|
 The third edition of "In the shade of the date trees: oriental tales" (À sombra das tamareiras: contos orientais), a book by Brazilian author Humberto de Campos is coming out this month. The new release marks the 75th anniversary of the death of the writer, in January 2009.
Published by Almádena publishing house, based in Rio de Janeiro, in the Brazilian Southeast, the work includes 29 short stories set in the Arab world and Far East, and is the third release by Almádena, a publishing house specialized in Arab themes.
Humberto de Campos starts the work telling his readers about a day he was visited by a Turk interested in selling him a book. The author bought the manuscript for 120,000 réis (the Brazilian currency at the time), and published them in a newspaper, as his work. At the time, Campos did publish his tales in newspapers in Rio de Janeiro, but, different from what readers may think, the story of the Turk is also fiction.
"Early in the 20th century, it was fashionable to talk about the Middle East," said João Baptista M. Vargens, the editor at Almádena. The book continues with tales like "Story of a faithful man", which tells of the pain of Abul Fadl, a rich man who, on leaving the mosque, doubted that any man could cheat him and thus saw his fortune collapse, or "The two daughters of King Hassan", which tells the story of two sisters, one called Lie and the other called Truth to explain the custom of story tellers, who tell lies as if they were truths.
Almádena publishing house invested about one year's worth of work in the book before publication. According to Vargens, the differential of this publication is the 86 footnotes. They help readers to understand words and expressions that are characteristic of the Arab world.
Worked on by Vargens and by two collaborators at Almádena, Suely Ferreira Lima and Renata Mansour. They explain, for example, that "cádi" is a judge, Hauran, a region in Syria, Janissaries are elite Turk-Ottoman soldiers and the Koran, the sacred book of the Muslims.
The book presentation is by Antonio Carlos Secchin, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and Brazilian Literature professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
"In this multi-faced work by Humberto Campos, 'In the shade of the date trees' represents a successful incursion into the imaginary of the East, which had a discreet, albeit constant, presence in Brazilian writing in the first half of the 20th century," says Secchin, in his text.
Campos was born in the northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhão and was not only a writer of short stories but also a journalist, critic, biographer, poet, chronicler and memoirist. Having lost his father, at the age of 17 Campos moved to Belém, where he worked as a writer for newspapers Folha do Norte and Província do Pará. His first work was poetry, with book "Dust, first series". He became a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1919 and was a representative for the state of Maranhão. His most famous book is "Memoirs", a chronicle.
The cover price of "In the shade of the date trees: oriental tales" is 29 Brazilian reais (US$ 18,00). The work may be found in the largest bookstores in Brazil. If it is purchased directly from Almádena, though, the cost drops to 20 reais (US$ 12.50). The book has 141 pages.
Service:
In the shade of the date trees: oriental tales
Author: Humberto de Campos
Site: www.almadenaeditora.com
Telephone: (+55 21) 3634 7637
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Brazil received a huge boost in its international image with its selection as the host of the 2016 Olympics, but it was really just the cherry on top of the overall recognition of the country's ascension to the ranks of one of the world's most important countries. Now, as it finally takes its place on the world scene, there has been a great deal of concern about what kind of image Brazil hopes to project, now that the world is really paying attention. 
The only good thing to say about the visit to Brazil of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Monday November 23, is that it was mercifully short and lasted less than 24 hours. Ahmadinejad had his picture taken being hugged by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who gave him a warm welcome and said Iran had every right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. 
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose.