Brazilians in V

[Andrew Dinn]

David Jordan writes:

> I don't know Portuguese, but the Portuguese diagraph 'nh' appears to my 
> inexpert eye to be cognate with the Spanish 'n' with a tilde (enye, 
> as hispanophones call it, phoneticized into English), so "Da Conho" would 
> appear to mean "of the ...," um, well you figure it out.  I think TRP's 
> making a little joke.

Having sat next to a (highly literate) Brazilian for some years I have
acquired enough knowledge of Portuguese to confirm that nh
transliterates n~ in Spanish. da Conho is indeed a joke (whether or
nto Pynchon knew it) and may perhaps indicate that Pynchon knows of
Euclides da Cunha, by name at least.  He does, after all, know of
Martin Fierro, one of the classic South American novels in Spanish.

Interesting Brazilian nugget and aside for the day:

Brazil's greatest novelist, Joa~o Guimaraes Rosa, has as his greatest
novel a story called `Veredas: Gran Serta~o. Veredas meaning territory
carved into great ridges and gullies. Gran Serta~o meaning great
wilderness. It tells (or rather the Brazilian woodsman/cowboy who
narrates it tells) of the criss-crossing paths of various characters
climbing and descending the As and Vs of terrain lying directly south
of the Amazon basin, home of some of it's mightiest tributaries and
most remote tribes. Translated (badly, by most accounts) in the early
60s as `The Devil to Pay in the Backlands' it is, according to my
ex-colleague, perhaps the nearest thing in South American literature
to a `Ulysses' or a `Gravity's Rainbow'. Maybe Pynchon read this too?


Andrew Dinn
-----------
And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.