N.b. The text below has been translated by A. Vazquez. The original Portuguese version can be found here: Notas de rodapé a O Uraguay.
This post was written by Dreykon Fernandes received his Bachelor’s degree in Literature (Portuguese Language and Lusophone Literature) at the Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil, and is a member of the research group LIMES – Fronteiras Interdisciplinares da Antiguidade e suas Representações [‘Interdisciplinary Frontiers of Antiquity and its Representations’].
What function do the footnotes to an epic poem serve? The Uraguay (1769), of Basílio da Gama as Case Study
by Dreykon Fernandes Nascimento
The Luso-Brazilian epic poem by José Basílio da Gama, The Uraguay (1769), centers its plot around a historical event: the Iberian expeditions against the Jesuit missions in Brazil, called the Seven Reductions (‘Sete Povos das Missões’, in Portuguese). Among the epic poems produced in Brazil, a particularly conspicuous and unusual feature of The Uraguay is its unprecedented use of footnotes added to the poetic text by the author himself, a literary practice that later became a feature of Brazilian poetry, as in the Vila Rica (1773) of Cláudio Manuel da Costa, The Defector (O Desertor) (1774) of Inácio José de Silva Alvarenga and the Caramuru (1781) of José de Santa Rita Durão.
Not that the practice of annotating epic poetry was uncommon during the period; such a practice, however, began with commentaries to Latin texts, and didactic poems most consistently; so we find footnotes added to Latin poems such as De Sacchari Opificio (c. 1712), by Prudêncio de Amaral, circulated in manuscript until 1780; De Rusticis Brasiliae Rebus (c. 1766-1767), by Rodrigues de Melo, circulated in manuscript until 1781; and Brasilienses Aurifodinae, by Basílio da Gama himself, produced between 1760 and 1767 while he was living in Rome, a text that circulated exclusively in manuscript and is still unpublished.
The annotation of heroic epic poetry written in the vernacular is not attested for any texts produced in Brazil until The Uraguay. An earlier use of footnotes can be found in France, in the case of The Henriad (1723) of Voltaire, but, in moving from the Latin to the vernacular, Voltaire makes few modifications, merely translating footnotes from a style more appropriate to didactic poetry into a historiographic style, in order to accommodate them to the historical subject matter of his epic poem. Functionally, the two types of notation are identical, limited to explicating or giving additional details to the content of the line of verse. The footnotes of The Uraguay, however, are fundamentally different in nature, since they are integral to the argumentative discourse of the text inextricably from its verses, as I will try to demonstrate in brief.
In a departure from the norms of the traditional system of notation, which demanded consistency of language between the footnote and the verse and the exclusive use of prose in order to perform its exegetical function, the footnotes of The Uraguay consist of citations of prose and poetry in vernacular languages, Portuguese and French, and in Latin.
Nescia gens nostri vivit…
… ad interiora venire
Regna vetent homines cupidos audita videndi.
[The people live unaware of our people…
…they prevent people desirous to see what they had heard about
from entering into the interior of their kingdoms…]
With verses not only taken out of context, but also made fragmentary, the footnote recalls the sentiment of the epigraph of The Uraguay, taken from the Aeneid 8.240-1:
At specus, & Caci detecta apparuit ingens
Regia, & umbrosae penitus patuere cavernae.
[But the cave and great kingdom of Cacus, uncovered,
appeared, and from deep within, the shadowy caverns lies open to view.]
In other words, beginning from the epigraph Gama relates his narrative to the liberation of Italy, subjected to the tyranny of Cacus, by Hercules. And yet, while the symbolism is maintained by means of the direct association between King José I and Hercules in verses 3.240-1 of the poem,
Genio de Alcides, que de negros monstros
Despeja o Mundo, e enxuga o pranto á patria
[Spirit of Hercules, who eradicates from the world
its black monsters, and dries the tears of the country]
the association between the Society of Jesus and Cacus is made explicit only in the footnote. That is to say, beyond their explanatory character, the footnotes in The Uraguay add important interpretive content and aid in the staging of the two known forces in confrontation in the work, namely the Portuguese Crown and the Society of Jesus, from one page to the next. This staging utilizes an argumentative structure that exposes to the eyes of the reader the contention between an Enlightenment discourse, foregrounded in the verses in the vernacular, and a discourse concerning the Jesuits, embedded in the Latin footnotes.
Additionally, the footnote precisely maintains the Vergilian correspondences of the epic poem of Gama, since the excerpt of the Praedium Rusticum undoubtedly comes to echo Aeneid 8.240-1, even though, in the original context, the verses of Vanière have nothing whatsoever to do with Cacus: the indigenous peoples did not fear foreigners (nec ab hoste tuetur oras), nor were they hostile to them (amice hospitio excipiant); they did not live in hiding, but close to the beaches (Appositas struxere domos ad littora); and among themselves they forbade greedy man (vetent homines cupidos). It is Gama who gives new significance to the Latin verses by integrating them into the semantics of his vernacular verses.
With these considerations in mind, we can see quite clearly how the complete exclusion of the footnotes in the subsequent publication history of The Uraguay, whether in standalone editions of the text, or in anthologies, eliminates important interpretive layers that the author himself places before the eyes of the reader, while simultaneously obfuscating the multilingual dynamic between vernacular languages and Latin available in the broader ambit of colonial America. Even when modern editions remember to include them, they are consistently postponed to the end of the book or at the close of the canto, disrupting the semantic sequence sewed up by Gama’s text, consciously based in the usual manner of printing in the Early Modern’s context, which displays the footnotes on the same page as the verse to which they refer, in favour of a modern post-romantic and anachronistic interpretation of what the footnotes are and the purpose which they serve.
Hercules crushes the fire-breathing Cacus — Engraving by Hans Sebald Beham, 1545: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.