The Intimate Terrors of João Guimarães Rosa: A Study of Language and Self Becoming
In the sinuous, smoke-laced caverns of world literature, certain names echo quietly, yet indelibly, in the minds of those who have dared step beyond the translucent veils of canonical expectation. One such name is João Guimarães Rosa (1908–1967), a Brazilian diplomat, physician, and wordsmith of singular intensity. Though widely celebrated in Brazil, Rosa remains a literary demigod confined to esoteric liturgies among Anglophone readers—a metaphysical cartographer who spoke not of the jungle’s foliage, but of its turmoil, winding like consciousness through the ravines of being.
Born in Cordisburgo, a small town sewn into the arid folds of Minas Gerais, Rosa was a precocious child fluent in several languages before reaching adolescence. His early years were shaped by the austerity of the sertão—the harsh Brazilian hinterlands—which would come to live not merely as setting but as ontological ground in his prose. After studying medicine, Rosa undertook a diplomatic career that took him across Europe, yet his rivers always flowed backward toward the interior: in life, to Minas; in writing, toward the unknowable soul.
His literary corpus rests predominantly upon a single, colossal keystone: the novel *Grande Sertão: Veredas* (1956), rendered in English as *The Devil to Pay in the Backlands*. This book is no ordinary novel, but a metaphysical battlefield masquerading as a monologue. Riobaldo, its narrator and ex-jagunço, recounts his erratic life amidst bandits, gods, and illusions—with a syntax warped to fit the vast, word-devouring contours of Brazil’s interior. And it is here, in the mysterious folds between narration and narration, that Rosa expands literature’s capacity to hold the Real.
One must understand: Rosa does not portray reality; he distorts it to reveal its substratum. His command of neologism and syntactical innovation elicits comparison to Joyce, but Rosa’s manipulation of language is less centrifugal, more animistic. As literary critic Benedito Nunes aptly observed, Rosa’s language devours the object and exhales it transfigured, passing through mythic-fold dialects, personal idiolects, and the arterial murmurs of folk consciousness.¹
Why, then, has Rosa been so eluded by global discourse?
A fair part of the blame lies squarely in the challenge of translation. Rosa’s prose lives in a multifurcated tongue—half-made of Portuguese, half-born in fugue states of the sertanejo mind. Even acclaimed translations, such as James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís’s rendering of *The Devil to Pay in the Backlands* (1963), fall poignantly short of conveying the texture of Rosa’s “language-organs,” which breathe the dust of interior conflict and flicker with the phosphorescence of the divine elsewhere.²
But beyond his stylistic mastery, what renders Rosa essential is his ontological inquiry. He is, without saying as much, a metaphysician disguised as a rural narrator. In the climactic moment of *Grande Sertão*, Riobaldo makes a confession that roars louder than the gunfire: “O diabo não existe. É o homem que o faz, com seu ódio e ignorância” (“The devil does not exist. It is man who creates him, with his hate and ignorance”). This is no mere moral aside; it is an apocalypse compacted into a line, a manifesto for the human as world-building agent.
In Rosa, God and Devil are not metaphysical adversaries but tautological manifestations, mirror-images morphed by perception. “O real não está na saída nem na chegada: ele se dispõe para a gente é no meio da travessia” (“The real is not at the starting point nor the end: it lies in the crossing”). This quote is oft repeated, less often digested. Rosa’s notion of “travessia” (crossing) is not a geographic passage but an existential passage, a sacred stochasticity in which one’s soul might fracture or be made whole.
Reading Rosa is an act of traversal itself—a surrender to the chaos of semiotic territories, one’s language-ego flushed and reborn in the crucible of semantic uncertainty. Take this evocative line from *Corpo de Baile* (1956), his collection of seven interconnected novellas: “No silêncio das coisas, escuto o barulho que a memória faz passando só” (“In the silence of things, I hear the noise memory makes, passing alone”). How Rosa wrests from stillness a sound, how he teaches one to listen not merely to noise or words, but to the acoustic residue of absence—this is his unique contribution to literature.
To read Rosa is to be implicated. Not merely in plot, nor in politics, but in the very event of being. He anticipates the postmodern by refusing Cartesian dualism; he annihilates the subject-object dichotomy and births instead a web of relational certitudes. A tree is not just a tree—it is “árvore alta-de-dormência,” a tallness compounded with sleepiness, enwoven with awaiting disruption. Every object vibrates with death and promise.
Philosophically, Rosa’s animistic poetics resonate with Spinoza’s monism and Bergson’s durée, but he refracts these epistemologies through the lens of rural Brazilian ontology. The interpenetration of time and being, of the seen and imagined, finds exquisite culmination in the tale “A Terceira Margem do Rio” (“The Third Bank of the River”), where a father inexplicably rows out into the river, never to return, yet forever within sight. The son narrates, eternally waiting. There is no resolution, only the persistent ache of deferred meaning.
In this brief, haunting myth, Rosa prefigures Derrida’s différance as emotional praxis: waiting is not absence, it is temporality made hoarse with yearning. The “third bank” is not literally geographic, but philosophical—a realm outside dichotomy, a trembling elsewhere.³
Were I to weave all this into a parable of my own making, it would unfold thus: A traveler, sick of cities and their mirror-halls of borrowed meaning, steps into hinterlands unknown. There, language unlearns him, strips him of signs, and returns to him a self not recognized but felt. In a static dusk-blur, he hears the river murmur not of destinations, but of modes of becoming. And he remembers Rosa’s line: “Viver é muito perigoso” (“To live is very dangerous”). Not as dread, but as grace masquerading as peril.
So we ask: what is the ultimate function of João Guimarães Rosa?
No less than this: to revive literature as sacrament. To demonstrate that language is not merely communicative, but incarnational. His oeuvre is a liturgy of border crossings, of liminal ears pressed against the void. His God is unknowable, his solitude symphonic. For the reader who dares a true engagement with Rosa, the reward is not resolution, but a finer confusion—made sacred by ambiguity’s embrace.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, sertão, neologism
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¹ Nunes, Benedito. *O Dorso do Tigre*. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1982. This critical work explores the metaphysical underpinnings and philosophical gestures of Rosa’s writing, focusing on *Grande Sertão: Veredas* as a philosophical quest disguised in narrative.
² Vieira, Nelson H. “João Guimarães Rosa and the Languages of the Unconscious.” *Luso-Brazilian Review*, vol. 24, no. 2, Winter 1987, pp. 59–70. Here, translation is examined as trauma and transformation, addressing the profound challenges of preserving Rosa’s lexicon in other tongues.
³ Almeida, Miguel Vale de. “Borderlands of Language and Faith: Reading Rosa’s Sertão through Derridean Eyes.” *Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies*, vol. 13, 2004, pp. 145–166. This paper introduces a deconstructive reading of Rosa, with emphasis on non-duality and the metaphysics of absence.