An interview with Adalberto Müller by Mariana Machová and Tereza Zavadilová
“Ecological” writers were active in Brazil long before ecocriticism became an academic concept in Euro-American literary theory. This is noted in an interview by Brazilian literary theorist Adalberto Müller, who, among other activities, has translated the works of American poet Emily Dickinson into Portuguese. Today, he focuses on Amazonian indigenous communities of the Tupí-Guaraní language group and their verbal acts. These communities do not distinguish between nature and culture – sometimes they do not even know the concept of “nature.” What the West is now rediscovering as ecological wisdom has, for them, always been a natural way of thinking.
Mariana Machová: When we say ecopoetics—or, in a broader sense, ecocriticism—what does that mean to you?
Adalberto Müller: First of all, we need to define the context here—to find what we in Brazil call Lugar de fala,1 i.e., “place of speech.” I will speak here from the position of someone who deals with issues relating to Brazil’s Indigenous population, on the one hand, and with poetry and translation, on the other.
In our country, we are very sensitive to environmental issues. Especially after the death of Chico Mendes,2 these issues have gradually become more and more urgent. And now we are very much aware of how important it is for our rainforests to survive the current devastation. We live in a country that has one of the largest areas of natural forest in the world. We also have a total of 862 Indigenous Territories that occupy an area of 1,229,841 km2, and the Indigenous people are strongly concerned with the way agribusiness and cattle farming are devastating large areas of forests surrounding the ancestral woods. Things being so, it is naturally a very sensitive topic in Brazilian literature and poetry as well especially for poets and writers concerned with environment and indigenous issues, like João Guimarães Rosa, Raul Bopp, Manoel de Barros, Leonardo Froes and Ailton Krenak, an indigenous person who is one of our best contemporary writers.
Tereza Zavadilová: Which Brazilian authors associated with the theme of the environment and its protection do you consider particularly significant?
AM: Even before the terms ecopoetry or ecocriticism began to be used in academia, we already had at least three important writers who dealt with nature and environmental themes. One was João Guimarães Rosa (1908–1967), the author of Buriti and one of the most important writers of the 20th century, who was exceptional in that he had the awareness of nature and the environment that I mentioned at the beginning. Secondly, Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), who was roughly his contemporary and also had this ecological awareness—especially in her later novels, such as The Stream of Life (Água Viva, 1973). And I can also mention the poet Manoel de Barros (1916–2014). He had a rather unusual story; he was an intellectual from the Brazilian bohemian elite, but in the 1950s he left this scene and became a cattle breeder in the Pantanal, one of the largest wetland areas in the world in the southwest of the country and an ecosystem characterized by an enormous diversity of wild birds and animals.
Cattle breeding was very developed in the Pantanal at that time—and I mean that in a good way, not the kind of breeding we know today… Manoel de Barros began to raise cattle according to the old ways. He read Virgil and at the same time studied everything about working in the fields and raising livestock. And he began to write something very different from anything that had existed in Brazilian literature until then. He deeply understood that Pantanal’s nature could affect the very nature of poetic language, that birds could perch in the lines of the text and sing strange tunes. And not only birds, but all kinds of creatures are poetic for Manoel de Barros. One of his most famous quotes is: “Worms aerate the soil; poets aerate language.”
TZ: Can we say that in Brazil ecological awareness was naturally reflected in literature long before people started talking about ecocriticism?
AM: Exactly. Although in Brazil we may not place as much emphasis on (academic) ecocriticism as you do in Europe, this is precisely how we gradually became aware of the relationship between literature and ecological issues. Unlike industrialized countries, we live alongside a large population of people who do not belong to modernity, who are “extra-modern” (I am referring to Indigenous peoples and Afro-Brazilians who live according to ancestral ways in rural areas). This makes difference. Besides, ecocriticism and similar concepts are quite complex and were originally developed in the Anglo-Saxon literary system. The first book published on this topic in Brazil was the Brazilian translation of Ecocriticism by Greg Garrard in 2006. Today, however, the situation is different, as ecopoetry has become a global trend. It is being discussed everywhere. And we discuss it with the awareness of the “people of the forests,” who always lived “ecologically.”
MM: As you have already mentioned, in addition to literary studies, you do research among the Indigenous peoples of Brazil. What role does environmental awareness play among them?
AM: Environmental awareness is much stronger among indigenous peoples—and by that I mean awareness of the relationship between the environment and culture. For Indigenous peoples living in the Amazon and Cerrado3 and elsewhere, culture cannot be separated from nature. This is a really big difference from the way Western society thinks. For example, in the language of the Tupí-Guaraní, who live in the lowlands of South America, and with whom I work most, there is not even a concept of “nature” as such. In the Guaraní language, nature simply cannot be conceived as something “separate from being”—there is only one word for it (teko), which means both and simultaneously “being” and “environment.” I once translated it into German: Umweltsdasein. Thinking about the environment therefore has no place in these Indigenous cultures—the environment is what they are! Every creature “is” the environment itself.
TZ: What led you, as a literary scholar and translator, to the study of the culture of Indigenous peoples?
AM: I was born and raised on the border between Brazil and Paraguay, and since childhood I have been translating between three different languages! It was practically a trilingual situation, with one of the languages being Indigenous rather than Western. My mother came from Paraguay, which is one of the few South American countries where the Indigenous language is also the official language—Guaraní is used here alongside Spanish. It is an Indigenous language, but it is heavily influenced by Spanish. Thanks to this language, I gradually began to learn other languages from the Tupí-Guaraní family. The indigenous languages here are very different from Western languages, not only in structure but also in the way of thinking of the people who speak them. And, of course, I became interested in the cosmological texts and myths of these cultures. I began translating everything that seemed to me to “look like poetry.” There are many different texts in their mythology, and some of them are meant to be sung and danced. Can you imagine dancing poems instead of only reading them?
MM: What material do you use in your research? Are they people, interviews, archival materials, texts?
AM: Although I work with Indigenous cultures, I am not an anthropologist; I’m a literary scholar. However, to understand the texts in their original languages, I also use an anthropological approach in my research—I had to conduct field research, visit villages, and talk to people to understand them. For many Indigenous languages, there are no dictionaries, grammar books, or texts that explain what a verse is or what is “poetic” in that language (or what poetry is). The very concept of poetry is closely linked to culture, and they do not distinguish between art and religion or agriculture, for instance. But I would like to clarify that most anthropologists no longer use terms such as “myths” or “mythology” because they are very misleading—they could be confused with Greek mythology, for example. A more appropriate term for what I am researching is therefore “verbal arts,” which are strongly related to non-verbal arts such as dance or basketry and to cultural practices.
MM: However, you link this research into the verbal art of Indigenous peoples with topics that are not entirely related to Indigenous cultures. For example, you have translated the complete works of Emily Dickinson. At first glance, these are very distant areas. Do you see any connection between them?
AM: Yes. I see everything as interconnected. I even see some writers as equivalent to Indigenous peoples. Take Emily Dickinson, for example, and the way she works with nature and the environment in her poetry, which is very close to the way Indigenous peoples think. Christine Gerhardt, a German professor of American literature, wrote a book on this topic.4 She explains that the way Dickinson cares for her garden, how she experiences gardening, is extraordinary: she creates her own relationship with non-human beings—plants, insects, birds—and writes about this experience. They are omnipresent in her work. Only recently has Dickinson begun to be reinterpreted in this sense; we always thought she spoke about her plants or garden in a “romantic” way, but it’s much more complicated than that…
TZ: Would you recommend any further reading on this topic?
AM: A friend of mine, Marta L. Werner, another professor of American literature, has created a website about birds and their way of life in Dickinson’s work.5 According to her, birds not only permeate Dickinson’s poems as a theme, but also change her own way of writing! They do not just appear as messengers but directly force her to write in a “birdly” way—to acquire their speed, learn the same movements, and so on. It’s not only about imitation (mimesis), but about somehow translating birds into human language. Dickinson had already been very well translated into Spanish and Portuguese, but unlike most translators, who always chose only some of her poems and compiled an anthology, I decided to translate her complete works.
MM: We still don’t quite understand how you managed it, but it’s definitely very impressive!
AM: Of course, I was heavily criticized. Often. I even met people in the United States, including prominent writers, who said to me: “Wow! Well… But why are you doing this? Some of her poems are really bad!” So what, some are better, some are worse, it just depends on how you look at them… She wrote throughout her entire life. And I think that everything (in her work) has some meaning. I published her collected poems in Portuguese translation in two volumes. And when you look at them as a whole, you really see birds flying everywhere! The same goes for insects and plants. It’s like stepping into her garden!
TZ: You also devoted yourself to the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991), who worked in South America. What attracted you to him?
AM: Yes, I have been interested in Flusser for a long time. I also studied media studies because at one point I was very interested in film and adaptations of literary works, and I wanted to understand this process as a form of translation. We are talking about various aspects of my work but note that translation is always present in some way. So first I discovered the Flusser who writes about the media, but when I read his book Vampyroteuthis infernalis, I was completely blown away. This text is actually about how humans and nature find a common ground, but at the same time diverge dramatically. Flusser examines a creature, an animal that lives in the depths of the ocean, the vampire squid. Reflecting on this strange creature, which is a kind of “antithesis” of humans, living in absolute darkness, is a way for him to see who we are through another animal species. I think it’s a very ecological text—and one of the most important texts ever written about who we are in relation to other species on this planet.
MM: When we consider the boundaries of what is human, how do you perceive artificial intelligence? Because today, of course, it influences literature and its translations around the world. Does this tool help you as a translator? Not to mention that AI is very much related to environmental issues…
TZ: Again, I see this as part of a broader theme, which is the relationship between humans, or humanity, technology, and the environment. Of course, as a translator and professor, I use all the tools at my disposal, such as this tool (Zoom) to facilitate our online conversation. I also use some translation tools—but of course, there is no tool for translating from most of Tupí-Guaraní languages, the best “tool” is to talk directly to people. AI is evolving and will change many types of human work in the future, but also relationships, our behavior, and emotional experiences; it is already used in all kinds of fields, including psychology and psychotherapy. In my studies of Indigenous cultures, I therefore try to ask a different question: How can “ancient technologies” and “ancient intelligence” influence us today? Members of the Tupí-Guaraní ethnic groups, for example, have mastered archaic technologies for interacting with nature: how they grow crops, how they sing, or what they consider sacred—the planet Earth, but also every single plant. They believe that there is a relationship between plants and that which transcends us. It is magical and poetic at the same time—and also it has implications in economic-environmental issues.
TZ: However, we Westerners have lost this connection, and this ultimately threatens our survival on this planet. Is there anything you can do about this from your position as a literary scholar?
AM: That is precisely why I am trying to reconnect with this ancient “archaic intelligence”—I believe it should be considered a very important tool for the future survival of the human species. We have become one of the most endangered species on this planet because we are destroying everything that could keep us alive in the future—rivers, oceans, air. These are the foundations of life, our own life! The archaic intelligence of the Indigenous peoples of Brazil should be understood as one solution for reconnecting with nature, with our own nature (as Flusser’s vampire squid does).
Of course, Indigenous peoples today use modern technology, artificial intelligence, computers, shoot videos, expose themselves on Instagram, etc., because they realize that it is necessary to fight on both sides. Use technology for the benefit of the environment, for ecology—not just for destruction, as we do. From a psychological point of view, our approach is also very destructive and destroys entire political systems; even you in Czechia are experiencing how democracy is being attacked by artificial intelligence and social networks.
Contemporary Western poetry can also be useful in this regard, playing a role in the search for this “archaic” understanding of technology; writers such as Herman Melville (1819–1891), Gary Snyder (born 1930), and Jean Giono (1895–1970) are, of course, very important to me. Some authors try to reconnect us with this wholeness of life. They are aware that life should not be separated from cultural development as it is in capitalist combustive acceleration —that it should always be considered the centerpiece of every research we conduct. And I think that is precisely the role of ecological poetics!
MM: Finally, can you tell us what you are currently working on?
AM: I recently met a Tupí-Guaraní shaman and recorded her on my cell phone. I asked her why the word jakaira in their language refers to one of their gods and also to a crop, corn. But instead of explaining it to me, she answered with a song—and I didn’t quite understand it at the time. I had to ask other speakers of the language for a translation. And I learned that their god and the plant are one and the same. When they sow the seeds of this crop, they are “sowing the deity into the earth.” And it rises and feeds the people, because the corn is then used to make a ritual drink for a ceremony in which a shaman or shamaness gives people names. This drink then turns back into a god, which is actually a plant… The tribe’s economic activities related to livelihood are therefore directly related to faith and religion. And in such communities, poetry intersects with religion and economy.
I wonder what else needs to be written to make our lives sustainable? After all, life around the world is being destroyed by the oil industry, car manufacturers, and even by the need to maintain artificial intelligence with its large data centers that consume water. Everyone knows that. My research questions are therefore: How can poetry deal with all this? And how can it be revived in society?
Editor’s notes
1 A term coined by Brazilian philosopher Djamila Ribeiro to refer to the social and cultural context from which a person speaks.
2 Environmental activist who was murdered in 1988 in connection with his campaign against deforestation.
3 South America’s second largest biome after the Amazon, a complex of savannas and forests covering an area of around 2 million km².
4 A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World, 2014.
5 See https://dickinsonsbirds.org/project.
Adalberto Müller is a professor of literary theory at Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. In 2013, he was a visiting researcher at Yale University and a visiting professor at Université de Lyon2/France (film studies). He has published books and articles on film and media studies, translation theory, and literary theory. He is a member of the International Emily Dickinson Society. He is currently researching the cosmologies of the South American Tupí-Guaraní peoples and their “poetry” or verbal arts.