Guimarães Rosa

João Guimarães Rosa (Cordisburgo, Minas Gerais, 1908 – Rio de Janeiro, 1967) was a Brazilian physician, diplomat and writer who brought the speech of the sertão, the arid rural interior of Brazil, into serious Portuguese literature. He matters because he gave literary voice to a world rarely represented before, through a language of his own that is dense and carefully crafted.

The eldest of six siblings, he spent his childhood between Cordisburgo and Belo Horizonte and taught himself much of what he knew, learning languages from an early age. He studied medicine in Minas Gerais and practised in Itaguara, where he first encountered the sertão at close quarters. During the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932 he served as a volunteer doctor. He later joined the diplomatic service, which took him to Europe and Latin America, including a posting in Hamburg in the late 1930s.

His first published book was Sagarana (1946), a collection of stories he had entered in a competition in 1938 and took years to consider finished. It was followed by Corpo de Baile (1956) and, above all, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956), a complex novel that mixes archaic and colloquial prose with neologisms and tackles profound philosophical questions. His style is marked by a rich vocabulary, bold experiments with Portuguese grammar and a musical quality that often imitates animal sounds and folk songs. His recurring themes include human solitude and the search for transcendence.

He was elected unanimously to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1963, but took his seat only in 1967, three days before dying of a heart attack in Rio de Janeiro. The novel is his most influential work and is often compared to James Joyce's Ulysses. His legacy is that of a renewer of twentieth-century Brazilian prose whose name is best established in academic circles.