Blaise Cendrars’s Travels to Brazil

In Paris, Tarsila do Amaral and her partner, the writer Oswald de Andrade, befriended the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars. In February 1924, at the invitation of Paulo Prado, Cendrars made his first voyage to Brazil, with two subsequent extended stays to follow. He travelled the country with Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade, and others, and was utterly overcome by Rio de Janeiro’s Afro-Brazilian culture and the Baroque in Minas Gerais. The trip, combined with Cendrars’ enthusiasm for Afro-Brazilian culture, such as samba and carnival, inspired his Brazilian travelling companions to engage more closely with their own cultures – a fact that would soon come to be reflected in the writing and paintings of Tarsila do Amaral and others.

A short time later, Oswald de Andrade published the Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil. With Pau Brasil, which translates to “Brazilian wood,” he alludes to one of Brazil’s most important export commodities. Andrade promoted the export of Brazilian poetry to Europe as a counter-movement in response to the import of creative ideas from Europe. He merged the highbrow with mass culture, incorporating elements from everyday life, as well as spoken language, thereby lending a voice to the lived Brazilian cultural experience. Four years later, he published the Manifesto Antropófago. He encouraged people to assimilate foreign European culture – to “digest” it – and to transform it in order to foster their own brand of Brazilian art. The Brazilian avant-garde began to appropriate motifs from Indigenous and Afro- Brazilian cultures and to develop its own modern language. In this way, Blaise Cendrars adopted the role of transcultural translator and became a catalyst of Brazilian modernism.