Featured in the current Winter 2022 issue, “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” by Jorge de Sena manages to be both a humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal. The story centers around an unlikely friendship between a young boy growing up in a stifling conservative household and the family’s pet parrot, an “impassioned” and “exuberant individual” from Brazil. In his English translation David J. Bailey captures the colorful hues of de Sena’s language and introduces Anglophone speakers to a beautiful piece from one of the greatest Lusophone writers of the twentieth century. I had the opportunity to speak with Bailey over email about his experience translating “A Tribute to the Green Parrot,” and in the following interview we discuss representations of colonialism in language, the power of children in conveying narratives, and the different measures that Lusophone writers have taken to overcome dictatorial censorship in their careers.
Rose Bialer: I wanted to start by asking: How did you first begin translating from Portuguese?
David J. Bailey: I became interested in Portuguese almost by chance, opting to study it at degree level alongside Spanish. I quickly grew fond of the language and culture and eventually took a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian literature to pursue an academic career. I’ve done commercial translation in the past, but this was my first serious attempt at translating a literary piece.
RB: When did you first come to encounter the work of Jorge de Sena? How did your engagement with his writing develop into your translation of “A Tribute to the Green Parrot?”
DB: When I started lecturing at the University of Manchester, I inherited a course on Portuguese colonialism from my predecessor, Prof Hilary Owen. Some of Jorge de Sena’s stories were on the reading list and I was especially moved by this one, which ends the collection Os Grão-Capitães. De Sena was a key figure in the resistance to the Portuguese dictatorship, on a par with other writers from his generation such as Miguel Torga and José Régio. “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” was something of an anomaly in not having been translated before. I looked at it with some M.A. students last year and ended up translating the entire story during lockdown.
RB: When reading the story, I couldn’t help but think about language and how Portugal’s colonial legacy is manifested in Portuguese. A great example of this is through the speech of the Green Parrot who, conveniently enough for the purpose of the story, has some dialogue. The Green Parrot is from Brazil and grew up on sailboats. His language is lewd, colorful, and unrestrained. By contrast, the narrator’s family in Portugal is ostensibly formal, but their language quickly devolves into violent slurs and insults. What did you make of this distinction in the text?
DB: That’s a very interesting observation that gets to the heart of one of the most persistent criticisms of the Estado Novo regime: its jaw-dropping hypocrisy, experienced in this story through the microcosm of the family. The myths spun by the regime to cover for its violence were complex and numerous: there was the myth of the “happy” Lusotropical empire, or of the “peaceful customs” of the Portuguese, when in reality they were dropping cluster bombs on Angolan villages. Similarly, Salazar encouraged people to celebrate Portugal’s rural traditions whilst covertly modernising the economy in ways that destroyed them. In this story, as you point out, the parents end up behaving in all the ways that they claim to condemn. The rude parrot raises other, more universal questions too, about the role of swear words in language and how they might be weaponised productively (or destructively). And of course, the fact that the Green Parrot heralds from a politically independent Brazil, where de Sena himself sought refuge—in contrast to the downtrodden, Angolan Parrot—is a distinction that testifies to the ongoing fight for the liberation of the Portuguese overseas territories at the time.
RB: Working with Lusophone literature from Portugal, Brazil, and African regions in your academic research and translations, I am curious to know how socio-political histories (like colonialism) of each place have shaped the language? Are there any surprising differences regarding the different dialects that people would not expect?
DB: The reality of Portuguese accents and dialects around the world today reflects a far more dynamic history than the Estado Novo’s so-called “Civilising Mission” could ever have dreamed of. Whilst the distinction between European/African and Brazilian varieties has some truth to it—a speaker from Lisbon is likely to have an easier time being understood in Maputo than Manaus—European Portuguese is today replete with Brazilian and African vocabulary. My favourite example is the word “bué” which is thought to come from São Tomé or Angola but is now ubiquitous in the speech of younger generations in Portugal. Another unintended consequence of Portuguese colonialism was the proliferation of creole languages based on Portuguese, many of which have become recognised national languages. Tellingly, in de Sena’s story, the Green Parrot’s assimilation (and in the end, amalgamation) of all the languages of the Seven Seas figures as enriching rather than corrupting.
RB: This is a piece that jumps back and forth in time. The narrator moves between his childhood and adulthood, detailing his friendship with the Green Parrot and shedding light on the nature of domestic life under an authoritarian regime. As a translator, what was your experience of capturing this temporal shift?
DB: Indeed, there is a continuous play of perspectives in this story which is often used for comic or tragic effect. Sometimes we hear the voice of the terrified child, “desperate for a wee” whilst his parents negotiate an icy reunion; at other points, that of the highly educated adult, who peppers his writing with references to foreign and classical literature. One effect of the narrator’s erudition is to create a cultural and critical distance—often humorous—between his present and past situations. The tragedy of the story, though, is that the child and adult narrators are of course the same person, and the closing paragraph makes clear that in many ways he remains the confused and dejected individual that his caregivers (and by extension, the regime) made him. Interestingly, the narrator sometimes uses the preterite and imperfect tenses interchangeably, making it unclear in places whether the events are a one-off or repeated occurrences. How reliable are his memories, and how much of the Parrot’s flair and character is a figment of the child’s imagination in response to trauma? These ambiguities and shifts in register all translate relatively well into English, but they also make it a good text to tackle with students, for example.
RB: Speaking of time, I think that one of the reasons this story is so effective at capturing the insidious effects of Salazar’s dictatorship in the domestic sphere is because it is told from a child’s perspective. In my own studies of Argentina’s Dirty War, I noticed the same trend in such as the film, Infancia Clandestina and the book, La casa de los conejos. What do you make of this narrative decision and how do you believe it functions in “A Tribute to the Green Parrot?”
DB: That’s an interesting comparison; the use of child narrators to explore the effects of conflict is well established (I usually direct my students to Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth for a well known example of this trend). Most obviously, the veil of innocence that shrouds child narrators means that the world is taken at face value, leaving the symbols and instruments of oppression (such as the “idols made by the blacks” in this story) to be decoded by more circumspect readers. Interestingly then, the trope of the child narrator depends to some extent on an adult reader (and in this story, a grown-up narrator, too) or rather turns us into enlightened “adults” through the process of reading. This is important in the context of de Sena’s story, not least since the Portuguese dictatorship, as philosopher José Gil brilliantly argues, consistently treated its subjects like children in its attempts to orchestrate consent and silence dissent. In this sense, the use of child narrators functions as an act of consciousness-raising.
RB: In your translator’s note you mention that in the story, “animals [are] described in profoundly human terms while humans are rendered animalistic.” What is the power of de Sena’s naturalist descriptions of his characters in the context of the colonial regime in Portugal?
DB: The exploration of human and animal relationships is another facet of this story that lends it enduring relevance and universality. The human/animal distinction—which also organises such concepts as civilised/uncivilised, rational/impulsive, etc.—remains at the heart of the western mindset and constitutes another myth through which it has historically sought to assert its dominance. In this story, the Parrot is evidently made out to be the most human of the characters—the true gentleman—whilst the brutish behaviour of the father undermines his air of cigar-smoking respectability. De Sena’s decision to cast one of the agents of Portugal’s so-called “Civilising mission” as a violent wife-beater is thus another act of colonial myth-busting. By the same token, his deconstruction of the human/animal binary preempts the work of others who have done so from an ecological perspective—and of course, the subjugation of animals has historically formed part of the same processes that produced slavery and colonialism.
RB: In the narrator’s highly conservative household, the young boy and his pet parrot are almost one in the same—dismissed by the adults, trapped in their home, treated as entertainment. There is a close relationship forged between the two that is described beautifully in this sentence:
I would wander off to the balcony to speak with the Green Parrot—not to gripe about the atrocities that he clearly hadn’t been able to see, but to bond with him in our mutual, caged solitude.
The narrator’s strategy for living through the violence of his household is to seek solace in the Green Parrot. I wonder if de Sena’s strategy for making sense of the Salazar dictatorship was through his writing.
DB: Escapism is certainly an important aspect of this story. As I mentioned earlier, the vagueness of many of the memories raises the possibility that the Parrot’s humanness is itself a figment of the escapist imagination, since the narrator has no caregivers to turn to. In many ways, then, the Green Parrot is merely a story the child tells himself in order to understand his painful reality. I can’t speak for de Sena, of course, but your point about his story-writing being a cathartic act would seem to make a good deal of sense in this context.
RB: De Sena faced authoritarian regimes in two different countries—Portugal and Brazil, eventually settling in the United States until his death. He ultimately chose exile from his home country rather than to live under a censored and oppressive dictatorship. How did other writers in the same position overcome censorship in their careers?
DB: Many dissidents sought exile in Brazil and other countries, although as you say, Brazil also succumbed to military rule in 1964. Some, such as Miguel Torga (whom I mentioned earlier) were imprisoned by the regime. His allegorical tales and clever retellings of Biblical stories are one of the finest examples of resistance literature from the period. The Portuguese neorealists also inspired writers in the colonies, such as Luís Bernardo Honwana in Mozambique, whose works were circulated illegally in Portuguese. Some, including Honwana, sought publication in other languages and support from activists abroad. However, my favourite example of attempting to dodge censorship is the case of Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa, who published a landmark feminist epistolary work under their three names in 1972 with the title New Portuguese Letters. As it was co-authored, the courts were unable to attribute the incriminating passages to any particular individual. As the trial drew on, the international outcry grew, and the “three Marias” were acquitted after the Carnation Revolution in 1974.
RB: Do you mind me asking if you are working on anything new at the moment, be it translation or research?
DB: I’m working on a small piece about parrots and birds in Portuguese and Brazilian literature at the moment. After that, I’m taking a break from literary research and putting together a team of academics from Portuguese-speaking Africa to study urban art traditions in the region. In particular I’m interested in artists working with rubbish and waste materials, and we’re hoping to fund some of their work with a research grant. I will continue to do bits and pieces of translation as and when I get time! Thank you for your interest in this story.
Rose Bialer is the Assistant Interviews Editor at Asymptote and lives in Madrid, Spain. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as The Kenyon Review Online, Full Stop and Rain Taxi.