiary attacks in his newspaper column against various opponents of the dictatorship—a list that ranged from leaders of leftist movements and guerrilla organizations to the bishop of Olinda Helder Câmara and the Catholic literary critic Alceu Amoroso Lima , eventually leading charges of being an apologist for the dictatorship. One of his collections of articles - where he offered, in an almost daily basis, an exquisite mix of adulation for

1708-580: The Rodrigues family, and Nelson and his brothers were forced to seek work at rival newspapers for low wages. To make matters worse, in 1934 Nelson was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a disease that plagued him, on an off, for the next ten years. During this time Rodrigues held various jobs including comic strip editor, sports columnists and opera critic. In 1941, Rodrigues wrote his first play A Mulher Sem Pecado (The Woman Without Sin), to mixed reviews. His following play, Vestido de Noiva (The Wedding Dress),

1769-469: The beginning, Rodrigues's plays shocked audiences and attracted the attention of censors. Rodrigues's third play (1945) "Álbum de família" ( Family Album ) chronicled a semi-mythical family living on the fringes of society and mired in incest, rape and murder. It was considered so controversial that it was censored and only allowed to be staged 21 years later. Other important earlier plays included "Anjo Negro" ( Black Angel ), an explosive 1946 play held from

1830-511: The child. No paternity test was ever done. He was involved with other women before he rekindled with his wife Elza in the late 70's, ironically, around the time that divorce became officially legal in the mostly Catholic nation. Nelson Rodrigues wrote 17 full-length plays, 9 novels and thousands of short stories. He was most influential as a playwright, and his plays include Toda Nudez Será Castigada ( All Nudity Shall Be Punished ), Dorotéia , and Beijo no Asfalto (The Asphalt Kiss, or The Kiss on

1891-529: The column " A Mulher do Povo " (The People's Woman) and drew the comic strip " Malakabeça, Fanika e Kabeluda ". Pagu was arrested in 1931 by participating in a harbor workers' strike in Santos, the first in a series of 23 detentions in her life. After her arrest she published the novel Parque Industrial (Industrial Park), under the pseudonym Mara Lobo. In 1935 she was arrested in Paris as a foreign communist using

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1952-585: The complex exploration of its characters' psychology and its use of colloquial dialogue. He went on to write many other seminal plays and today is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest playwright. Nelson Rodrigues was born in Recife , the capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco (in the Northeast of Brazil), to Mario Rodrigues, a journalist, and his wife, Maria Esther Falcão. In 1916, the family moved to Rio de Janeiro after Mario ran into trouble for criticizing

2013-450: The day of his birth. A dna test was done in 1996 between Elza's sons and Yolanda's children. The dna test confirmed Maria Lucia, Sonia and Paulo were Nelson's children. Rodrigues became briefly involved with a married woman, Lucia Cruz Lima (1931-2009) who became pregnant with Daniela (1963-2019) during their relationship. The child was born deaf, blind and mute. The relationship deteriorated and Rodrigues moved out, but continued to support

2074-503: The dictatorship and denunciation of allegedly communist plots -he proudly titled O Reacionário (The Reactionary). His support for the dictatorship, however, was by no means unconditional. In 1968, he participated in an anti-censorship rally to protest the closing of eight plays by the military censors, and signed a petition that formally requested that such censorship be rescinded. He also successfully intervened to help release well-known leftist Helio Pellegrino from jail and testified at

2135-462: The doctor's white brother arrives, his wife sleeps with him in the hopes of having a white son. In the 1960 play "O Beijo no Asfalto" (The Asphalt Kiss or the Kiss on the Asphalt), Rodrigues tackled the issue of homophobia. In the play, a recently married man comforts a dying stranger who has just been run over in a traffic accident. A newspaper reporter witnesses the kiss and spins a salacious story that

2196-460: The events that take place in this novel such as one of the ladies getting fired from her job due to her getting pregnant and then jailed for killing her baby who had no skin. This is just one example of the chilling realities within this thrilling novel. This story also gives the perspective of a lady who escaped the struggles of poverty by marrying a rich man named Alfredo who was a major supporter of Marxism. The third main character in this novel gives

2257-687: The first soybean seeds that were introduced in Brazil. In 1945 Pagu launched a new novel, A Famosa Revista , written with her husband Geraldo Ferraz. She unsuccessfully attempted a run for state representative in the 1950 elections. In 1952 she attended the School of Dramatic Art in São Paulo, taking their shows to Santos. Linked to the avant-garde theater, they presented her translation of Ionesco's The Bald Singer. She translated and directed Fando et Lis by Fernando Arrabal , an amateur montage in which

2318-637: The games' happenings with his literary obsessions and stock phrases, are said by Alex Bellos to take have taken football-writing "into a new dimension". During this period, Rodrigues relished his role as an iconoclast and had running feuds with major figures of the Brazilian Left and Right. In the 1970s, at the height of his reputation as a journalist and playwright, Rodrigues health began to fail because of lifelong gastroenterological and heart problems. Rodrigues died on December 21st, 1980, at 68 years of age, of cardiac and respiratory complications. He

2379-489: The immorality of existing social relations - the portrayal of the family as both sacred and failed - that didn't endear Nelson Rodrigues to fellow conservatives: after reading Album de Família , his close friend, the poet Manuel Bandeira , offered him the advice to try his hand at writing about "normal people". In the early 1950s, the myth of Rodrigues as pervert bogey was already well established: in 1953, politician Carlos Lacerda compared excerpts from Rodrigues' column to

2440-558: The life of Pagu was told in the film Eternamente Pagu , the first movie directed by Norma Bengell . Carla Camurati played the title role. A song titled "Pagu" was composed by Rita Lee and Zélia Duncan . Manifesto Antrop%C3%B3fago The Anthropophagic Manifesto ( Portuguese : Manifesto Antropófago ), also variously translated as the Cannibal Manifesto or the Cannibalist Manifesto ,

2501-474: The modernist style of Une Saison en Enfer by Rimbaud , the Manifesto Antropófago is more directly political than Oswald's previous manifesto, Manifesto Pau-Brasil , which was created in the interest of propagating a Brazilian poetry for export. The "Manifesto" has often been interpreted as an essay in which the main argument proposes that Brazil's history of "cannibalizing" other cultures

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2562-435: The old hierarchies and taboos were being actively destroyed. An anguish for order that could be summarized by Rodrigues' famous quote: "all women like to be spanked" ( Toda mulher gosta de apanhar ). During the 1960s, Rodrigues was to write that giving room for the young to offer opinion was to turn society upside down, and that Betty Friedan should be locked in a mental institution. It was exactly this implicit awareness of

2623-454: The pamphlet " Truth and Freedom ": "A bullet got behind, between gauze pads and shattered memories." She returned to Brazil and died on December 12, 1962, due to the disease. Pagu published the novels Industrial Park (the author's edition, 1933), under the pseudonym Mara Lobo, considered the first Brazilian proletarian novel , and A Famosa Revista (The Famous Magazine) (Americ-Edit, 1945), in collaboration with Geraldo Ferraz. Industrial Park

2684-499: The perspective of a communist leader who was also involved with Alfredo. These three different perspectives give a holistic view of what it was like to live in Sao Paulo Brazil during the 1930s. is This novel is a shadow of the struggles Pagu had to face as a young woman in brazil during the early 20th century. Parque Industrial is just one of many pieces of art created by Pagu, which has made her famous to this day. In 1988,

2745-480: The play was made into a film by the same name, which won the silver bear at the 23rd Berlin International Film Festival . In spite of his success as a playwright, Rodrigues never dedicated himself exclusively to the theater. In the 1950s, Rodrigues began publishing daily short stories as part of highly successful column A Vida Como Ela É (Life As It Is). Rodrigues wrote the column six days

2806-466: The play, men are completely absent, except for a pair of boots on stage meant to represent the fiancé of the daughter of one of the widows, Das Dores, who is actually the ghost of a stillborn child. "Toda Nudez Será Castigada" (All Nudity Shall Be Punished) is a "Carioca tragedy' written 1965, and along with The Wedding Dress is one of his most-produced plays. It is the story of despondent widower Herculano who has promised never to remarry. His son, Serginho

2867-475: The playwright as a "divine comedy." Determined to remind us that things are not always what they appear, Rodrigues created the Noronha family, a seemingly normal lower-middle-class Brazilian family headed by the family patriarch, a low-level employee in the Brazilian congress. As the action unfolds, we become aware that nothing is as it seems. Four of the five daughters are prostitutes, and the one teen daughter who

2928-404: The playwright revealed the mastery of his craft by overlapping moments in time and place in order to create a more dynamic vision of reality. The stage is divided into three planes: one for real-time action happening around the character, another for her memories, a third for her dying hallucinations. As the three planes overlap, reality melds with memory and delusion. The play has been described as

2989-445: The small man of the 1950s Rio de Janeiro lower middle-class,who, as Rodrigues himself, had "a single suit, a single pair of shoes", and was torn between the longing for a lost moral order - specially, when a male, to the threat posed to his authority by the incipient female emancipation fostered by the development of an urban milieu and its possibilities of unwitnessed encounters and his (or hers) sexual drives.In short, his work displays

3050-416: The stage by censorship until 1948 that deals with issues of race and incest. In the play — which takes place in a semi-mythical setting, which is never identified — a successful black doctor marries a white woman and their marriage cannot help but reflect the dysfunctional race relations of society at large. The woman slowly kills their black children one by one, and the husband does nothing to intervene. When

3111-428: The title - was to be adapted to the screen by leftist director Nelson Pereira dos Santos , who tried to meld Rodrigues' moralizing streak with Brechtian social drama and American mob film . A fervent, spontaneous anticommunist already before the military coup d'etat of 1964 , Rodrigues was generally regarded as apolitical before the dictatorship, during which he was to engage in constant clashes and running feuds with

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3172-412: The two were lovers. The kiss occurs before the play actually begins and, Rashomon-like, it assumes different characteristics according to who describes it. Slowly, the innuendos and lies begin to corrode the young man's marriage. The play was written in 1960 at the request of actress Fernanda Montenegro . Rodrigues reportedly wrote it in three weeks. "Os Sete Gatinhos" ( Seven Kittens ) was described by

3233-601: The young artist Plínio Marcos debuted. She also translated poems by authors such as Guillaume Apollinaire . Known as a major cultural influence in Santos, Pagu encouraged young talents such as actor and playwright Plinio Marcos and composer Gilberto Mendes . She devoted herself particularly to the stage, especially in encouraging amateur groups. While still working as an art critic, she was stricken with cancer. She traveled to Paris to undergo surgery, but without positive results. Disappointed and desperately sick, Pagu attempted suicide, but did not succeed. Of this episode, she wrote

3294-453: Was a womanizer and left his wife to date freely. Rodrigues had a long term relationship with Yolanda Camejo dos Santos (1932-2018) with whom he had three children; Maria Lucia (1953), Sonia (1955) and Paulo (1957). Yolanda threw Nelson out of her house when she discovered that Nelson was cheating on her. Rodrigues suspected the two girls weren't his but believed the boy was his son, even dedicating his column on Ultima Hora newspaper to Paulo on

3355-565: Was given to her by the poet Raul Bopp , who dedicated a poem to her ( Coco de Pagu ). In 1930, Pagu married Oswald de Andrade, who recently had left Tarsila, then his wife. In the same year, Rudá de Andrade, her first and Andrade's second son is born. Both became militants of the Brazilian Communist Party and together they founded the political newspaper O Homem do Povo (The People's Man), which lasted for eight issues before being closed by São Paulo police. There, Pagu wrote

3416-404: Was hailed as a watershed in Brazilian theater and is considered among his masterpieces. It began a fruitful collaboration with Polish émigré director Zbigniew Ziembinski, who is reported to have said on reading The Wedding Dress , "I am unaware of anything in world theater today that resembles this." In the play, which takes place after the female protagonist is hit by a car and undergoes surgery,

3477-413: Was his duty to hold a mirror up to society's hypocrisies and to expose the darkness in the audience's heart. "We must fill the stage with murderers, adulterers, madmen; in short, we must fire a salvo of monsters at the audience," he said. "They are our monsters, which we will temporarily free ourselves from only to face another day". According to the critic Paulo Francis Rodrigues' constant subject-matter

3538-568: Was installed in the São Paulo Metro 's Republica station . It was inspired by three of Andrade's works: O Perfeito Cozinheiro das Almas deste Mundo , Manifesto Antropofágico , and O Homem do Povo . Nelson Rodrigues Nelson Falcão Rodrigues (August 23, 1912 – December 21, 1980) was a Brazilian playwright , journalist and novelist . In 1943, he helped usher in a new era in Brazilian theater with his play Vestido de Noiva (The Wedding Dress) , considered revolutionary for

3599-474: Was published in 1928 by the Brazilian poet and polemicist Oswald de Andrade , a key figure in the cultural movement of Brazilian Modernism and contributor to the publication Revista de Antropofagia . It was inspired by " Abaporu ," a painting by Tarsila do Amaral , modernist artist and wife of Oswald de Andrade. The essay was translated to English in 1991 by Leslie Bary; Written in poetic prose in

3660-1200: Was published in the United States in translation of Kenneth David Jackson in 1994 by the University of Nebraska Press . A version in Spanish of this novel was published in 2016 and translated by Martín Camps, Professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She has also written detective stories under the pseudonym King Shelter, originally published in Detective magazine, directed by playwright Nelson Rodrigues , and then gathered in Safra Macabra (Livraria José Olympio Editora, 1998). In her work, along with theater groups, she revealed and translated great authors hitherto unpublished in Brazil, such as James Joyce, Eugène Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal and Octavio Paz. One of Pagu’s most famous pieces

3721-554: Was simple: "human beings are prisoners of irresistible passions, taken as shameful by society [...] and usually punished [...] Nelson was a moral conservative, with a talent for depicting emotions below the waist". From the very start of his playwright career, Rodrigues' was labeled by conservative critics as a "pervert" for his nearly obsessive exploration of sexual taboos (adultery, homosexuality, incest) in his plays, novels and columns. However, as various critics have remarked, Rodrigues' theater and narrative fiction themselves partake of

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