Luiz Gama’s poem ‘No Álbum do meu Amigo J.A. da Silva’ from the collection Primeiras Trovas Burlescas de Getulino (1859, 1861) is formulated as an extended recusatio in response to a friend’s request for a song. In this way, Gama apologizes for his inability to compose refined poems given his circumstances (he is poor and he is black). In this non…[Read more]

In Mário de Andrade’s novel Macunaíma, the eponymous hero is born ‘deep in the forest,’ ‘ink-black’ (retinto), and ugly. Macunaíma’s blackness becomes synonymous with ugliness, just as he becomes beautiful when he becomes white. This paper juxtaposes the circumstances of Macunaíma’s birth, the impression of the surrounding nature on his mother at…[Read more]

This book chapter treats of the appropriation of Greco-Roman classical material in the works of two Brazilian authors. One is Domício Proença Filho, a contemporary Afro-Brazilian poet, the other, Luís Câmara Cascudo, an ethnographer and folklorist writing during the first half of the twentieth century.

This article is an examination and discussion of the history of the term “Roma Negra” as a reference to the state of Bahia in Brazil, with implications for the study of trans-historical comparative slavery and the role of religion in the lives of the enslaved both in Bahia and in ancient Rome.

This article is a book review of Peter Green’s 2015 translation of Homer’s Iliad.

This article is an examination of classicicisms in select works of Brazilian authors Luiz Gama and Machado de Assis.

Este trabalho é um comentário sobre a minha tradução de “Finismundo: a última viagem, poema de Haroldo de Campos.”

This article is a commentary on my translation of “Finismundo: the last voyage, a poem by Haroldo de Campos,” from Portuguese into English.

In the first part of Finismundo, Haroldo de Campos recalls Dante’s solution and reimagines one last journey for the aging hero — a journey post-Ithaca. This is the ultimate journey, the one that puts adventure and the search for the unknown (hubris) above domestic peace. The gods, however, punish Odysseus. The shipwreck is inevitable, and it mar…[Read more]

This article analyzes the speech of the Homeric character Thersites in Iliad 2, with a view to teasing out its sociological implications.