“By the Rivers of Babylon”
“By the Rivers of Babylon”
by Jorge de Sena
THE LITERARY WORK
A short story set in Lisbon near the end of the sixteenth century; written in exile in Brazil, published in Portuguese as (“Super Flumina Babylonis”) in 1966; in English in 1989.
SYNOPSIS
The great Portuguese poet Luis de Camões is now old and poor, infirm and impotent, but his genius allows for one more creative burst: a poem on the theme of exile inspired by biblical Psalm 137.
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written
Jorge de Sena (1919-78), poet, short fiction writer, novelist, playwright, critic, essayist, translator, biographer, and cultural historian, is one of Portugal’s preeminent men of letters. Formally trained in both the sciences and humanities, he became the leading scholar on Portugal’s two major poets, Luis de Camões and Fernando Pessoa (see The Lusiads and Message , respectively; also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). Sena emigrated from Portugal in 1959 to escape the fascist Salazar regime. Moving to Brazil, he became a professor at the State University of Sao Paulo, Araraquara. In 1965, after becoming a Brazilian citizen, Sena emigrated once again, this time to escape the military dictatorship in Brazil. Moving to the United States, he continued his academic career, first at the University of Wisconsin and then at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with his status as Portugal’s preeminent poet remaining intact throughout these changes. At his death in 1978 Jorge de Sena was regarded by many not only as Portugal’s number one living poet but as the equal of Camões and Pessoa. All three spent part of their lives in exile, with Sena often using Camões’s persona as a foil for his own thoughts and feelings, and a conduit for attacking evil in humanity and its institutions. In “By the Rivers of Babylon” Sena portrays an infirm Camões who has the capacity to castigate his countrymen for their shortcomings, but who instead focuses his poetic gifts on the sorrow he feels for the impending “death” or “exile” of his country, which will come about with Portugal’s takeover by Spain, the so-called Babylonian Captivity.
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place
Portuguese Age of Expansion
Portugal was Europe’s first great maritime empire, one that at its peak in the sixteenth century, virtually girdled the earth. Beginning in 1415, with the capture of the Moorish garrison in Ceuta on the African coast, the growth of a Portuguese empire advanced precipitously with Portugal’s discovery of a sea route to the East in 1498. During the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Portugal would discover more than two-thirds of the world, opening up vast new vistas for Europe.
As heirs of a long accumulation of technical skills achieved in the late Middle Ages and of Arabic and Jewish contributions in the form of astrolabes and maps, the Portuguese had developed a maritime technology that allowed them to roam the seas freely. This expertise coupled with superior Portuguese firepower led to the rise of the empire. For much of four centuries (1400s-1700s), the Portuguese held a monopoly on the commercial coastal trade of Africa, Arabia, Persia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Japan, and half of South America. Never had there been such a far-flung empire. Like the Italian city of Venice before it, Lisbon became a global seaport, drawing would-be profiteers from all over the earth.
Because of the voyages of discovery and conquest, the disparate ethnic and racial branches of the human family were brought together for the first time. Portugal became the ambassador of the West to these new lands, and served, in like fashion, as the interpreter of the newfound Eastern cultures to Europe. People, goods, flora, and fauna were exchanged between continents, with Lisbon serving as Europe’s center of commerce and power, innovation and wealth, disease and corruption.
Discovering the sea route to India
The Portuguese developed and expanded their maritime technology and voyages of discovery over some 80 years (from 1415 to 1492, when Columbus discovered America for Spain), virtually without competition from any other country. Until 1492, Spain was still involved in the type of warfare that merely resulted in an exchange of real estate among European powers. In the Treaty of Alcáçovas, contracted with the Spanish kingdom of Castile and ratified by the Pope in 1479, Portugal agreed to forfeit its claim to the Canary Islands in exchange for any lands it might conquer outside Europe. A line was drawn east and west through the Canaries. Everything south of the line would belong to Portugal if conquered; everything north would belong to Spain on the same basis.
Having systematically sailed south along the west coast of Africa, Portugal was finally prepared to round the continent and sail northeast to India. The historic voyage was set for 1487. A party under Pero de Covilhã was dispatched to India by land to welcome the ships. Bartolomeu Dias led the fleet that was to have arrived by sea. Covilhã reached his destination; Dias did not. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope, his crew mutinied, thinking that worse conditions lay ahead, Dias was forced to return to Lisbon.
It was at this point that Christopher Columbus, who had married a Portuguese and had lived and worked in Portugal for years, proposed that India could be more easily reached by traveling west. His plans were turned down by King John II and his advisors as “nonsense,” most probably because his calculations of the distance it would take to reach the goal was far short of what Portugal had already calculated on the basis of much experience. Four years later Spain became the second nation to fully enter into the Age of Discovery, taking advantage of Portugal’s vast store of knowledge, equipment, and experience in the person of Columbus. Spain contracted the maverick explorer to undertake the proposed voyage, a last-ditch effort on the part of the Spanish to beat the Portuguese to India. Spain was feeling emboldened at the time, having just conquered Granada, the last remaining Moorish kingdom in the Iberian peninsula. The year was 1492.
When Columbus returned with the news that he had reached “India,” not realizing that he had in fact reached the Americas, Portugal despaired. It recovered quickly, however, when it realized that according to its treaty with Spain, the land belonged to Portugal. A new accord was then hammered out by the two monarchies known as the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which held that lands south of the line running east and west
PORTUGUESE MARITIME TECHNOLOGY
The numerous Portuguese contributions to maritime technology can be grouped into three major categories: (1) the sailing ships (first the caravel and then the nau, which was larger than the Spanish galleon) and their abilities to travel against currents and winds (tacking); (2) the navigational techniques developed once the seamen freed their crafts from coastal sailing (astronavigation); and (3) the amassing of oceanographic information (winds, currents, meridians), together with its preservation (cartography, maps, charts, chapbooks, and the like). The first of the ships, the caravel, boasted a wide hull that displaced little water and three masts on which were hoisted triangular or lateen sails; such a sail allowed great mobility for tacking (it could form an angle of more than 50 degrees with the direction of the wind). In its smallest, early version, the caravel carried as much as 50 tons and operated with the help of a 20-man crew. Much larger, the later versions were referred to as floating cities and operated with upwards of 800 crewmen. All these cargo ships were armed and so could double as warships when needed. The legacy of fear engendered by a Portuguese warship with its colors flying, ready to do battle, survives in the name given to one of the most colorful and deadly of jellyfishes: the Portuguese Man of War.
through the Canary Islands would belong to Portugal, as long as they fell east of a new line running north and south 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, thus giving Portugal claim to Brazil, which was yet to be discovered. Lands on the west of that line would belong to Spain. Columbus died thinking he had reached the outer islands of “India,” and only set foot on his discovery, the South American continent, during his third voyage. Meanwhile, Portugal’s Vasco da Gama reached the real India in 1498, winning control of the coveted spice trade for his country and scoring a significant triumph in what was to become a century-and-a-half of Portuguese discovery and acquisition:
- 1415 Ceuta (Morocco), North Africa, claimed; lost in 1668 to Spain
- 1419 Madeira Islands (Atlantic Ocean) claimed; continues to be Portuguese
- 1427 Azores Islands (Atlantic Ocean) claimed; continues to be Portuguese
- 1444 Guinea-Bissau (West Africa) claimed; retained until its independence in 1975
- 1456 Cape Verde Islands (West Africa) claimed; retained until its independence in 1975
- 1471 Tangiers (Morocco), North Africa claimed; lost in 1665 to Arab kingdom
- 1472 St. Thomas and Prince Islands (West Africa) claimed; retained until its independence in 1975
- 1482 Angola (southern Africa) claimed; retained until its independence in 1975
- 1488 Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) reached
- 1498 India reached
- 1500 Brazil claimed; retained until its independence in 1822
- 1507 Mozambique (East Africa) claimed; retained until its independence in 1975
- 1507 Hormuz (Iran) claimed; lost in 1622 to Great Britain
- 1510 Goa (India) claimed; lost in 1961 to India
- 1511 Malacca (Malaysia) claimed; lost in 1641 to Holland
- 1514 China reached
- 1518 Colombo (Sri Lanka) claimed; lost in 1656 to Holland
- 1521 Timor (Indonesia) claimed; retained until independence in 1976
- 1534 Bombay (India) claimed; lost in 1665 to Great Britain
- 1542 Japan reached
- 1557 Macao claimed; lost in 1999 to China
Administration of the overseas empire
According to Charles R. Boxer, the Portuguese empire was “a commercial and maritime empire cast in a military and ecclesiastical mold” (Boxer, Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, p. 18). Individuals involved in the empire served either the Crown or the Church. But Portugal usually did not attempt to conquer existing nations or peoples, only to maintain a commercial monopoly. To this end, the Portuguese established naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean with three key
PORTUGESE AUTHORS IN THE AGE OF EXPANSION
Portugal produced a generation of writers to match the greatness of its political and maritime achievements. They included scientists such as Garcia da Orta (1501–68), who catalogued and described the medicinal and nutritional properties of new plants, and religious writers such as Samuel Usque (b. 1510) known for his Consolation of the Tribulations of Israel) and Frei Tome de Jesus (1529–82) who wrote The Acts of Jesus. There were also numerous gifted historians to record the events, chief among them Gaspar Correia (1495–1561), who wrote The Conquest of India, Joāo de Barros (1496–1570), author of The Conquest of Asia, and Diogo do Couto (1542–1616), author of The Conquest by Decades.
Among the literary greats were poets Sá de Miranda (1481–1558), Diego Bernardes (1530–1605), and the master Luís Vaz de Camões (1525?–80), who wrote the national epic poem, The Lusiads (also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times), about the discovery of the sea route to India. Playwrights included António Ferreira (1528–69), whose major work is Castro, and Gil Vicente (1465?–1537?), who wrote The Ship of Hell and The India Play (also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). Novelists fell into three distinct genres: the chivalric, represented by Francisco de Morais’s (c. 1500–72) Palmerim of England, the sentimental, by Bernardim Ribeiro’s (1482?–1552?) Child and Young Woman, and the pastoral, by Jorge de Montemor’s (1520–61) Diana. The major travel book, The Peregrination, was written by Fernāo Mendes Pinto (1510–83). The genre of shipwreck literature was represented in the collection Tragic History of the Sea (narratives dated from 1552–1602, but only published in volumes in 1735 and 1736).
It has often been observed that the three major works of literary art to come out of the Portuguese Age of Expansion seem to focus on different aspects of the same enterprise: the discovery of the sea route to India, followed by the widespread conquest and domination in Africa, Arabia, India, Asia, Indonesia, and America. Camões’s epic speaks of triumph and glorification; Pinto’s travel book satirizes the undertaking by questioning the basic premises of conquest and forced religious conversion; while the shipwreck literature delves into the dark side of the adventure, and the cost in terms of human misery, due principally to greed.
strongholds: Goa in India, Ormuz in Persia, and Malacca in Malaysia. Once these were secured from Muslim traders, the Indian Ocean became a “Portuguese sea,” safeguarded by fortresses established all around its perimeters from Africa to Asia, with these fortresses serving as commercial ports. Some were maintained by a military garrison; others were established by treaty or an alliance with the indigenous monarchs. In either case, Portuguese ships, with their superior maneuverability and cannon power, policed the entire area. Wherever possible, the Portuguese preferred to establish themselves on the coastal islands. Some ports became Europeanized cities, such as those on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Azores, or on the African islands of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe, and Mozambique Island. Goa, the capital of Portugal’s eastern empire, grew so wealthy that it rivaled Lisbon. Portuguese sovereignty would be retained here until December of 1961, when the territory, along with Daman and Diu, became part of India. Other important cities included Macao in China, whose return to Chinese sovereignty would occur even later, in December of 1999.
Portugal’s “Babylonian Captivity.”
As early as the rule of King Manuel (1495-1511), Portugal attempted the policy of conquering European nations peacefully by marrying its princes and princesses into various ruling houses, especially Spain’s. The plan ultimately backfired, when young King Sebastian was killed and his military forces were overwhelmed and defeated by a Muslim army at Alcácer Quibir, North Africa, in 1578. Having no issue, the throne passed to the dead king’s grand uncle, Cardinal Henrique, who not unexpectedly left the throne vacant at his death in 1580. It was then that Philip II of Spain claimed the throne with the threat of military force and on the legal basis of his Portuguese heritage: his mother was Portuguese (Cardinal Henrique’s sister), as was his grandfather, King Manuel, and his wife. Along with these strategies, Philip used persuasion to gain favor with the Portuguese nobles: he promised he would pay Portugal’s war debt to the Muslim army and ransom Portuguese prisoners; he promised that no Spaniard would govern in Portugal’s territories, and that no Portuguese would fight in any purely Spanish conflicts. Together the strategies succeeded. Philip II of Spain was acclaimed Philip I of Portugal, which ushered in the period of the union of the two crowns, the so-called Babylonian Captivity of Portugal under Spanish rule. To many, including Camões, the “Captivity” had a depressing finality about it that spelled the death of their country.
Luis Vaz de Camões (15257-80) is now recognized as the greatest poet of the Portuguese language. As noted, he penned the national epic, The Lusiads (1572), which chronicles the entire panorama of Portuguese history framed within the Vasco da Gama voyage of discovery to India in 1498. As with the British playwright William Shakespeare, almost nothing definite is known about the details of Camões’s life. Apparently he was a poor member of a noble family. As a young man he served in North Africa, where he lost an eye fighting against the Moors; he also spent time in Goa, Mozambique, Vietnam, and possibly Macau. These and a few more details have been gleaned from the half-dozen or so surviving contemporary documents that refer to Camões.
Besides not being accorded in life the recognition and acclaim that was commensurate with the greatness of Camões’s poetic genius, some of his lyric verses would be attributed to his contemporary, Diogo Bernardes, as well as to others. The final injustice suffered by the poet who acquainted the West with the wonders of the tropics and Asia (he is considered the first European of imagination and genius to visit these lands [Bacon, p. xxviii]), came when Spain’s Philip II was enthroned as King of Portugal in 1580. Heartbroken, Camões wrote that he would die with his country.
Everything which the man who wrote The Lusiads believed in went down with the headstrong, handsome, sub-normal young King. For Philip II of Spain could and did support his claim to the throne against two helpless native competitors when the old Cardinal Henry, Dom Sebastião’s successor, died early in 1580. The fragment of a letter, which expresses absolute desolation of spirit, appears to be the latest surviving relic from the pen of Camões. It has been quoted many times. … “I loved my country so much that I shall die with her.” The Poet did not delay long. A few months later, as Philip’s armies advanced to take away Portuguese liberty for sixty years, Camões died, poverty struck, according to every testimony, and certainly heart-broken, on June 10, 1580.
(Bacon, p. xxix)
The Short Story in Focus
Plot summary
“By the Rivers of Babylon” centers on the creative process. The protagonist is an infirm and impotent Camões near the end of his life. The great national poet lives with his widowed mother in an upstairs apartment in Lisbon, barely scraping by on occasional writing commissions, dealing with subjects that do not inspire him. He also receives an irregularly paid stipend from the government, presumably for his epic poem The Lusiads and for his many years of service to the crown in Portugal’s overseas empire. His dreams of fame and fortune have failed to materialize and his health is broken. An advanced case of syphilis may be affecting his mind as well as his body. Only with difficulty does he move about on crutches.
SYPHILIS: THE SCOURGE DISEASE OF THE AGE OF DISCOVERY
No one can say for sure where the venereal disease known as syphilis originated, but it is widely held to have come from the Americas. Historians have determined that syphilis was transmitted sexually through indiscriminate sexual contacts between European men and indigenous women, “The spread of syphilis to various regions of the world has been attributed by some historians to Portuguese sailors, settlers, and merchants. Medical accounts of syphilis appear in countries such as China, Japan, and India only after the arrival of the Portuguese” (Guider, p. 41). Until the discovery of penicillin and other “wonder drugs” in the first part of the twentieth century, there was no way to arrest the increasingly severe effects of this spirochete-caused disease on the body. Syphilis first produces a hard chancre, which forms at the site of the initial infection; the second stage involves pus-filled eruptions over the skin anywhere on the body, together with changes in the blood; the third and final stage is characterized by the disease’s invasion into and debilitation of every system of the body, including the brain. If, after being discovered, the disease is left unchecked, it leads to an agonizing death. While there is no evidence that the real Camões ever had syphilis, it is perfectly plausible that he did, since the poet lived abroad and speaks in his poetry of multiple lovers. The affliction was apparently named during Camões’s lifetime, after a 1530 poem in Latin by Girolamo Fracastoro, whose hero, the shepherd Syphilus, was the first to suffer the disease.
The sexually transmitted disease is a constant and painful reminder of his promiscuous past. His life is made all the more intolerable by his insensitive, unappreciative mother, who complains incessantly about her own misfortunes, nags him about his writing, and berates him for his former dissolute life; he feels shame each time she changes his soiled bandages.
When the story begins Camões is just returning home from his weekly visit with the friars, his one source of enjoyment. It is not primarily his concern with death, judgment, and the afterlife that draws him to them, but the priests are the only educated people he has access to with whom he can converse on the wide range of subjects that interest him. He has difficulty climbing the stairs; he is slow, and it is painful. Any sustenance received from speaking with the brothers is erased by the difficulty of getting back to his room. This day his mother is not there to greet him, so for a time he is spared her chatter, complaints, and reminders. When she returns, she starts in on the demands, the overdue commissioned poems, the translations, and the literary favors she promised her friends. She reminds him how he started out as a strong, handsome, well-loved boy with a bright future; but he took up with bad women, became involved in a brawl, and had been forced to go abroad to India. As usual, he is not listening, or only partially listening as he eats his supper.
Increasingly, Camões’s mind wanders, he recollects bits and pieces of his existence: former loves, distant lands, temptations, poems. He thinks about his years spent in exile separated from home and country and muses on what might have been. He had sought love, glory, wealth, and recognition. In the end, however, his genius was not recognized, nor was he recompensed; and he did not acquire wealth nor did he find love. Indeed, he had forfeited his health to sexual affairs and to the many physical trials he had had to endure, which included shipwreck, exposure, disease, and war. It was destiny, he concedes, together with his own errors, and his ardent love for women (the first line of one of his most famous sonnets—“Erros meus, ma fortuna, amor ardente” [My errors, evil fortune, ardent love]) that produced his sorry plight (Williams, “The Poetry of Portugal,” p. 64). He accepts his condition as the natural consequence of poor choices and bad luck, but feels terribly disappointed.
Camões broods about his sins and about having given in to the temptations of the devil; he is confident, however, that he will be saved: “They were not temptations for his soul, which God would never allow to be lost.” (“By the Rivers of Babylon,” p. 142). He ponders about God having become incarnate, a concept the poet can relate to, for he has created bodies for his thoughts and ideas. He believes that giving form to a poem is the supreme act of incarnation, greater than that of a woman giving birth, different too than even that of divinity’s incarnation:
To feel pregnant with a poem, to feel oneself made fertile by a glimpse of lightning, and to be a man—this was as much as one could know. It is not known by the woman who gives birth, for it is their lot to give birth, at times without having loved. It is not known by the man who wants to have sons, for he can make them without love. But the poet who has practiced love even at the cost of his own flesh, who has written poems even though the spirit thinks poetry a small thing, this one, yes, this one knows what manner of thing is the Incarnation. But he merely knows it. He has not lived the Incarnation, it is the Incarnation that has lived him.
(“By the Rivers of Babylon,” p. 146)
While Camões thinks about these and other weighty issues, his mother drones on about mundane matters. Finally, with her usual admonitions, she excuses herself and retires for the night:
Be careful with the lamp, don’t waste too much oil, for it costs an arm and a leg, and you know I’m afraid of fires and you might fall asleep there at the table, it wouldn’t be the first time, and the lamp could set fire to your papers, to the house, may God help us and Saint Barbara protect us.
(“By the Rivers of Babylon,” p. 153)
Camões’s current impotence refers not only to his sexuality, but to his creative powers. We read that he is “dried of love, weak in enthusiasm, disbelieving in his homeland, devoid even of the joy of writing verses. His verses now had abandoned him” (“By the Rivers of Babylon,” p. 143). On this night, however, his inspiration returns and in one burst of creative genius we see Camões begin to compose one of his most famous works, “Babel and Zion,” a long, seven-syllable poem, rhyming abbab, which revisits the very thoughts Sena’s fictive Camões had been pondering that evening: his life’s tortured course, exile, temptations, the poetic gift, a desire to return not just to a glorious Portugal, but to the heavenly city from whence he came:
It would be 365 lines, as many as the days of the year, like a via sacra of life, 73 stanzas of 5 lines each.…
He rose, impelled by a yearning that took his breath away, a dizziness that multiplied in the tiny light of the lamp. A wave of joy flooded over him, in anguished jolts.…
All atremble but with a firm hand, he began to write.… By the rivers that flow from Babylon to Zion I found myself seated.… He scratched it out, desperate. And began again. By the rivers that run past Babylon I found myself and there sat weeping for memory of Zion and all that befell me.… And he wrote on into the night.
(“By the Rivers of Babylon,” pp. 154-55)
Camões as a symbol of the fading glory of Portugal
Camões has traditionally been portrayed as the virile soldier-poet singing the triumphs and glories of Portugal in his national epic, The Lusiads. He had lived the adventure himself; he represented the nation’s soul.
In contrast to this heroic persona, Sena’s account portrays Camões as an ordinary human being (although with an extraordinary poetic gift), afflicted by the vicissitudes common to old age: poor health, loneliness, and doubts. The Portugal that Camões knew and praised in his epic would soon give way to an ignominious end: the Babylonian captivity by Spain. Both Portugal and Camões would die in 1580. In the story, Camões is inspired by his gift once more, to sing not of triumph and glory, but of sorrow and lament, presaging the nation’s fall. The poem expands on Psalm 137, which recounts that while in captivity, the Jews wept by the rivers of Babylon, and because of sorrow, could not bear to sing the songs of Zion:
By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
(King James Version, Psalm 137:1-4)
In his poem “Babel and Zion,” Camões is to Portugal what the psalmist was to Judah in 600 b.c.e., a singer of lamentation.
Sõbolos rios que vão
Por Babilónia, me achei,
Onde sentado chorei
As lembranças de Sião
E quanto nela passei
By the rivers running fast
Through Babylon, I found me, where
I sat and wept, yea, with despair
For memories of Zion’s past
And all that once befell me there
(Rodrigues and Vieira, p. 50, trans. F. Williams)
Although the Psalm ends on a note of grisly despair, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones” (Psalm 137:9), Camões ends his poem on a note of hope for those who may one day leave Babel and reach Zion:
Ditoso quern se partir
Para ti, terra excelente,
Tão justo e tão penitente
Que, depois de a ti subir,
Lá descanse eternamente!
He who departs blessed will be
And seeks thee, land most excellent,
So just so true and penitent
Who, after climbing up to thee,
There rests eternally content!
(Rodrigues and Vieira, p. 50, trans. F. Williams)
Camões may likewise be speaking prophetically about Portugal’s future. Certainly the theme of restoration of empire and glory, led by the messianic figure of the “enchanted” or hidden (not dead) King Sebastian, would become an important theme for Portuguese writers for centuries to come.
In addition to the parallels between ancient Judah’s demise and Portugal’s (both known as Babylonian captivities), and the identification of the exiled psalmist (speaking on behalf of the Jews) with Camões, who speaks on behalf of Portugal, we have the voice of author Jorge de Sena, a modern exile who, like Camões, bemoaned the lack of recognition for his poetic genius, the apparent plagiarism of his ideas, and the silent treatment or attacks in reviews of his works.
Sena writes about this infuriating unprofessional conduct by his contemporaries toward his own works in many of his prefaces and postscripts, but his most artistic as well as outspoken rendering on the subject comes in a poem in which the author’s voice is masked behind the persona of Camões:
“Camões Addresses His Contemporaries”
You may well rob me of everything:
ideas, words, images,
as also metaphors, themes, motifs,
symbols …
...
And later you may well not credit me,
but suppress me, ignore me and even acclaim
other more fortunate thieves.
(Williams, The Poetry of Jorge de Sena, p. 136)
Sources and literary context
Although Camões is never identified by name in this fictional story, Jorge de Sena’s “By the Rivers of Babylon” is not merely a flight of imaginary fancy, but is in fact based on or derived from the extant documents known about the life of Camões. So that the reader would not miss the historical and biographical references found woven throughout the story, Sena, in the notes in the back of the Portuguese editions, listed all known and creditable documents, and carefully explained what information or inferences of the poet’s life were gleaned from each one. Sena was very interested in the topic of realism in literature. He devoted considerable time and space to writing about it. He believed in Erich Auerbach’s contention (expressed in Mimesis) that realism has always been a part of writing since the Bible, and is not limited to the literary period called realism, which flowered in the second half of the nineteenth century. Sena also believed that an author’s biography plays an important role in fiction writing.
In the short story under consideration, the details from the documents are historical; their inclusion and arrangement into the inner thoughts of Camões and monologues by his mother are fictional. Sena would argue that a purely historical approach would be dry and incomplete. Likewise, a purely fictional story, although perhaps more interesting, would ultimately not satisfy, since it would bear no relationship to the real Camões. But the combination of history and fiction, or historical fiction as it is called, provides the most satisfying of all narratives. Hence, the documents provide the facts of the outward actions and movements of the protagonist, while Sena provides the inward, hidden thoughts that no person could know. As noted by British novelist E. M. Forster (author of Passage to India and Howard’s End), historical fiction presents the whole character—the inside as well as the outside:
In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told.
(Forster, p. 47)
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written
The military dictatorship in Brazil
Sena had fled Portugal and the fascist Salazar dictatorship for Brazil in 1959. The overthrow of the Brazilian government by a military dictatorship in 1964, two years before the publication of his short story, led to his flight to the United States the next year, for he did not wish to risk living under yet another authoritarian government. The dictatorship brought to an end a short-lived (20-year) interlude of democracy in the post-World War II era, which bore witness to the peaceful election and transfer of power to four presidents: Gaspar Dutra in 1946, Getúlio Vargas in 1951, Juscelino Kubitschek in 1956, and Janio Quadros in 1961. For the second time in little more than five years, Sena and his family would pull up stakes and start over in a new land. Once again he had seen the demise of a nation’s freedom, not through external conquest by a foreign power (as in Camões’s day), but by a closed, and heavy-handed domestic dictatorship. There is an unsettling commonality, not only between Portugal’s and Brazil’s domestic dictatorships, but between them and the domination of Portugal by Spain in Camões’s day. In each case, there is a kind of death: domestic society was crippled and individual freedom quashed by the imposition of stilling controls.
Reviews
Sena said, referring to his story “Super flumina Babylonis” (“By the Rivers of Babylon”) and his novella O Fisico Prodigioso (1977; The Wondrous Physician), that they “both are without doubt the best that I have ever written or will ever write” (trans. F. Williams; see Preface to Os Grão Capitães, p. 14). This self-assessment was confirmed when By the Rivers of Babylon and Other Stories came out in English. Reviewing the volume in World Literature Today, George Mon-teiro declared that “[the stories] introduce to English-language readers a formidable writer.” Sena is “one whose name must be added to the rolls of the twentieth-century fiction writers who matter now and will still matter a century from now” (Monteiro, p. 289). The volume likewise received praise from Jonathan Keates in the London Times Literary Supplement, and from Amy Boaz in the New York Times. Boaz singled out the short story in question. Apart from what it conveys about exile or Camões or Sena, in her view, the tale imparts universal truths about the experience of composition: “To read the last tale of the collection, ‘By the Rivers of Babylon,’ is to behold the agony and exaltation of the writer” (Boaz, p. 48).
—Frederick G. Williams
For More Information
Bacon, Leonard. “Introduction.” The Lusiads of Luis de Camðes. New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1950.
Boaz, Amy. Review of By the Rivers of Babylon: And Other Stories, by Jorge de Sena. New York Times Book Review, 24 September 1989, 48.
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