The Discovery of America by the Turks
Jorge Amado
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA BY THE TURKS
JORGE AMADO (1912–2001), the son of a cacao planter, was born in the Brazilian state of Bahia, which he would portray in more than twenty-five novels. His first novels, published when he was still a teenager, dramatize the class struggles of workers on Bahian cacao plantations. Amado was later exiled for his leftist politics, but his novels would always have a strong political perspective. Not until he returned to Brazil in the 1950s did he write his acclaimed novels Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (the basis for the successful film and Broadway musical of the same name), which display a lighter, more comic approach than his overtly political novels. One of the most renowned writers of the Latin American boom of the 1960s, Amado has had his work translated into more than forty-five languages.
GREGORY RABASSA is a National Book Award–winning translator, whose English-language versions of works by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Amado have become classics in their own right. He was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1922, and in 2006 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He is distinguished professor emeritus of Romance languages and comparative literature at Queens College, City University of New York.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was a Nobel Prize–winning Portuguese writer. His many novels include All the Names and Blindness.
JORGE AMADO
The Discovery of America by the Turks
Translated by
GREGORY RABASSA
Foreword by
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
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First published in Penguin Books 2012
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Jorge Amado, 1994
Translation copyright © Gregory Rabassa, 2012
All rights reserved
Published in Portuguese under the title A descoberta da America pelos turcos by Editora Record,
Rio de Janeiro, 1994.
“A Certain Innocence” by José Saramago appears in this volume in a new translation by Gregory Rabassa. This selection is published in The Notebook by José Saramago, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Daniel Hahn, Verso (London, 2010). Copyright © José Saramago and Editorial Caminho, SA, Lisbon, 2008-2010. Published by arrangement with Verso.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Amado, Jorge, 1912–2001.
[Descoberta da América pelos turcos. English]
The discovery of America by the Turks / Jorge Amado ; translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa ; foreword by José Saramago.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
ISBN: 978-1-101-60357-4
I. Rabassa, Gregory. II. Title.
PQ9697.A647D4713 2012 2012022549
869.3’41—dc23
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Sabon
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Contents
Foreword: A Certain Innocence by JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Preface by JORGE AMADO
THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA BY THE TURKS
Postscript by ZÉLIA GATTAI AMADO
Foreword
A Certain Innocence
For many years Jorge Amado tried and knew how to be the voice, the feeling, and the joy of Brazil. Few times will a writer succeed as well as he in becoming the mirror and the portrait of an entire people. An important part of the world of foreign readers came to know Brazil when they began to read Jorge Amado. And for many it was a surprise to discover in the books of Amado, along with the most transparent evidence, the complex heterogeneity, not only racial but also cultural, of Brazilian society. The generalized and stereotyped picture to which Brazil had been reduced, to the sum of white, black, mulatto, and Indian, was now being progressively corrected, albeit in an unequal way, by the dynamics of development in the multiple sectors and social activities of the country, and has received in the works of Amado a most solemn and at the same time delightful disavowal. We were not ignorant of the historic Portuguese immigration, nor, on a different scale and in different periods, of the German and Italian ones, but it was Amado who laid before our eyes how little we knew about it. The ethnic fan that cooled Brazil was much richer and more diversified than European perceptions had it, always contaminated by the selective habits of colonialism: After all, one had to include the multitude of Turks, Syrians, Lebanese, and tutti quanti who, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, almost right down to the present moment, left their countries of origin to turn themselves over, body and soul, to the seductions and also to the perils of the Brazilian El Dorado. And also so that Amado could open wide for them the doors of his books.
I take as an example of what I have been saying this small and delightful book, whose title, The Discovery of America by the Turks, is capable of immediately arousing the attention of the most apathetic of readers. Here will be told, in principle, the tale of two Turks—who, as Amado says, weren’t Turks but were Arabs—Raduan Murad and Jamil Bichara, who had decided to immigrate to America for the conquest of wealth and women. It’s not long, however, before the story that seemed to promise unity subdivides into other stories, in which dozens of characters are involved—violent men, whoremasters and tipplers, women as thirsty for sex as for domestic felicity; all of this in the district of Itabuna, Bahia, precisely where Amado (a coincidence?) happens to have been born. This Brazilian picaresque is no less violent than the Iberian ones. We are in the land of paid gunmen; cacao farms that were gold mines;
fights decided by the stabs of a knife; colonels who exercised a lawless power, the origins of which no one is capable of understanding; and whorehouses where the whores were fought over like the purest of wives. These people think only of fornicating, of piling up money and lovers, and of drinking bouts. They are meat for Judgment Day, for eternal condemnation. Nevertheless, all through this turbulent story of evil counsel there breathes (to the reader’s distress) a kind of innocence as natural as the wind that blows or the water that flows, as spontaneous as the grass that grows after a rainstorm. A wonder of the art of narration, The Discovery of America by the Turks, in spite of its almost schematic brevity and apparent simplicity, deserves a place beside the great novelistic murals such as Jubiabá, Tent of Miracles, and The Violent Land. It is said that you can recognize a giant by his finger. Here, then, is the giant’s finger, the finger of Jorge Amado.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Preface
Roundabout the end of May 1991, I was in my house in Rio Vermelho, Bahia, when I got a phone call from Rome. The director of a public relations outfit was filling me in on a project and making me a proposition.
An important Italian official had decided to commemorate the fifth centennial of the discovery of America with the publication of a book consisting of three stories by authors from the American continent: one in English by the American Norman Mailer, one in Spanish by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and one in Portuguese by me. The project called for the book to be published in four languages: Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, three hundred thousand copies of which would be given out free to all passengers on flights between Italy and the three Americas on the various airlines between April and September 1992, the year of the fifth centennial.
The agency would acquire the rights for the texts of the three writers for a period of three years in the four languages. They asked me whether or not I might have some piece of a story tucked away somewhere of the anticipated length (they told me the number of bytes or such, and as I understand nothing about computers, I translated them into typewritten pages, seventy or so) and if I didn’t have one whether I would consider writing one. They proposed a set amount in payment of author’s rights. It seemed a bit low to me, so I hesitated and we agreed to discuss the matter further in July in Paris, where I would be traveling a month from then.
The idea was starting to grab me, so I gave it some thought. I remembered that when I was putting Showdown together I’d begun to think about an adventure (or misadventure) for the Arab Fadul, but I hadn’t gotten around to writing it down. I didn’t think it was needed for the structure of the novel. It was an amusing idea. I thought about it again and about bringing it to fruition.
I waited in Paris but the Italians never appeared, and I said to Zélia: “The mafiosi have disappeared. So much the better; now I can keep on working in peace on Home Is the Sailor.” I’d begun writing Sailor in Bahia. It so happened, however, that those guys contacted me again, came to Paris, accepted my price, and we signed a contract. I postponed writing the anti-memoirs and invented the novella you are about to read. In November of that year in Rome I turned in the manuscript, got my check, and began squandering the pittance.
At the same time I began selling the story in languages that had not been included in my contract with the agency. I signed agreements for translations into French, German, Russian, and Turkish. In September 1992 the French edition came out (Editions Stock) in a magnificent translation by Jean Orecchioni. The little book about the Turks was well received by the French critics and sold—and is still selling—quite well. It will appear in a pocket edition beginning next year. I must add that the Turkish edition, published early in 1993, is beautiful. As for the translation: I consider it perfect. Perfect translations are those in languages the author can’t read.
The editions of the three stories in Italian, Portuguese, English, and Spanish in one volume should have been published in April 1992, but they weren’t. They didn’t become part of the commemorations of the fifth centennial, which had evidently degenerated, as anticipated, into a harsh and basic polemic: Epic or genocide? Discovery or conquest? Time passed, and I received no further news from the agency.
I didn’t have any more news, but I did have my suspicions upon reading in the newspapers about “Operation Clean Hands,” which had brought out into the open and put on trial the corruption of Italian political life—corruption that could be second only to the Brazilian variety—and included in its investigations a most important government establishment, whose directors had been brought to trial along with its president, who killed himself in jail. I was left scratching my head. I showed the report to Zélia: “I don’t think those editions they planned on will ever reach the hands of passengers on the airlines; the project’s gone down the drain.”
Exactly. The agency that had drawn up the contract wrote to me immediately and told me the project had been abandoned, and they gave back to me the rights in the four languages in which they’d had the option. I phoned Carlos Fuentes to pass along the news, and he said he’d already sold the rights for publication in Spanish to a publisher in Madrid. I notified Sérgio Machado in Brazil: “The Turks have been set free. You can publish the book whenever you want.”
If the reader of this little novella perceives a certain resemblance between the Arab Jamil Bichara, a character in the story, and Fadul Abdala, a character in a previous novel; between Raduan Murad and Fuad Karam; between the village of Itaguassu and the place called Tocaia Grande, he mustn’t think it a simple coincidence. It’s just more proof of the fact that I’m a limited and repetitive novelist, according to the line of the current and express opinion of the noble gentlemen of national criticism—an opinion that is mentioned and repeated here in writing in order to comply with same.
Otherwise, everything’s just fine. I hope readers will have some fun with the events and incidents leading to Adma’s nuptials, which took place in the city of Itabuna at the beginning of cacao culture, in the early years of the century, when the Turks finally discovered America, landed in Brazil, and became Brazilians of the best kind.
JORGE AMADO
For Zélia
in the joys and sadnesses of this autumn.
For António Alçada Baptista and
Nuno Lima de Carvalho,
who discovered Brazil and
conquered the heathens with
the weapons of devotion
and friendship.
It’s time now for us to discover America—said the prophet Tawil—we’re a bit late and we’re losing money.
—From the secret archives, a volume of The Minor Prophets
A divine inspiration, a masterwork of the Lord, a great gift, a delectable pussy, a twat worthy of an Angel.
—The book of Genesis, chapter [on Perfection]
The Discovery of America by the Turks
or
How the Arab Jamil Bichara,
Tamer of Forests,
On a Visit to the City of Itabuna,
Seeking Nourishment
For His Body,
Was There Offered
Fortune and Marriage;
Or Yet Again
the Nuptials of Adma
1
If we are to believe Iberian historians, be they Spanish or Portuguese, the discovery of the Americas by the Turks, who are not Turks at all but Arabs of good stock, came about after a long delay, in relatively recent times, during the past century and not before.
We must bear in mind that being interested parties, the Peninsular chroniclers are suspect. All they were interested in doing was praising and puffing up the deeds and figures of Spaniards and Portuguese, of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, and other bigwigs; Castilians and Lusitanians of the highest order, of the noblest Christian lineage, of the purest blood; fearless, indomitable heroes. To begin our conversation it is worth noting that, armed with birth certificates and testimonials, Italian publicists have, in their w
oppish way, claimed for the other peninsula the glory of being the cradle of Columbus and Vespucci: the one who discovered and the one who took advantage of it and labeled the unknown lands with his name. The Spaniards parry with other papers, other testimonials, so who’ll ever know who’s right? Certificates have been falsified; testimonials have been bought with the vile metal. If the Spaniards deserve little credit, the Italians deserve even less, as is easily shown by Vespucci’s fraud. And what have they to say about the Vikings? The Discovery is all a great mélange.
In the immigrant ship bringing them from the Middle East, from the mountains of Syria and Lebanon to the virgin forests of Brazil, a difficult and stormy passage, Raduan Murad, a fugitive from justice for vagrancy and gambling, a scholar with seductive prose, revealed to his steerage companion, the Syrian Jamil Bichara, that during sleepless nights bent over beat-up old books about Columbus’s first voyage, in the roll of sailors making up the crew of one of the three caravels on that festive excursion, he’d discovered the name of a certain Alonso Bichara. Bichara the Moor, signed on maybe, who knows, by a press gang, one of those many heroes forgotten when it was time for celebrations and rewards: The admiral is covered with glory and the crew is covered with shit (in spite of all his erudition, Raduan Murad had a foul mouth).
The truth, or a bunch of bootlegged goods? Raduan Murad was imaginative, inventive, and as far as scruples were concerned, he cultivated none at all. A few years later, settled in the virgin lands now, he would invent the “Itabuna ploy,” done with three unlike cards and something new at the poker table, something quite useful in bluffing and whose fame spread far and wide in the southern region of Bahia. Truth or trick? Of no great concern because the events to be recounted here took place with Jamil as their protagonist, and not with his purported forebear, Moorish from the Bichara, Spanish from the Alonso, of doubtful existence. It is better to concern ourselves with proven, undeniable facts, even though the truthful story does touch upon the miraculous.
