To Love, intransitive verb

Brazil in the 1920s was going through many transformations. A new republic was shedding old moralities. Agrarianism was urbanizing. Social mobility was cutting across classes. A nation in search of a new culture was reaching out to the sophistication of Europe.

In this setting, Mário de Andrade tells us the story of a Brazilian teen and a German woman in her mid-20s. He was born into a wealthy family; she was trying to make a living away from her country, carrying the emotional baggage of the Great War in the Old World. He was a student, she a teacher. But her lessons would soon go beyond language, literature, and music.

And she’d also learn a little something herself. Brazilian culture, in those heady boisterous years, was complicated. Love was taking on new meaning. Could love be a transitive verb, uniting subject and object? Or would it best be left intransitive, a subject all alone with an emotion?

Mário de Andrade’s unique use of language and his insights into life contributed to an upheaval in not only in Brazilian culture but in Brazilian literature, inspiring the nation’s Modernist movement. Ana Lessa-Schmidt reflects that Modernist style in her careful and creative translation.