Language as a space in which a revolution can happen without spilling blood

In the 9th 2024 FAPESP Lecture, linguist, writer and translator Caetano Galindo spoke about the role Brazilian Portuguese can play in the construction of a genuinely inclusive democracy.

By José Tadeu Arantes  |  Agência FAPESP – “Language may be the space, the agora, in which a revolution can happen without spilling blood.” This was Caetano Galindo’s condensation of his thoughts about a language in transformation that is itself a factor of transformation. He expounded his ideas brilliantly in the 9th 2024 FAPESP Lecture, entitled “Latim em Pó: o que nossa língua pode nos ensinar sobre democracia, poder, diferença e convívio” (“Powdered Latin: what our language can teach us about democracy, power, difference and coexistence”).  

Galindo is one of the most important living Brazilian linguists, a prizewinning translator and the author of a novel and a collection of short stories. He has also written for the theater. He emphasized this transformational role of the Portuguese language, considered particularly significant in Brazil in recent years. Moreover, he said, the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil is not a unified and coherent phenomenon but an artificial construct shaped by power structures. In contrast with this elitist, racialized construct, which is often imposed with cruelty, there exists a huge diversity of languages that are spoken by people and eventually become harmonized thanks to homeostatic mechanisms.

“A language is more than a series of rules. It’s the space where differences coexist and create harmony. It has much more to do with people and their variations than with a standard dialect that someone imposes,” he said. “At some point, Brazil resigned itself to the ‘fiction of monolingualism’, but only recently. For most of our history, the ‘general language’ [derived from Tupi] and the ‘imperfect Portuguese’ of enslaved Africans were the instruments of contact among the different peoples who lived here.”

Exploring this contrast between self-regulation and standardization, he described how the Portuguese language became the official language of Brazil by being framed from the standpoint of an elite. “For centuries, many Brazilians were taught that their language was ‘wrong’ and that ‘speaking wrongly’ was a sign of ignorance. It’s cruel to deprive a people of the certainty that they’re perfectly capable of expressing themselves in their own language,” he said, arguing that all languages are perfect in themselves.

This exclusion has been perpetuated by the educational system, Galindo added, although some key drivers of change can be noted in 2024: “Very intense communication, social media, universal access to basic education and wider access to higher education are enabling certain forms of the Brazilian Portuguese language traditionally relegated by this white, European, conservative elite to come to the fore. They’re more evident now and aren’t automatically considered inferior anymore.”

An example: “When Emicida [a Brazilian rapper and songwriter] speaks in public, he doesn’t bother to speak as the elite expects him to. And, to use a buzzword, this is empowering. People can climb up the social ladder in Brazil today by making fertile, artistic, brilliant use of the language, instead of bowing down before an artificial construct imposed as a standard and kept that way at the cost of a system of exclusion.

“Do I see a bright future ahead? No, no human being in today’s world sees a bright future in any field. But I do see, as it were, a tiny point of light. Something seems to be happening. And I, from the standpoint of someone who, above all, feels great love for this weird thing, this bizarre flower, this ‘flor do Lácio’ [a quotation from Olavo Bilac, who called Portuguese the ‘last flower of Latium’ in his sonnet Língua portuguesa], which I call ‘flor de Luanda’, or ‘Latim em pó’ [‘powdered Latin’, a quotation from Caetano Veloso’s song “Língua”], I can look at this and think, ‘There goes a possibility!’”

Galindo is a professor at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). His best-known works are Latim em pó: um passeio pela formação do nosso português (Companhia das Letras, 2023) and a translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (Companhia das Letras, 2012), which won prizes from the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL) and the São Paulo State Association of Art Critics (APCA). Other noteworthy publications include the essay Sim, eu digo sim: uma visita guiada ao Ulysses de James Joyce (Companhia das Letras, 2016), the short story collection Sobre os canibais (Companhia das Letras, 2019), the novel Lia: cem vistas do monte Fuji (Companhia das Letras, 2024) and the play Ana Lívia, which premiered in São Paulo last year with Daniela Thomas as director and Bete Coelho and Georgette Fadel leading the cast. He has translated more than 60 books, from Italian, Romanian, Danish and above all English. 

The lecture was preceded by remarks from an opening panel chaired by Marco Antonio Zago, President of FAPESP; Fernando Ferreira Costa, Coordinator of FAPESP’s Lectures and Interdisciplinary Schools; and Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto, a member of the organizing committee for FAPESP’s Lectures and Interdisciplinary Schools. The moderator of the lecture and lengthy Q&A session was Ligia Fonseca Ferreira, a professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP).

Zago recalled having discovered Galindo through two books. “The first was Latim em pó, a gift from my friend José Ernesto dos Santos. I read it in a day. I was on my way back to São Paulo and was given the book at lunchtime. I read it on the journey, paused for a light meal on arrival, and went to sleep only when I finished it. It’s interesting because it covers dozens of centuries. The second was a gift from the Irish Consul General in São Paulo. It’s long, about 1,000 pages long, more or less. It’s a novel that takes place on a single day, but I’m sure no one would read it in less than a week, or several weeks, or perhaps months. This was Ulysses by Joyce, translated very originally and creatively by Galindo,” he said. 

Ferreira introduced the speaker. Before mentioning his books and prizes, noting that he graduated in French language and literature, and saying that he is also a musician who plays classical guitar, she summed up his “authorized biography” in a humorous paragraph, certainly written by Galindo: “Born in 1973 in Curitiba, where he lives with dozens of needy musical instruments, thousands of unread books, a hound called Leopoldo, and a wife he definitely doesn’t deserve.”

A recording of the complete event, including the 9th 2024 FAPESP Lecture “Latim em Pó: o que nossa língua pode nos ensinar sobre democracia, poder, diferença e convívio”, can be watched at: www.youtube.com/live/1ze4cHXKF9w.