Produced by Todd Fine and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) BRAZILIAN TALES TRANSLATED FROM THE PORTUGUESE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ISAAC GOLDBERG Author of "Studies in Spanish-American Literature," etc. Boston The Four Seas Company 1921 _Copyright, 1921, by_ THE FOUR SEAS COMPANY Boston, Mass., U. S. A. The Four Seas Press CONTENTS Page PRELIMINARY REMARKS 7 THE ATTENDANT'S CONFESSION 43 BY JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS THE FORTUNE-TELLER 65 BY JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS LIFE 87 BY JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS THE VENGEANCE OF FELIX 107 BY JOSE MEDEIROS E ALBUQUERQUE THE PIGEONS 121 BY COELHO NETTO AUNT ZEZE'S TEARS 139 BY CARMEN DOLORES TO J. D. M. FORD SMITH PROFESSOR OF THE FRENCH AND SPANISH LANGUAGES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY SOME INFORMAL PRELIMINARY REMARKS The noted Brazilian critic, Jose Verissimo, in a short but important essay on the deficiencies of his country's letters, has expressed serious doubt as to whether there exists a genuinely Brazilian literature. "I do not know," he writes, "whether the existence of an entirely independent literature is possible without an entirely independent language." In this sense Verissimo would deny the existence of a Swiss, or a Belgian, literature. In this sense, too, it was no doubt once possible, with no small measure of justification, to deny the existence of an American, as distinguished from an English, literature. Yet, despite the subtle psychic bonds that link identity of speech to similarity of thought, the environment (which helps to shape pronunciation as well as vocabulary and the language itself) is, from the standpoint of literature, little removed from language as a determining factor. Looking at the question, however, from the purely linguistic standpoint, it is important to remember that the Spanish of Spanish America is more different from the parent tongue than is the English of this country from that of the mother nation. Similar changes have taken place in the Portuguese spoken in Brazil. Yet who would now pretend, on the basis of linguistic similarity, to say that there is no United States literature as distinguished from English literature? After all, is it not national life, as much as national language, that makes literature? And by an inversion of Verissimo's standard may we not come face to face with a state of affairs in which different literatures exist within the same tongue? Indeed, is not such a