The Uruguay     by Jose Basilio de Gama, Translated by Richard Burton Original title: O Uraguai Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by California UP: Berkeley Pub. Date: 1983 Pub. Place: USA Not available for ordering

Published in 1769, The Uruguay is one of several late colonial verse epics on the Indianist theme, and the most admired by the Romantic nationalist writers who took up the subject from the middle of the next century as an expression of Brazil’s literary independence. There was much about it to inspire them. It was the first substantial text in Portuguese to voice regret, albeit in the mouths of its Indian characters, for the tragedy of Conquest, in the celebrated lines: ‘Ye, sons of Europe, would that ne’er the wind/ And wave had borne you hither! Not in vain/ Nature between ourselves and you hath spread/ The water-wilderness, this vasty deep.’ What’s more, its main protagonists are heroic warriors fighting a war of liberation, in defence of natural, ancestral land rights, and they are given an unprecedented moral and intellectual stature, arguing their case on an equal footing with their European counterparts. And it has a memorable tragic Indian heroine, Lindóia, who takes her own life after being cruelly separated from her lover Cacambo, adding a sentimental dimension to the ravages of colonialism.

The historical episode that provides the basis for The Uruguay is the same as that depicted in Roland Joffe’s 1986 movie The Mission, the campaign by joint Portuguese and Spanish armies to enforce the 1750 Treaty of Madrid by expelling a cluster of Jesuit mission settlements from lands on Brazil’s southernmost frontier, on the river Uruguay. For all the destructive impact of the mission experience overall for Brazil’s Indians, it is clear that these were successful, prosperous communities and that the Jesuits enjoyed the unreserved loyalty of their Guarani ‘wards’. Da Gama takes the official anti-Jesuit line of his time, though (the Portuguese Government was in the process of expelling the Order from all of its dominions), denouncing the missionaries’ cynical manipulation of the ‘innocent’ Indians in the rational, anti-clerical language of the Enlightenment.

What makes the text especially interesting is its tension between Da Gama’s justification of the sovereign right of the Imperial authorities to suppress the rebel missions, and his clear sympathy for the Indians’ plight and the natural legitimacy of their cause. Among its most memorable passages are the set-piece debate, in Canto II, between the Guarani envoys and the Portuguese commander about the true meaning of liberty, and the warriors’ heroic and ingenious efforts in Cantos III and IV to undermine the European invaders’ advances, as if working in a magical alliance with their native land. An intriguing detail concerns the likely influence of Voltaire’s Candide on Da Gama’s epic, for the mission Indian Cacambo appears in both texts, which share a similar anti-clerical, Enlightenment perspective. The English edition (presented together with a facsimile of the original Portuguese manuscript) is a posthumously published nineteenth-century version by Richard F. Burton, the famous translator of the Arabian Nights, who was British Consul in Santos between 1865 and 1868.

‘All men know/ How heaven bestowed these fair broad plains we tread/ Free to our fathers and in freedom we/ From our forbears received as heritage/ And free our children shall from us receive./ We hate, we still refuse to bear the yokes,/ Save that the heavens vouchsafed to reverend hands./ The wingèd shaft shall judge between our feuds/ Within a little while and shall your world/ (If of humanity one trace remain)/ Decide betwixt us twain if we defend/ Thou justice, we our God and father-land.’/

‘In fine ’tis war ye want, war ye shall have,’/ Rejoined our General. ‘You may now depart/ For open lies the path.’ 63-64