One fine day the hawk and the owl meet and start talking. He's hungry and she's worried about her children's safety. The ending is tragic and at the end the narrator enters to announce some kind of moral of the story.
It appears to be a fable by La Fontaine, but it is Graciliano Ramos in an unpublished book that is only now seeing the light of day because the author's work has just entered the public domain.
It is possible that The Owl's Children would never have been published otherwise. Firstly, because it is a poem. Secondly, because it was done under the pseudonym J. Calisto. Aware of how his work was presented to the public, the author left explicit instructions prohibiting publication of texts written under these conditions after his death.
“He thought it was bad, he considered himself a bad poet,” sums up Ricardo Ramos Filho, grandson of the Alagoas native, who greeted the news of this edition with “surprise and sadness,” describing it as “a huge mess.”
“Graciliano left my father with decisions that we have always respected, and now that they are in the public domain, the first thing they do is disrespect his wishes,” he explains. “I know Graciliano didn’t want that. He revised it by crossing out words because he didn't want anyone to see it, he burned the word with a cigarette butt so no one could figure it out.”
Everything to read
The point is that the family no longer has control over this. Under Brazilian law, a writer's heirs retain full rights to his work only 70 years after his death.
Since the author of “Vidas Secas” died in 1953, since January 1st everyone has the right to print and sell their own copy of one of the masterpieces of the second generation of Brazilian modernism.
Or any other text by Graciliano. This “Os Filhos da Coruja” from 1923 is published for the first time in a book by the children's publication Baião, a branch of the Todavia publishing house, which invited the researcher Thiago Mio Salla to coordinate a publication project by the author, which also includes novels and a Selection of letters with further unpublished material.
“Graciliano is an author represented both literary and commercially, and from an intellectual point of view, the public domain opens up possibilities for publishing the work from other perspectives that add new readings,” explains the organizer.
The intent of his project, he says, is to invest in critical editions that compare different versions of the texts, to provide a systematic overview of the author's body of work in each book, and to select footnotes from top authors such as Antonio Candido, another published name at home.
And yes, publishing material that Graciliano rejected, knowing full well that “interest in Graciliano’s work is very great.” “He wanted to maintain a unified image, yes, but what was made of him after his death was greater than he himself perhaps imagined. We are talking about one of the greatest authors of Brazilian literature.”
According to editor Stéphanie Roque of Companhia das Letras, the possibilities opened up by the public make the Alagoan's work democratic and accessible, which would please the author himself.
“Graciliano was a very severe critic of language and had the same ethical rigor in his characters, who were so socially notable from outside the southeastern axis. These are books that are revitalized with new readings in our context of thinking about identities.” “
The house publishes a trio of his main novels on the PenguinCompanhia label: “Angústia”, “São Bernardo” and “Vidas Secas”. Other publishers such as Antofágica and Clube de Literatura Clássica have specialized in publishing in the public domain, also in print.
The wide distribution of the author, who was a critical success but had a limited audience during his lifetime, began in the 1960s with the Martins publishing house and was consolidated with Record, which has published him since 1975 and has been responsible for sales of around 2 million Copies. Copies of “Vidas Secas” so far.
Since then, the author has shown no signs of slowing down, and Thiago Mio Salla is used to combing through primary sources to discover new texts by Velho Graça since he completed two doctoral theses on his work at the University of São Paulo .
One of the highlights of this work was “Garranchos”, a collection of 80 previously unpublished texts, some under a pseudonym, from Alagoas' inexhaustible press output. It was a work created in collaboration with the author's family, which Mio Salla describes as “always open and receptive”, and was published by Record 12 years ago.
The house where Graciliano lived actually has no plans to stop publishing his texts nor does it plan to break its contract with the Ramos family, which runs until 2029. The decision to conclude an offtherecord agreement in 2018 was an honor of the decadeslong partnership with the heirs, says editorial director Cassiano Elek Machado.
“Of course there will now be dozens more editions and we will lose some of our performance compared to the author, but we are satisfied with the quality and scope of our catalog,” he states.
Record is putting its chips this year “in both premium and economic assets,” according to the publisher. First a nice box with the author's three most famous novels, then a pocket version of “Vidas Secas”. And finally the volume “Prefeito Escritor” with accounts of when in his life before his literary success he was elected administrator of the city of Palmeira dos Índios.
The publisher will continue to pay royalties to the family for at least five years, now with a significant difference. At the initiative of the heirs who founded the Graciliano Ramos Institute, part of the money will go to the Innocence Project Brasil, an organization that advocates for people who are unjustly imprisoned as the author was during the Estado Novo happened to everyone who reads the “memoirs” about prison.
The grandson Ricardo Ramos Filho, who defends his legacy with so much commitment, was born just ten months after his grandfather's death and followed in his footsteps both in his permanent positions and in his profession he dedicated himself not only to literature, but also became president, recently reelected. elected, the Brazilian Writers' Association.
He is someone who understands the risk, and in recent years has sought out leftwing lawmakers in Congress to try to change the law that governs the public realm. Failed.
He immediately and calmly states that he is “all in favor” of making Graciliano’s work public and free to anyone who wants to read it. “This could have happened earlier. The advantage of this law is that the work can be sold without paying a copyright. To make matters worse, many take advantage of it to publish without the slightest care.”
It is somewhat ironic that Os Filhos da Coruja, published as the author's new phase begins, revolves around the fear that his descendants will be devoured a feeling that, after the critical fate of the work, only the widower Graciliano had been responsible for at this point. for four shoots. As we see, the laws of nature are truly inexorable.