Introduction

Brazil is known for its sebos, which can be found in every one of its main cities. For a native English speaker, briefly put, a sebo is a cross between a second-hand bookshop and a bric-a-brac store selling cut-price antiques and some religious articles. Usually found in the heaving marketplace districts, it’s interesting to shop around them because you come across works, selling for a song, which you’d never normally order from Amazon but which, when able to pick them up and scan through them, catch you interest.

Such as the case with a recent book I found, in Rio de Janeiro, by a Brazilian poet named Mario Quintana titled Apontamentos de História Sobrenatural (1976) (Translation: Notes on Supernatural History). I confess that I’d never heard of Quintana before venturing into the sebo and buying this book, but I do like anything vaguely supernatural so I thought I’d give it a go.

And I’m glad I did decide to. Quintana, as one biographer states, was a native of Porto Alegre, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul—a place where I have spent a lot of time—and was born in 1906. The son of a pharmacist, as he grew up he found that his intellectual interests lay in the reading of European literature, and he learned to speak Spanish, and developed a good reading knowledge of French and some Russian.

He went on to become a poet, and a few of his works have been translated before now. The poem presented below, which I have translated, does not appear to have yet been, but I liked its theme. As an architectural traditionalist, and as someone who has seen first-hand a lot of the older nineteenth-century architecture in Rio Grande do Sul, I agree with Quintana’s sentiments expressed below. There’s just something special about older houses…

Mario Quintana: Functional Architecture

I don’t like new architecture

Because new architecture cannot make old houses.

So, I don’t like new houses,

Because new houses don’t have ghosts.

And when I say “ghosts,” I don’t mean those vulgar phantasms which walk through walls…

It’s something else—I don’t know—more subtle

An invisible presence, just like in us, we have a soul we don’t even know.

Such pity I feel for today’s children!

They live, as disenchanted orphans,

For they have neither basement nor attic

In their poor houses which lack a certain mystery—

How can dreams reside in such places?

These dreams are always clandestine events and it’s necessary

(as we well know)

To hide them from visitors

(Even, you might say, from esteemed visitors).

It’s necessary to hide from other people in the house

It’s necessary to hide it from confessors,

It’s necessary to hide it from professors,

Even from the prophets

(the prophets are always prophesying other things).

And neither do these new houses have those long interminable corridors

Which sometimes the moonlight comes out to haunt.[1]

[1][1][1] Mario Quintana, ‘Functional Architecture’, in Apontamentos de História Sobrenatural (Porto Alegre: Editora Globa, 1976), pp.26–2.