Morte e Vida Severina
Morte e Vida Severina (literally, Severine Life and Death, but translated by Elizabeth Bishop as The Death and Life of a Severino) is a play in verse by Brazilian author João Cabral de Melo Neto, one of his most famous and frequently read works. Published in 1955 and written between 1954 and 1955, the play is divided into 18 sections and written in heptasyllabic meter, recalling the popular poetry of northeastern Brazil, where Melo Neto was born and lived for most of his life, the cordel.
Morte e Vida Severina is subtitled Auto de Natal Pernambucano (Auto of Pernambucan Christmas), in a reference to both the biblical perspective of the word and in a broader sense of a new, hopeful beginning for life at its entirety. The play accounts for the journey of a retirante, someone who, fleeing from the droughts that annually ravage the northeastern region of Brazil, proceed either to the city or to fertile lands, often in a repetitive cycle of flight and devastation.
The “retirantes” had also been the theme of the famous novel Vidas Secas by Graciliano Ramos, albeit under a very different point of view. This auto, which chronicles the journey of a single man, the eponymous Severino, down the Capibaribe river, evolves into a metaphysical account that parallels Nativity and reflects the possibility for a meaningful life amid the harshness of the sertão.
Style and structure
"– My name is Severino,
I have no Christian name.
There are lots of Severinos
(a saint of pilgrimage)
so they began to call me
Maria's Severino.
There are many Severinos
With mothers called Maria,
So I became Marias's
Of Zacarias, deceased."
-Morte e Vida Severina by João Cabral de Melo Neto (Translated by Elizabeth Bishop)
Properly, Morte e Vida Severina recounts the journey of a retirante down the Capibaribe river to the city. The auto is formally divided in 18 parts, each compromising a scene, either a dialogue between the retirante and someone or a group of people he encounters in his way or a monologue. However, as to the subject of content, the poem can be analyzed in two sections: a first period, when the retirante is traveling to the city, and a second, compromising what follows his arrival. All of the poem is written in seven syllable metric, which creates a strong sense of singing rhythm, as a imitation of the cordel form.
In the first period, we contemplate Severino passing through several large sugarcane crops, what makes explicit the inequality of land ownership in the region, as well as discover the arid and desolated characteristics of the life in the sertão, so that the Melo Neto crafts a paradox by describing a life that most truly resembles death than anything else. This contradiction is the central point of the poem.
In the second period, the action is most concentrated between Severino and an old man, as the retirante muses on whether he should throw himself into the river and his cycle of repetitive suffering or not. It is in this part that the metaphysical allegory takes place, recreating the scene of Nativity and involving characters that parallel God, Jesus Christ, and the Magi.
Analysis
Morte e Vida Severina begins describing Severino, a retirante from Pernambuco wandering to Recife, the state's capital. Severino’s name comes from the Portuguese word for “severe", severo and means, roughly, something which is severe. However, while the character attempts to identify himself, he is not capable of discerning himself from any other inhabitant of those lands. Suffering from the same misery and following the same destiny, they all are severinos. Thus, the character does not represent a person, but the very idea of a retirante, and by describing the life and death of Severino, the poem is actually portraying the severin life and death that applies to the existence of thousand of people:
"we are many Severinos, equal in everything and in their evil/ (...) And being us all Severinos/ equal in everything in life/ we shall die of equal death/ the same severin death:/ the death that one dies/ of old-age before the thirties/ of ambushes before the twenties/ of famine a bit a day" (freely-translated from portuguese).
Later, Melo Neto, describing the burial of another Severino, criticizes the latifundial style of the economy, which take from man his strength, youth and labor, as seen in the quotation on the left.
"- The grave you’re in
Is measured by hand,
The best bargain you got
In all the land.
– You fit it well,
Not too long or deep,
The part of the latifundio
Which you will keep.
– The grave’s not too big,
Nor is it too wide,
It’s the land you wanted
To see them divide.
– It’s a big grave
For a body so spare,
But you’ll be more at ease
Than you ever were.
– You’re a skinny corpse
For such a big tomb,
But at least down there
You’ll have plenty of room."[1]
Much further in the poem, the retirante reaches the city; however, where he expected to find a better scenario than his previous one, he encounters only the belief that he had just been pursuing his own death. There, he meets an unnamed man with whom he discusses life and his musings on attempting suicide by drowning himself in the river. This conversation, however, is interrupted by the birth of a child, a representation of Jesus Christ, and to everyone around starts singing. Many people bring gifts to the boy, but all of a humble kind: crabs that will keep his life from the mud; newspapers to use as covering on cold night; a doll made of mud, between others. Two Egyptian fortune tellers predict a simple future for the boy, who, they say, will remain forever attached to the miserable reality in which he was born.
Melo Neto then closes the poem with the man answering Severino by acknowledging hat he does not known if life is in fact worthy of being lived in spite of all the sufferings it engenders, but also claiming that life itself had given him an answer and a message of hope, which is quoted in the following box.
"And there’s no better answer
Than to see life
Unravel its thread,
Which is also called life,
See the factory
Life itself stubbornly makes.
See it sprout and grow, like now,
Explode into a new life,
Even when the explosion,
Like that which too place,
Is so small.
Even when it’s so puny,
Even when it’s that of
A severe, Severino life.”[2]
Adaptations
In 1965, Roberto Freire asked the then-young Chico Buarque to make the work into a musical play. It was released by Chico as his second album the following year.
It was also adapted to cinema, though partially, in 1977 by Zelito Viana; in 1981, TV Globo produced a version.
Also, a black-and-white 3D animated version was made by Miguel Falcão.
Elizabeth Bishop made a partial translation of the poem as The Death and Life of a Severino.
See also
References
Neto, João Cabral de Melo. "Morte e Vida Severina". Analysis of the same poem on several sources.
Encyclopædia Britannica, "João Cabral de Melo Neto".