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| 8/1/2016 - Antônio Cícero e Caetano Veloso - New York Airport |
MLA
AUSTIN 2016 - 131st Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association
07 January, 2016 and 10 January, 2016
Around 7200 attendees are expected to join in this Conference.
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| Foto: Fernando Young |
The Department of Spanish and
Portuguese is proud to announce its large contingent at the 2016 MLA
conference, to be held in Austin from January 7th to January 10th, 2016.
• 3:30 p.m. Saturday, 9 January, Brazos, JW Marriott: The Artist as Interpreter: An Interview with Caetano Veloso. Marjorie Gabrielle Perloff of Stanford talks with Veloso, the Brazilian singer-songwriter who’s a founder of the Tropicalismo movement.
The
Artist as Interpreter: An Interview with Caetano Veloso
Saturday, 9 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., Brazos, JW
Marriott
A creative conversation
Presiding: Roland Greene, Stanford Univ.
Speakers: Marjorie
Gabrielle Perloff, Stanford Univ.; Caetano
Veloso, Rio de Janeiro
Session Description:
A founder of the Tropicalismo movement, the
Brazilian singer-songwriter has interpreted his era from the military
dictatorship of the 1960s to the present and transposed avant-garde poetry into
song. He is interviewed by Marjorie Perloff.
Austin 360
January 9, 2016
Nancy Flores
Renowned Brazilian
musician Caetano Veloso
speaks at MLA
speaks at MLA
The first time that
legendary Brazilian artist Caetano Veloso, a founder of the Tropicália
movement, was booed on stage was when he plugged into an electric guitar at a
show.
The left-wing
intellectuals, he says, wouldn’t stand for it. Rock ‘n’ roll music was
considered too vulgar. Decades later, Veloso would learn that a similar
incident happened to Bob Dylan, an artist who he’s often compared to.
On Saturday afternoon, Veloso
captivated Modern Language Association attendees during a
standing room-only featured interview at the group's annual convention at the
JW Marriott in Austin.
The celebrated musician,
often hailed as one of the world’s greatest songwriters, recounted moments from
his storied life from the stigma of rock ‘n’ roll in the early 1960s to his
forced exile from Brazil.
During the 1960s, Veloso
reimagined popular Brazilian music by experimenting with new sounds and
incorporating musical influences from near and far. While he grew up listening
to American music like Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald, it wasn’t until 1965
that he fell in love with rock. “I was one of those pretentious people, not
interested in rock ‘n’ roll, but then I started listening to rock with
different ears.” The Tropicalía movement was born, but its political nature
wasn’t tolerated by the oppressive military dictatorship that ruled Brazil at
the time.
Veloso, along with fellow
Tropicália movement musician Gilberto Gil, was forced into exile in London from
1968–1972. When he met Gil, he said it was like “love at first sight.”
Veloso had seen him on television and adored his music, and credits Gil with
elevating his musicianship. “I looked at his hands and tried to reproduce
what he was doing,” Veloso said.
Their music, though, got
them arrested and the two eventually ended up in Portugal, Paris and then
London. “We never thought of coming to the U.S. because the country was in
turmoil with students protesting the Vietnam War,” he said. Tensions in
Paris at the time were high as well, and Veloso says he had to show his
passport at every corner. He followed advice to head to London, where the
atmosphere was calmer and the music scene was strong, but Veloso never felt at
home.
“I found it dark and
gloomy,” he said. “I missed Brazil enormously. I hated that Brazil had
become my enemy because it was one of the things that I loved most in my life.”
While life in London was
miserable at first, he eventually warmed up to the country more by his second
year there.
When he returned to Brazil,
he had found that his exile had changed him in many ways, but one especially
surprising outcome for him was his yearning to be a father.
He and his wife had
originally planned on not having children.”I have three boys now, and it was
because I went back to Brazil.”
Veloso returned to Brazil
as a national hero, and he continues to be an influential international figure.
In 2003, he wrote his memoir “Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution
in Brazil.”
Caetano
Veloso e Antônio Cícero no MLA
12/1/2016
Caetano
Veloso é entrevistado no maior evento sobre Linguagem Moderna nos Estados
Unidos
Por
Junia Ramos
Graduada
em Comunicação Social- Jornalismo- pelo Centro Universitário de Belo Horizonte-
UNI BH
A Modern Language Association promoveu seu encontro anual em
Austin, capital do Texas, nos EUA, que tem como objetivo fortalecer o estudo e
ensino da língua e da literatura. Entre as muitas atividades do encontro, uma
de grande destaque foi a entrevista com Caetano Veloso, intitulada “O artista
como intérprete”, ocorrida no dia 09 de janeiro. A entrevista foi conduzida por
Marjorie Perloff, professora emérita de línguas, literatura e humanidades da
Universidade Stanford, na Califórnia e Roland Greene.
Como se poderia esperar, a entrevista sucedeu com perguntas sobre
cultura em suas mais variadas dimensões, o que incluiu também a política. A
obra de Caetano foi apresentada pelos organizadores do evento como capaz de
integrar diferentes linguagens, em particular a musical e a poética. O
compositor ressaltou em sua fala a forte influência que recebeu da poesia
concretista brasileira, como no caso da canção “Circuladô de Fulô”, homônima do
poema de autoria de Haroldo de Campos. Caetano ainda ressaltou a extraordinária
capacidade de outros compositores brasileiros como Chico Buarque de conseguir a
síntese entre a linguagem musical e a linguagem poética.
O evento atraiu um grande número de expectadores, em particular
brasileiros. Além dos participantes do encontro anual da Modern Language
Association, intelectuais, artistas e pessoas em geral com interesse na MPB,
que por acaso se encontravam em Austin, foram atraídos para o evento com
Caetano Veloso. Para muitos — como Jorge Alexandre Neves, professor de
Sociologia da UFMG, que se encontra realizando pós-doutorado na Universidade do
Texas — o evento foi uma oportunidade para, de alguma forma, matar as saudades
da pátria natal, bem como de poder assistir um grande artista brasileiro ao
vivo e de perto. De acordo com Jorge, embora Caetano tenha ressaltado em sua
fala que gosta de provocar, característica essa que já lhe rendeu inúmeras
polêmicas intelectuais ao longo da carreira, neste evento ele foi extremamente
sereno, buscando apresentar suas ideias de forma comedida e até conciliadora.
Para Neves, contudo, o mais importante é que “ao final do evento, a impressão
que ficou foi a de que grandes nomes da MPB, como Caetano Veloso, forneceram à
cultura universal uma forma original de síntese moderna da linguagem, em
particular, das linguagens musical e poética”.
Antônio Cícero recita seus poemas
Outra apresentação marcante no evento foi a do poeta e crítico
literário, Antônio Cícero, introduzido por Sônia Roncador, professora associada
do departamento de Espanhol e Português da UT Austin, que o apresentou como
poeta, compositor, filósofo e uma das mentes brilhantes do século.
Além de recitar mais de oito poemas, Antônio Cícero mostrou ao público o processo de criação de um poema. Cícero, explicou como fazer uma letra para uma música a partir de uma melodia dada a ele. “Tinha muita dificuldade pelo fato de não ser músico, mas criei uma maneira própria de marcar notas musicais, de forma que o som das palavras combinassem” ressalta. Cícero salienta ainda que suas inspirações e referências usadas em suas poesias estão relacionadas a outros poetas e suas obras.
Antônio Cícero descreveu para o público como criou letras para melodias que se tornaram músicas famosas para cantores assim como sua irmã Marina Lima, Orlando Moraes, Lulu Santos, Maria Bethânia, Zizi Possi, entre outros. Para finalizar, o poeta recita seu poema mais famoso ”Guardar”, que em 2001 foi incluído na antologia “Os cem melhores poemas do século”.
●
Los
Angeles Review of Books
An
Interview with Caetano Veloso
By Marjorie Perloff, Roland Greene
MAY 1, 2017
THIS INTERVIEW was initiated by Roland Greene
as part of his Presidential Program at the Modern Language Association
Convention, Austin, Texas, January 2016; it was held in one of the smaller
ballrooms at the Marriott Hotel. The room was literally overflowing, with
people filling every inch of floor and hanging from the walls. The audience was
made up not just of convention-goers: many of the hotel personnel came, some of
them long-time fans of Caetano Veloso.
The crowd was no surprise: Veloso regularly manages to fill the Hollywood Bowl and Town Hall. The founder of the movement called Tropicalismo, Veloso fused pop and avant-garde elements, and he has amazing charisma. His interests in philosophy, politics, film, and other disciplines have infused his music with a critical consciousness that is all but unique today; he has often been compared to Bob Dylan and the Beatles. And he is as active as ever, working with other composers, with poets and visual artists.
We both first encountered Veloso through our readings of the great Brazilian Concrete Poets, especially Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, both of whom collaborated with Veloso on “verbivocovisual” compositions. To prepare for the interview, we sent Veloso a set of questions. He was a bit nervous because he feels that his English is not very good; it is actually more than adequate, and when he was at a loss about a certain term, he would ask his friend in the audience, the Brazilian philosopher-poet Antonio Cicero. As time went on, he became quite relaxed.
In the course of the interview, three videos were shown: Caetano Veloso’s performance of his song “Alegria, Alegria” (Happiness, Happiness) on Brazilian television in 1967; the critic Gonzalo Aguilar’s adaptation of Augusto de Campos’s poem “O Pulsar” (The Pulsar) with Caetano’s musical setting; and Caetano’s performance of his song “Sampa” (a colloquial name for São Paulo) on a televised tribute to the de Campos brothers made in the early 1980s. Caetano’s memoir Verdade Tropical (1997), translated into English as Tropical Truth (2002), is referred to quite frequently in the interview.
The video of the entire interview appears in a colloquy titled “Tropicalismo Fifty Years Later” on Arcade. The interview was transcribed by Alexis Pearce and edited and amplified for clarity.
MARJORIE PERLOFF: Let
me begin with a large question. Caetano, you are both a wildly acclaimed pop
star and the favorite artist-performer of the Brazilian Concrete Poets, with
whom you worked for decades, even setting some of their difficult poems to
music. You say in your memoir [Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and
Revolution in Brazil, trans. Isabel de Sena, 2002] that “Tropicália” or
“Tropicalismo” was a very special fusion of popular and avant-garde, “a genuine
blend of the ridiculous aspirations of Americanophiles, the naïve good
intentions of the nationalists, traditional Brazilian ‘backwardness,’ the
Brazilian avant-garde—absolutely everything in Brazil’s real cultural life
would be our raw material.” My question is: What is specifically Brazilian
about this mix? What would you say about the fusion of high and low, your
particular fusion?
CAETANO VELOSO: Well,
the presence of global pop culture (that means mostly American) was part of our
lives, you know. But we wanted to express our own culture, to reaffirm the
national aspect of our personalities without being afraid of being considered
submissive to imperialism as most left-wing nationalists would try to
characterize us. And then you have to take into account the backwardness of
Brazil. We are backward, we are delayed, we are underdeveloped. [Audience
laughs.] “Underdeveloped” is an old word, isn’t it? Now we are emergent.
But back then we still we felt underdeveloped. And so all sorts of things
became our raw material, really. What can I say? The fact that we met the
Concrete Poets in São Paulo was very fortunate because in fact, Augusto de
Campos, one of the three most important Concrete Poets from São Paulo, looked
me up because he had heard one of my songs before Tropicalismo. The song was
called “Boa Palavra” (“Good Word”), and he had liked it. He also read a short
interview I gave to a magazine in Brazil, and he liked these two things and
wrote an article about that song and what I said in my interview [Augusto de
Campos, “Boa Palavra sobre a Música Popular,” Balanço da Bossa e Outras
Bossas (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1968), 59–65]. He didn’t know me. I
was very young, and I didn’t know him either because Concrete Poetry was not
that well known then. So since he looked me up, we got together. We talked a
little, not a little, a lot, because he was talking a long time about Lupicínio
Rodrigues, who is an old samba composer from the south, a black man from the
south. And in fact, in the end, we had a lot to talk about, and then he started
showing me things that they wrote, and first of all things that they liked to
read, from Brazil and from the world. And so I added these things to whatever I
had read before that, these things that these people showed to me.
MP: Do
you think that was a 1960s phenomenon? Or is this kind of conjunction still
true in Brazil to this day?
Well, that was a moment, a period in which high and low mingled and
sometimes got together. But in Brazil, it had a different meaning, because in
Brazil, the majority of our population was illiterate, and at that time, most
people lived in rural areas, in the countryside. And I think that that helped
make pop songs so important to the culture. That was part of our backwardness.
But the result is something that I think could only happen in Brazil. It’s very
much like what happened in the United States. Some things are really parallel.
For example, the first time I sang with an electrified band, a rock band, I was
booed strongly by intellectuals, students, left-wing students, very much like
what happened to Bob Dylan a few years earlier. We didn’t know about it. I
didn’t know that had happened to Bob Dylan when he first played guitar, with an
electric guitar group, but it happened because Bob Dylan was supposed to be a
folk singer, and folk was considered serious. Bob Dylan was a fan of João
Gilberto, a fan of bossa nova. He said this in a sleeve note for one of his
albums, and in his memoir, in his Chronicles. He later remembered that
when he was acoustic and folkish, he was respected and not booed. And the same
thing happened to us. There’s a funny thing in the United States. This kind of
thing seemed to be more easily forgotten. People in Brazil say Brazil has no
memory, but I would say it’s worse in the United States, where people now
assume Bob Dylan was always rock ’n’ roll!
MP: While
we’re talking of things Brazilian, would you say something about your early
life in Salvador, when you first met Gilberto Gil and you got started, and
having a band with your sister?
We didn’t have a band exactly. We worked together; we played together in
the same theater, a small theater that was built by a group of young students
of theater that came from the theater school of the University of Bahia. The
University of Bahia in the late ’50s, early ’60s, was really very, very
important and strong. I came from my hometown of Santo Amaro to live in Bahia
in the 1960s, and I found this environment. I’ll tell you, I saw John Cage’s
music played live in the auditorium of the university. I saw Camus and Brecht
and great authors performed on stage by really good actors. These actors became
nationally known and important, and at the same time Glauber Rocha, the film
director, was beginning to write film criticism, film reviews, whatever, and
also other things. He also wrote about poetry, and he was very young too —
older than me, but still very young. I was 18 then, and I met Gilberto Gil, two
years after I arrived in Salvador and that environment. I met Gilberto Gil. And
that was amazing because in 1959 before I left my hometown, I heard João
Gilberto. And hearing João Gilberto was a revolution in my mind; it was an enlightenment,
really. I knew that something had to happen, something was already happening
and that Brazil could be freer and bigger and could make some kind of original
contribution for world civilization. Because this is what countries should have
as an ambition.
MP: Was this the moment when you came into
contact with Ezra Pound?
Well, Ezra Pound — give me a break! [Laughs.]
MP: [Laughs.] It’s a good story
though.
I’ll tell you. Because I loved so much what João Gilberto did, when I
saw [Gil] playing the guitar the way he did, he was able to reproduce naturally
all those complicated chords and tempos and beats that João Gilberto created,
and to restudy the samba tradition. And I was amazed, and Gil was black. But
you know, he never said he was black or showed any reaction to the fact that he
was black. In Bahia, most people are kind of black. He’s kind of black. [Laughs.]
In my memoir, I say that I am a light enough mulatto to be considered white
even in São Paulo. And Gilberto Gil is a dark enough mulatto to be considered
black even in Bahia. [Laughs.] So I met him. It was love at first sight
because although I did not have half or a fifth of his musicality, of his
musicianship, he liked me. I adored him because I saw him on television. And so
when we got together, he liked me, as if I had played something. I didn’t play
anything back then. I learned from him. I looked at his hands and started to,
you know, try and reproduce what he was doing. And the sounds responded. I play
very little, but he plays wonderfully.
MP: And …
So this was Gilberto Gil. As for Ezra Pound [Laughs], the fact is
that in Bahia I had not heard about Ezra Pound yet. I heard, I read Brazilian
poets, mostly Vinícius de Moraes, Cecília Meireles, most of all Carlos Drummond
de Andrade, and the one who was my favorite, João Cabral de Melo Neto, plus the
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and the Spanish Federico García Lorca. And
that was the poetry I read mostly, but of course I heard of other people, but
not much of Oswald de Andrade. The Concrete Poets in São Paulo told me about
Oswald de Andrade. But the guy who told me about Ezra Pound was a film
director, not a film director, a theater director, Rangel, somebody Rangel,
what was his name? Flávio Rangel. I hardly knew him. He knew who I was, I knew
who he was. Augusto de Campos had written that thing about my song “Good Word.”
It’s a long song, you know … So he saw me in a restaurant or somewhere in Rio,
Flávio Rangel. He said (he had a high-pitched voice): “You must read Ezra
Pound. You must read Ezra Pound!”
MP: So did you?
I didn’t do it immediately. I was like, “Ezra Pound? What’s that?” And
he said, the fact that he thought my song — although Augusto de Campos had
liked it — he thought my lyrics were too long and not concise. And so when I
met Augusto de Campos, he gave me the ABC of Reading, of literature, of
reading literature, and that’s where he talks about concision, Ezra Pound. But
when I went to read the Cantos themselves, they were very, very long. [Laughs.]
So I had to rethink concision, and I almost got it.
MP: You have said that the song “Alegria,
Alegria,” helped initiate Tropicalismo. In your memoir, you recall a chic club
in Salvador called Anjo Azul and composing a song for its audience. You write:
I wanted to create a song in tune with Anjo
Azul’s sophisticated audience, a portrait in the first person of a young person
walking through the streets of Rio; the image of the city would surface from
lists of products, personalities, places, functions. As the song progressed, I
understood that […] what I might call a critical distance emerged — which for
me is a condition of freedom — but there was also the joy inherent in things
immediately to hand.
I think this is very interesting, like
“nothing in my hands or pockets.” That comes again and again. And then you say
that some of the words came from Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Words. And I
also wondered if the idea of walking the streets of the city came from
Guillaume Apollinaire or Blaise Cendrars, whose poetry was quite popular in
Brazil. I am thinking of a walking poem, like Apollinaire’s “Zone.”
I only heard, I only read something by Apollinaire when I met the
Concrete Poets because they were interested in showing me the Calligrammes.
But the long poem about walking, “Zone,” I didn’t read it, no, not then, only
later. But as for Sartre, yes. I just transcribed the little part of the last
paragraph of The Words. In fact, when I read The Words I was so
young that I thought, “This is the best book ever written!” And my friend
Rogério Duarte, who was a little older than me and a lot more cultivated, said
to me, “That shows how ignorant you are.” And I was a little sad. Years — it’s
true — years later, I read Simone de Beauvoir after Sartre died, and in one of
her books she says that The Words is the best book ever written. [Laughs.]
But she had other reasons, I think.
MP: I think so, too. May we have the video?
Video 1: CAETANO VELOSO — Alegria, Alegria (1967)
MP: Isn’t that
great? [Applause.] You look so happy in this film,
very happy, smiling. [Laughs.]
The band was Argentinian.
It was a bunch of Argentinian guys. We didn’t have monitors, really. It was
hard to sing at that time on a TV station in Brazil. Not good monitoring.
MP: But you’re
smiling all the way.
I was smiling.
MP: Very happy. In
the lyrics, the syntax is somewhat dissociated, just the way it is in some of
the poetry of the period. It isn’t straightforward. It starts off looking very
straightforward, but it isn’t really. The words are quite strange and distinctive
and of course so is the music. Now as a young man, you purposefully kept aloof
from the United States, disliking Elvis Presley and rock ’n’ roll — you talk
about that — and wanting to get beyond Brazilian bossa nova. Why did you feel
you wanted to avoid the American influence? How did that work? You once
remarked, “The United States is a country without a name. Brazil is a name
without a country.” Do you want to elaborate on that distinction?
Well, I wouldn’t say I was
aloof from the United States. I grew up listening to Frank Sinatra and Ella
Fitzgerald and Miles Davis and Ray Charles. We knew the United States was
there. The thing is, in my generation — I think it was not that different in
the United States although Americans have forgotten it — but rock ’n’ roll was
not respected. I mean, people who wanted to have good taste and know what good
music is, didn’t listen to rock ’n’ roll. And I was one of those pretentious
people. There’s something that Frank Sinatra said which was very offensive back
then. Later on he had Elvis on his TV program and everything, but in the early
days, he said, “Nowadays music in the United States, in America, is written and
sung by any idiot with a sideburn.” Things like that. And rock ’n’ roll before
the Beatles, before the British added prestige to rock ’n’ roll, it didn’t cut
it. It was like vulgar music for vulgar young people. And that’s where its
energy came from, really. And the energy interested us a lot, but it only
started interesting us from the mid-’60s on — from ’65, ’66 on. Before that, I
just didn’t pay attention to rock ’n’ roll at all, you know, because I was
listening to Chet Baker and Ray Charles and Betty Carter, and that was natural
in my environment. And I think it was not that different here [in the United
States]. So I was not interested in rock ’n’ roll, but in Brazil, some people
were producing rock ’n’ roll. Some people of my own generation were not
respected in the beginning in the same way. But I was not in that group of
people. But American music was very strongly present in my life.
And then in 1965 to 1966, I
started looking at and listening to rock ’n’ roll with different ears. And it
became a very important thing to me, and the energy, and the suggestions of
new, even intellectual, creation really caught me. And that was a scandal, that
was one of the scandalous aspects of Tropicalismo, of Tropicália. The fact that
we were paying attention to rock, and our colleagues, of our generation,
weren’t, and some still aren’t. For example, Chico Buarque, he was not paying
attention to it. But then he understood and he started using things because of
Tropicalismo, and some other people too. But for example, Dori Caymmi, he hates
it even now. He still hates the idea that we were interested in the Beatles in
1966. He still doesn’t accept that. It’s wonderful. He’s a great musician; he’s
a great colleague. He’s incredible, but he’s serious when he says he doesn’t
like it. Nor does Nana Caymmi, his sister. She says, “No, no, no, no,
Tropicalismo, no. They like the Beatles.” But there were those who were
interested in rock from the beginning like Roberto Carlos. Raul Seixas was from
Bahia, the same age as us. And he was doing rock ’n’ roll, But they were not
respected by students, by intellectuals and refined musicians because the
correct thing to do was to enrich harmonies, like in modern jazz and bossa
nova. So the three chords of rock ’n’ roll, and the screaming voice, all that
was just kind of vulgar to our ears. They still are to Dori Caymmi’s ears, but
I fell in love with it in 1965.
MP: Now let’s turn
to a slightly darker chapter of your life — the time of the military coup in
1964 that led to your arrest and imprisonment in 1968, for supposedly
subversive activities. Do you want to tell a little about that? And how you
learned English — it actually has a happy ending in some ways, because it was
because of your exile, first in Portugal and then in London, that you speak
such good English.
Well, first to Portugal,
then to France, then to England. Yes, we lived two and a half years in England
in exile. But there was one little thing I wanted to say, but I forgot —
something about Brazil, about the United States, a country without a name, and
Brazil is a name without a country. I wanted to say something about that
because long before that, Godard put that statement in one of his films, a
dialogue in which a guy asks a girl, “What is this country that is called
United States of America?” America is not the name of the country. America is
the name of the continent. And all Peruvians, Brazilians, Argentinians, they
all say they are Americans, and they are right. So America is not the name of
the country. And United States is not a name, it’s a description. And Brazil
used to be called — the official name of Brazil used to be — United States of
Brazil. And Mexico I still think is the United States of Mexico. It’s a
description. Just say republic, federation, whatever. So the United States
doesn’t have a name, but you people built a country. We didn’t. We had this
name that was just the name of a plant, of a tree that gave color to cloth. And
it’s Brazil. It’s a funny name, you know, and it sticks to your mind for some
reason. And there was a legend in Ireland of an island called Brazil that was
going to be the utopian place in the world. You know it coincides with the name
of the tree. So as for the name, and also we have an unofficial anthem, which
is a song that here is known as “Brasil” [hums the melody] … “Brasil.”
It begins in Portuguese. In Brazil, it is felt as if it were an anthem really.
Even today. And it begins by saying, “Brazil, my mulatto.” The country is
called almost officially “mulatto.” These things are important. These things go
around. The name, the myth of Brazil that is inscribed in its name, so a name
we do have, but we didn’t build the country. That’s why. Well then, you were
asking me something else, and I’m sorry to have interrupted you.
MP: About your
imprisonment and time in jail; it was, you have written, a dark chapter.
The time in jail was horrible,
terrible. For me. I met lots of people who were put in jail, and for them it
was just unpleasant. For me, it was hell. For me, it was a nightmare. I am not
adult enough to face that kind of situation. I was not. And then it was two
months, and I was in solitary first, and I almost went crazy, and then we were
taken to Bahia, and we were under a kind of house arrest for four more months.
We had to report to a colonel every day and could not leave, trespass the city
limits. I could not even go to my hometown, which was 70 kilometers from
Salvador. And then they exiled us. They invited us to leave Brazil because they
didn’t know what to do with us. It was something that they put us in prison,
and we were famous, beginning our careers. It was going to be not easy for them
to explain if it became known. Because the press was censored, things were not
…
MP: But you were
not tried for anything, were you?
No. Trial? At that time,
no. No trial.
MP: So they just
exiled you to Portugal, right, and then to London?
We went to Portugal, we
spent some two weeks there. Then we went to Paris. Our manager was already in
Europe, and he suggested to us to go to London because Paris was in the
hangover of 1968. It was 1969 when we arrived there, and Portugal was still
under a dictatorship, their old dictatorship. And France was still in the
aftermath of the ’68 thing. We never thought of coming to the United States
because it was in turmoil. It was when your students were protesting the
Vietnam War. It was very much like what we were afraid of in Brazil. You can
see films like Zabriskie Point, that Antonioni shot in the United
States — you see what America was like back then. So Europe was supposed to be
calmer in spite of the fact that Paris was in the hangover of the 1968 event.
But it was totally controlled. It was unpleasant because they asked for our
passports in every corner. Then our manager said we better go to London for two
reasons: it’s calm, no asking for passports, and the music is great, as we
knew.
MP: Did you like
London?
No, not at first, no. I
found it dark and gloomy, really, and very different. It’s another planet,
England, it’s a different planet. It still is. It’s a lot more continental now,
as they say, but still, it’s like another planet. So I felt that I missed
Brazil enormously. I hated that Brazil had become my enemy because it was one
of the things I loved the most in my life. The idea of Brazil and the physical
feeling of being in Brazil. These two things are loved by my heart intensely,
so I suffered a lot. We spent two and a half years in London. The first year I
just couldn’t like anything. The second year I was already liking the benches
on the green grass and the way people behaved. The liberal tradition, you know,
of the English people, and that kind of wisdom that they have. They are very
European, but they are not that European. They find balance in everything. They
make a joke when needed. They are always a little distant, but in a nice way.
Mostly.
ROLAND GREENE: A
chapter of your memoir discusses your relationship to the Concrete Poets.
Augusto de Campos was the first to review one of your early albums. You were
close to them throughout your career; only Augusto is still living. And you
praised their radical abandonment of discursive syntax, and then you also say
your songs were themselves a new kind of poetry that you wanted to establish, a
new way of being a poet. Could you talk a little more about your relationship
with them?
I was with Augusto two or
three weeks ago. We went to Brasília because he was being decorated by the
president of the Republic, Dilma Rousseff. And in Brazil, it’s very polarized,
the political situation. And people oppose the president and her party, and
Augusto backs them. And he accepted the decoration mostly because of that. So I
went. He invited me, they invited me, to go and be there and sing two or three
songs too, as part of the homage to him. And so I did. And people said: “How
could you go and be there with Dilma?” But I found it right because I voted for
Dilma, in fact, because I made all my accounts, and I decided to vote for
Dilma. It’s hard, it’s too complicated to explain, but the result is that I
voted for Dilma. And Augusto, given his position, campaigned for her because he
wanted to be clear about it. He’s very, very lively and lucid and creative and
demanding. He’s very demanding and rigorous. He’s still the same guy, and we
see each other from time to time, and we talk. The thing is, you said I said
something about being myself, about being a poet. But it was a different thing.
It was like, I thought that I never wanted to be a poet. I wanted to be a
painter and then I wanted to be a movie director. I wanted to make movies. I
would write things, mostly prose, not poems. I knew I could write. I loved reading.
I liked poetry, but the idea of the poet …
For example, as Godard has
been many times a poet in making his films, I wanted to be a poet in making my
songs, singing them, and playing the part of the songwriter-singer,
singer-songwriter in a way that would have as a result something that would be
called poetry. But not that my lyrics were poetry by themselves, you know. It
was the combination of all things. I remember that Jorge Ben, the Brazilian
black composer who started doing bossa nova. He started doing bossa nova his
way, a very personalized way of doing bossa nova, a more blackish bossa nova
but still during the bossa nova times. He was kind of a conceptual poet because
he would just take the briefing that a filmmaker gave him to explain what the film
was going to be so that he could make a song about the subject of the film. He
just put music to the text he got, to the briefing, you know. Just put music to
the briefing. And then at some other time, he wrote a song in which the verse
was just a list of Dostoyevsky’s titles, novel titles. And somewhere else he
wrote a song that was just copied from a textbook, history textbook, about
black people in Brazil. But from the textbook, you see? He was bossa nova, but
then he started inviting R&B styles for his creation, and he started
playing electric guitar. He was a supertropicalist just at the same time that
we were trying to create that thing that became what is called Tropicalismo. So
I thought he was kind of a super poet.
The best lyricist of our
generation is Chico Buarque. Everything he wrote is perfect. Not a syllable
doesn’t go with a note in the melody. His prosody is perfection, and rhymes,
they are abundant. They are never forced. They are natural sound-wise and
necessary content-wise. He is really a master. But Jorge Ben is a dirtier
thing, and just, you know, transposing existing texts to his songs, and
disappearing and reappearing. The result of it for me was like, “this is
poetry,” you know. And that’s what I meant when I said that I wanted that my
work could be some new kind of poetry.
RG: Let’s look at
an example of one of your own adaptations of one of Augusto de Campos’s poems.
This is Augusto’s poem, “O Pulsar.” The original poem, which we have here,
belongs to the later phase of Concrete Poetry in Brazil in which the poems
become less visceral and more syntactic. You adapted this early on. I have a
copy of the first edition of Augusto’s collected poems, the Viva Vaia, that has a record — a scratchy
record — of you doing “O Pulsar.”
Yes.
RG: So, the
austerity of the melody that you brought to it matches the graphic conventions
of the poem in which, as you can see, a moon, which stands for the “o,” grows
in size over the course of the poem, starting with the first letter of the
poem. And a star that shrinks stands for the letter “e.” So let’s play video
number two, and then after you can tell us about this.
Video 2: O Pulsar de Augusto de Campos con música de Caetano
Veloso
I like it.
MP: [Laughs.] I love it. I think it’s great.
I do. I made two or three more versions of this playing with just my guitar, then with a band with different instruments, but always on this high note, on the star, the drum or whatever, bass drum on the moon. This is a beautiful poem.
MP: Let’s take your story back now a little bit to when you came back to Brazil from London. Do you feel your work changed or you changed? Was that a difficult transition? What was that like? You don’t actually talk about that much in the memoir. That must have been a hard transition.
It was, in fact. I was so happy to be back in Brazil, it really changed everything. I remember that if I was in my car and turned on the radio, and an American or English song came on, I would turn the dial to listen to Brazilian music. And I still do it, yeah, still do it. That didn’t help me much with my English, but what can I do? I was very happy, and I’ll tell you. I and my wife then, we had decided that since the beginning we were not going to have children, just like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but then when we were back in Brazil, in Bahia, I first started feeling the need to have a child, and it was a physical need. And eventually she joined me, and we had a child, and that changed my life so incredibly that I cannot explain. So now I have three children, three boys, and it was because I went back to Brazil. [Laughs and applause.] So my songs changed: rock ’n’ roll now became the noble, expressional, popular music, you know. It was rubbish, but now it was the noble thing. It’s okay. The rock ’n’ roll brigade reacted against the too much MPB [Música Popular Brasileira] aspects of what I was doing when I went back. Then they put me on the other side, “Now he’s Brazilian Popular Music, not rock ’n’ roll.” So it’s been back and forth, this relationship with rock ’n’ roll, and it began when I went back to Brazil. Before I went back to Brazil, I missed Brazil so much that when I was in London, songs I wrote even before that, songs we wrote, although they were not rock ’n’ roll, they admitted the existence of rock ’n’ roll. They admired and loved it. But they were not rock ’n’ roll. But some were more like rock ’n’ roll. And so it happened.
MP: Did you pick up the same friendships and associations when you came back? Brazil must have changed a lot.
Basically, yes. In fact, when we were in Brazil before we were put in prison, some of our colleagues were angry with us. Some wouldn’t even speak with us because we were using electric guitars. Yeah. But then when we were put in prison and exiled, and then we came back, then all of our friends were friends again, although some, like Dori Caymmi, still don’t accept what we did back then. Or he accepts whatever we do now — only when it’s Brazilian enough and harmonically rich enough because you can be very American for such people if you imitate Chet Baker or Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk, but if you show interest in Paul Anka, no.
MP: That’s funny.
RG: The past couple of decades have been such a fertile part of your career. Your music remains so relentlessly exploratory. It’s never nostalgic, right up to the present, right up to the most recent album, Abraçaço. How do you see the phases of your career in the last 20 years or so?
It’s still something I’m exploring. I make an effort to justify the fact that I’m working professionally with music because I thought, I had an illusion that I was going to do it for one and a half years, and then leave it to do something else and leave it to Gil and Gal [Costa] and [Maria] Bethânia and my closest friends to go on with music because I didn’t think I was musically talented enough, and I still don’t. But I realized, I’ve acknowledged that I had made some relevant things, and so I wanted to, and the fact that I was put in prison and had been exiled, that depressed me a bit, not to say a lot. And that made me less courageous to say, “Okay, I’m not going to make music anymore.” I was already making music. So I had to go on with whatever was comfortable for me. The thing took care of itself, you know, and so I followed it, but I wanted to justify the fact that I was doing it. So I’ve been making efforts to sound and look relevant to myself in my own view. So I still feel I’m looking for … I must do something that really does justify my making music.
MP: Do you feel that now that you’re so famous, there are demands on your time that are irritating or difficult?
Sometimes, sometimes, but no. I provoke. I do things that I know are in a way provocations, and sometimes I still do it. I think it makes me feel more alive and can make other people feel more alive.
RG: We’re going to show one more video. This was recorded in the early ’80s. It’s the song “Sampa”; it’s from a Brazilian TV program, and the first person you see in this first shot is the late Haroldo de Campos.
Haroldo!
Video 3: SAMPA - TV Cultura 17/9/1983
 |
|
Durante as gravações no
Sesc, Caetano Veloso conversa com Augusto. Entre eles, Lígia, mulher de Augusto e ao
fundo Haroldo de Campos. Foto: Sérgio Amaral
|
RG: Last thoughts, anything else you want to say that we haven’t asked?
MP: Do you want to say something to the young artists or young university people in the audience that want to be artists? What advice do you give them for their lives in this bad time?
I just want to thank them. I just want to thank you for being interested in our conversation. [To Perloff] I want to thank you for coming here to talk to me. You know I love you. [To Greene] I have to thank you for inviting me. And it’s been a pleasure. I was nervous. I’m always afraid that I’m not going to understand what people say when they speak English. I can speak more or less, but to understand what other people say is not … I’m always needing subtitles.
●
Roland Greene is professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Greene is a Renaissance specialist and editor-in-chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012); his second specialty is Brazilian writing, especially Concrete Poetry, and he is fluent in Portuguese.
Marjorie Perloff is the author of many books on modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics; the most recent are Unoriginal Genius (2010) and Edge of Irony (2016).
● ●
The
Artist as Interpreter: Caetano Veloso at MLA 2016
Mar 11, 2017
Speaker: Caetano
Veloso
Description
The singer and songwriter is interviewed by Marjorie Perloff at the 2016
Modern Language Association Convention in Austin. He discusses his early
encounters with American music, how he views his songs in relation to poetry,
and his collaborations with the concrete poets of Brazil.
A transcript of the interview, edited and augmented for clarity, appears
in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The interview was made possible by the support of the Teresa Lozano Long
Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.
Length: 1:07:10
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