[RESUMO] The first collection of Brazilian poetry by Bob Brown (18861959) brings from oblivion the work of the adventurer, avantgarde poet, farmer, business journalist and inventor of the reading machine, who lived in Brazil from 1919 to 1927 with his wife and led expeditions to the Amazon, where he discovered the archaeological wealth of indigenous peoples.
Published by Syrinx in 2022, Revolution Ocular do Globo, featuring poetry by American Bob Brown and translated by Gabriel Kerhart, brings out of the darkness the work of an avantgarde passionate about the Amazon and steeped in indigenous culture. In the selfportrait poem “Eu Não Morro!” Brown defines Brazil as “my foot that sticks” and China as “my foot that plays”.
The first Brazilian anthology favors the books 14501950 (1929) and The Readies (1930), but also includes My Marjonary (1916) and The South American Cook Book (1939). Geographical Animals, Brown and his wife Rose toured more than a hundred cities on the planet and devoted themselves to the tropical forests.
Gabriel Kerhart’s creative translation corresponds to the typographical transgressions of Bob Brown, a writer who edited his visual poems in calligraphic and ‘rupestrian’ forms and whose books inculcated plastic agility, ideogrammatic synthesis and multicultural vision. Kerhart introduced Brown to the contemporary language of graffiti, embarking on one of Brazil’s most original translation adventures. Brown’s avantgarde poetry was spraypainted on walls and then photographed. What comes into our hands is not content with being a book. Brown is read in the world.
Robert Carlton Brown was born in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, in 1886 and died in New York in 1959. From one end of his life to the other he slipped into the guise of an adventurer, avantgarde poet, inventor of reading machines, collector, farmer and business journalist. While living in Brazil from 1919 to 1927, with relapses in the 1930s and 1950s, he and his wife Rose Brown commuted zigzags between São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and the rivers of the Amazon rainforest.
He edited the BrazilianAmerican financial bulletin and at first glance showed more interest in learning about indigenous art and folk cuisine than Brazilian literature. He struggled to learn Portuguese and celebrated the existence of the word “saudade”. Gourmand, salivating for beef jerky and chicken in brown sauce.
At the height of modernism in 1922, Brown was living in Brazil, but there is no record of an encounter between him and writers equally fascinated by anthropophagy. Incidentally, his interest in the subject was more literal, as he reveals in an antireligious poem. “I’ve been thinking / a lot / about missionaries / cooked in / black pots / by black men / and I always come to the conclusion / why not?”
The poet is still unknown in the Brazilian intellectual world today. Photographed by Man Ray in the 1930s, it circulated among American emigrants in Paris. Friendship or simple dialogue with representatives of the 20thcentury avantgarde Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, HL Mencken and William Carlos Williams did not lead to a wider dissemination of his work, despite the efforts of the poet Jonathan Williams. Publisher of Jargon Books.
In 1965, in the literary supplement to O Estado de S. Paulo, the concrete poet Augusto de Campos had a keen eye for his optical poems and commended the “absence of versified formalism” in the manuscripts and drawings of “14501950”, comparing it the humor and the plastic freedom of a Brazilian contemporary, the poet Oswald de Andrade from “Primeiro Caderno do Aluno de Poesia” (1927).
“His feet are pictured, one in China and the other in Brazil. Oswald’s brazilwood Brazil? Thirty years later Oswald is resurrected, we cannot overlook Brown’s resurrection. His optical poems must be seen,” recommended Campos with a pioneering spirit Essay from the book “À Margem da Margem”, 1989.
In the United States, Bob Brown became known as the “grandfather of the ebook,” as defined by Jennifer Schuessler of The New York Times. Influenced by the Surrealists’ automatic writing and the style of Gertrude Stein, Brown developed the design of an electric reading machine in 1930, in which texts were introduced in scrolls and read on a display.
The inventor wanted to read a novel containing hundreds of thousands of words in ten minutes. Stein, his enthusiast, saw the prototype of the futuristic contraption. In the Ocular Revolution of the Globe anthology, Gabriel Kerhart has included the first chapter of The Readies, which is linked to the visionary invention.
“I am for new ways of reading and writing, and I believe that when he buys something to read, the reading antennae deserves his eyes to be filled,” defended Bob Brown as he developed a telegraphic poetic language in which he immersed himself in Apollinaire . “Modern word bearers are in demand now, readings are taken by machines; microscopic writings on moving tapes that pass under a magnifying glassequipped grid, bringing size to life in the reader’s bird’s eye.”
Brown’s first biography was not published until 2016. The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: a Real Life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through the 20th Century (Through the 20th Century) by Craig Saper compares the chameleonic poet to the character in Woody Allen’s film, Um sich to adapt to different situations.
Saper relies primarily on the couple’s accounts of their travels through the Amazon. The book leaves gaps in Brown and Rose’s daily life in Brazil. It is known that they had houses in São Paulo, Rio and the most idyllic in Petrópolis or that they invested in plantations. There are also mysteries about the social life of the writer and foreign correspondent, who was close to the journalist Herbert Moses.
Traces of Bob Brown’s Brazilian career lie in newspaper collections in Rio. In the library of the National Library his traces appear on the pages of classifieds. On April 13, 1941, in Correio da Manhã, he attempted to hand over a rural estate, the Alto da Serra farm, in Petrópolis: “35,000 square meters, with hydroelectric power, a good well, four casitas and places for 40 more . Robert Carlton Brown, Hotel dos Estrangeiros Phone 257230”.
On May 18, 1941, in Jornal do Brasil, it was the turn of the 45,000 square meters of “magnificent panoramic land” in Petrópolis to be offered for one hundred contos. On the 18th, 20th, 21st and 22nd of this month, Brown’s greatest obsession appeared in ads in JB, Correio da Manhã and Jornal do Commercio. “Buy Indigenous and artistic things from the Amazon, customs curios, necklaces and legitimate Indian paraphernalia. Photographs too. Robert Brown, Hotel dos Estrangeiros”.
Two rare interviews with the writer, absent from his biography, were granted to newspapers now extinct. On September 23, 1941, the reporter in Diário da Noite described his Portuguese as “rescaling German”, packed with r. In a photo he appears in room number 4 on the second floor of the Hotel dos Estrangeiros in Flamengo. “Mr. Brown opens the door for us, smiling and affable, plump, flushed, forehead and shirt sweaty despite the low temperature.”
Around the bed a jumble of suitcases and pottery. “My husband adds his luggage every day and he likes everything to be well organized so it doesn’t break. So no one has enough space for so many different items,” warned Rose Brown.
“Along the walls, native bows, plenty of arrows, straw baskets, mats. On the floor, very old chests with large iron locks, antique furniture, and an abundance of packages of various sizes made of newspaper. On the shelves of a shelf, some curious pieces of ceramics from the peoples who originally inhabited the Amazon jungle,” explained the journalist.
The poet opened the wardrobe and instead of welltailored suits, ceramics from Marajoara and Santarena appeared, some mutilated or in pieces. Bob Brown showed Brazilian government permits to bring the parts to the United States.
“My wife and I did a fivemonth tour of the Amazon and some of its tributaries to collect data for a book. But we saw such beautiful and strange things, we were so enchanted by the local customs and traditions that we understood that work alone would not be enough to satisfy the interest of our North American compatriots.
“Our main idea is to get one of the big Hollywood companies to order a large format nature film to be shot in the Amazon. We have already taken some steps and are sure that the idea will be successful. Americans will appreciate that very much.” Theme. Brazil has this region. Exuberant material that interests all races.”
The Forest Travel Book, written with Rose, was published in 1942. “Amazing Amazon” was never published in Brazil and was reviewed by the New York Times. Biographer Craig Saper praises the unusual nature of the Browns leader, who even ate lunch with fish caught through a hotel window without escaping the exoticism of the meals: “Capybara, deer, wild duck and other occasional game are to the table, but we only eat chicken two or three times a week because the price is prohibitive.”
On the long journey to the Amazon in 1941, Bob Brown blew the money he had accumulated from the Gus Meins screenplay for Nobody’s Baby (1937) and the publisher’s advance on research into Amazing Amazon. While in Hollywood, the couple wrote five treatments of Brazilian stories that took up the renter movement and the MadeiraMamoré railroad project.
Three years later, Brown and Rose returned to Rio and reopened the anthropological wardrobe. On November 19, 1944, Diário Carioca heard from “journalists and archaeologists” who had just arrived from a trip collecting indigenous ceramics in the Amazon Valley. Before crossing the Brazilian border, the couple traveled through Mexico, Peru and Ecuador in search of the artistic heritage of the Mayan and Aztec peoples. They spread out a collection of “black dolls” on the tables. “They come from the Mochicas and Chimus, from the north coast of Peru,” he explained.
“How could they get her over such great distances unharmed?” the reporter asked. “I carried them on my lap like ‘wise men’ and that went through the Yurimaguas, the source rivers of the Huallaga and the Marañón [rios peruanos] to Iquitos,” Rose said.
Brown exhaled joy at his return to Brazil, recalling his presence at the 1922 Centenary of Independence Exposition as a member of the American Commission. “We have spent some of the happiest years of our lives on this land. It’s like it’s our second home,” added Rose. “We wanted to review the places where we wrote the book ‘Amazing Amazon’ in 194041. So we stopped in Santarém for a while because we think it’s the most interesting city on the Amazon.”
During the collection, they were impressed by the archaeological richness of Santarém (PA) and even carried out excavations. “Bob was fascinated by the searches, which returned great results almost every day and generated new enthusiasm. I enjoyed the task of putting the broken items back together and we both barely noticed the time passing,” she explained. “Your work [indígenas da região] it is mature and secure. It is noted that they had a method of learning and careful training. They didn’t have lathes, they modeled shapes and figures by hand. They were true sculptors and did not repeat pieces.”
“In this genre his works can be compared in the most favorable way with those of other contemporaries, not only with those of America but with those of the rest of the world,” concluded Bob Brown, displaying a beautiful vase.
The poet brought the ceramics from Santarém to Hollywood so that they could be incorporated into the set of a film set in the Amazon. World War II thwarted the project and he was content to display his collection in a Los Angeles museum. “This was the first Brazilian exhibition to be seen in Los Angeles. The museum archaeologists and our artist friends exiled from Paris studied the pieces and were enchanted by their superrealism, which aroused their curiosity to know the place they came from.”
Bob Brown’s heart leapt again when he heard about the Orson Welles film project in Brazil in 1942. He tried to work with the team without success. At the time, he was considering founding an InterAmerican Museum to promote the arts of indigenous peoples.
Most of his collection was eventually acquired by the Fundação Brasil Central, founded in 1943, and later found its way into the collection of the National Museum. Rose and Bob Brown’s archaeological treasures were certainly destroyed by the September 2018 fire, but some of the indigenous art collected in Brazil and Peru is preserved at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, which purchased Brown’s pieces in 1942.
These lots include a pipe and sculptures of the Munduruku of Pará, a monkey figurine of an ethnic group from the Xingu River, and a vase, grater and human head sculpture of the Ashaninka of the Loreto region, Peru.
The Browns decided to spend their final years in Brazil. In 1946 a property at 153 Rua Teresa in Petrópolis was put up for sale. With five books set in the country, one of them about the history of Emperor Dom Pedro II, Rose died in Rio in 1952.
Depressed, Brown began writing letters to his late wife in hopes of a literary resurrection, his biographer says. Without his fellow adventurer, Bob Brown returned to the top of Greenwich Village in New York and married an old friend. “Revolution Ocular do Globo” is now setting up its two feet in Brazil.