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Portfolio: Ricardo Sternberg
By Renata Almeida | Sotaque Brasileiro, # 5, Summer 2004
Brazilian memories in the poetry of a carioca "half mineiro"..
Ricardo Sternberg |
Talking to Richard Sternberg is like walking in the ways of Brazilian and Portuguese literature with a friend who is excited about what he says, but without claiming to give lessons to unsuspecting listeners. Our conversation by phone, happened late at night but even that was not capable of diminishing Ricardo's interest in my questions about his history, his academic and literary career.
Sternberg left Brazil for the United States when he was 15 years old. Together with his parents and three brothers, he moved to Berkley, California, where he completed his studies in high school and then joined the UCLA (University of California), studying comparative literature. "My thesis was on Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Because of him and also having studied two years at Santo Antonio boarding school, in São João del Rey, I feel kind of mineiro, confesses the carioca. After that, he received a scholarship to Harvard University, where he stayed three years. The job offers were coming and he accepted the proposal from the University of Toronto, where he has been for the past 25 years. The program's degree in Portuguese and Brazilian Literature offered by the University of Toronto is unique in Canada. At UofT he also teaches graduate classes in comparative literature.
But after all, how did the idea of writing books of poetry come about? Ricardo says that he started playing with poetry since his youth. He was writing and collecting his poems until his first book was put together, called The Invention of Honey, published in 1990, with a second edition published in 1996. This book, like the ones that followed, Map of Dreams (1996) and Bamboo Church (2003), was written in English. He explains: "Poetry is linked to the voice more than the prose, which is linked to writing. The voice I hear is in English." When asked if he has no desire to write a book in Portuguese, he does not hesitate to reply, "if I returned to Brazil, I have the impression that I would write one."
If the writing is in English, memories, however, are very Brazilian. "Poetry is really a visit to the past, so I write about my life in Brazil. It is an attempt to see a little about what the automatic eye hides," said Ricardo. "I write old memories of when I was seven or eight years old, be it from the neighborhood where I lived in Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, or from Cabo Frio, city where I used to spend holidays. When I reread what I wrote, memories so well hidden in me, I laugh inside," he says. Because of his work, Sternberg won the National Discovery Prize and the Pusheart Prize.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Cabral de Melo Neto, Machado de Assis and Eça de Queiroz, are some of the representatives from Brazilian and Portuguese literature that inspire Ricardo in his courses at UofT. "Every great poet influences the work of a writer, the way of seeing the world and dealing with poetry," says Ricardo. Drummond, however, is a special chapter in the life of the writer. As he have done several translations of the poet mineiro, Ricardo began corresponding with him through letters "simple and delicate," as he puts it. When the subject on contemporary Brazilian poetry, came, he quoted Ferreira Gullar and, more recently, Frederico Barbosa.
In November, the professor, poet and translator, will be participating in the Conference Exile from Immigration to the Portuguese-Speaking Country at the invitation of the University of London. Sternberg's next project as a poet is already defined: a poetic sequence about a character named Lord Tamarind. However, as he likes to say, "the harvest time between one book and another is seven years."
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