{"id":8729,"date":"2026-07-20T10:39:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T13:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pracaclovis.com\/?post_type=traducao&p=8729"},"modified":"2026-09-21T17:41:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T20:41:28","slug":"azul-corvo","status":"publish","type":"traducao","link":"https:\/\/pracaclovis.com\/?traducao=azul-corvo","title":{"rendered":"Azul-corvo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

LISBOA, Adriana. Azul-corvo. <\/em>Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Claudia Miranda da Silva Moura Franco
Translated by Kate Savage
Illustrated by Carolina Vigna<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human beings are, so to speak, filled with \u201cwhat ifs\u201d: a universe of possibilities that invades the mind at any possible moment. The literary critic Antonio Candido used to say that it is a trait of human nature to surrender to the imagined universe, and this, he argued, is the \u201cdriving force\u201d of literature: the moment of displacement that is responsible for the creation of an idea, the recovery of a memory, the formation of a recollection. This could come in the form of a cathartic moment, an opportunity for the unconscious mind to make a noise in deafening silences, as in the case of narratives that explore the realm of totalitarian regimes and state repression, breaking the long silence that had for so long characterised the absence of social and political memory in Brazil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is exactly this breaking of silence that defines the writings of Adriana Lisboa (Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 1970), author of Azul-Corvo<\/em> (2010) (Crow Blue<\/em>, translated by Alison Entrekin, Bloomsbury, 2013). Adriana is also a poet, essayist and short-story writer, having published novels such as Sinfonia em branco<\/em> (2001), Um beijo de colombina <\/em>(2015), Rakushisha<\/em> (2014), Han\u00f3i<\/em> (2013) and Todos os santos <\/em>(2019), as well as her poetry collections: Parte da paisagem<\/em> (2014), Pequena m\u00fasica <\/em>(2010), Deriva<\/em> (2019) and O vivo<\/em> (2021). She also wrote the essay Todo o tempo que existe <\/em>(2022) and the short story Caligrafias de sucesso <\/em>(2009). As well as Crow Blue<\/em>, her first and third have been translated into English by Sarah Green, for Texas Tech University Press, with the respective titles Symphony in White<\/em> (2010) and Hut of Fallen Persimmons <\/em>(2011). Many of her works went on to win awards; however, it was with Azul-corvo<\/em> that she received both national and international recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel was first published by Rocco in 2010. The story harks back to the military dictatorship, focusing on the Araguaia Guerrilla Movement which was active in Southeastern Par\u00e1 and Northern Goi\u00e1s (a region also known as \u2018Bico do Papagaio\u2019 [The Parrot\u2019s Beak], now in the state of Tocantins). The guerrilla fighters started to arrive in the region in around 1966, as it was considered to be a favourable location for armed conflict, as \u00c2ngelo Arroyo has suggested. Arroyo, a former guerrilla fighter who once led the Brazilian Communist Party, argued that the forested area would make an even battlefield because \u201cthe enemy cannot use tanks, artillery, aerial bombardment, etc. They have to be on foot like a guerrilla\u201d (Arroyo, 1974, cited in Campos Filho, 2012, p. 108).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the defining features of contemporary Brazilian fiction has been its focus on past political events in the country and how they are (and can be) interpreted, and Crow Blue <\/em>serves to document the Araguaia Guerrilla Movement, eliciting an immediate emotional response in the reader: \u201cthe triggers of the past awakening memory and activating all the machinery of recognition\u201d. The novel also brings other stories and minor details to light, such as the erasure of the participation of black and female soldiers in the movement, as well as issues of gender, race, and even mixed-race identity and immigration. These themes offer reflections of a universal nature (\u201csomething hybrid and impure\u201d), providing a space for discussion about what it is to be black or mixed-race both then and now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crow Blue<\/em> is a story of losses and searches, but also of reunion, interwoven with episodes featuring countless discursive intersections that allow for an exploration of the fictional representation of historical events. As an intertextual example of a dual aesthetic nature, this novel draws on the factual as a means of creating fiction, in which traditional modes of literary narration intersect with contemporary ones. In this manner, the novel\u2019s aesthetic aligns with that proposed by Ranci\u00e8re, for whom aesthetics \u201cdesignates a mode of thought that develops with respect to things of art and that is concerned to show them to be things of thought\u201d (Ranci\u00e8re, 2009, p. 11-12).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of Evangeline, nicknamed Vanja, resembles the story of many sons and daughters who grew up during the military dictatorship in Brazil, children who know very little about themselves and even less (if anything) about their parents lives in guerrilla struggles. They were the ones who stepped off the fence, took a side of history, and lost their lives because they believed in an ideal encapsulated by the lyrics of Me and Bobby McGee<\/em>: \u201cFreedom\u2019s just another word for nothin\u2019 left to lose. Nothing don\u2019t mean nothing honey if it ain\u2019t free, not now.\u201d This is how we are introduced to Suzana, Vanja\u2019s mother, a free-spirited woman (and a fan of Janis Joplin) who falls in love with Fernando, a former combatant in the Araguaia Guerrilla Movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the death of her mother, thirteen-year-old Vanja, feeling lost and \u201cin the middle of nowhere\u201d embarks on a journey in search of her own roots. To do so, she must dive headfirst into the life story of her mother and the two men who played an important role in the choices she made. The narrative takes the reader from Rio de Janeiro to Lakewood, Colorado (USA), and to S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o do Araguaia (in the state of Par\u00e1), portraying these borderland spaces as metaphors for a transition between past, present and future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Genette (1979) addresses these repetition-related aspects of storytelling as literary devices that lend credibility to the narrative. In this case, the repetition of \u201ccrow-blue shells\u201d becomes an element that encapsulates much of Vanja\u2019s personality. The shell, functioning as a dwelling place, can be identified as a space that gives her a feeling of belonging; the colour blue, the most unearthly of colours, suggests emptiness through the sense of infinity it provides; and the crow can be interpreted through the symbolism of loneliness that surrounds it, first as a symbol of voluntary isolation and, on a deeper level, as a symbol of hope for tomorrow, since its godlike characteristics give it an almost divine quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mention of the Marianne Moore poem \u2018The Fish\u2019, which reads: \u201cthrough black jade. Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps \/ adjusting the ash-heaps\u201d, reinforces the idea of meandering paths, and secrets that remain hidden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luigi Pareyson (1950), addressing the verisimilitude in Aristotle\u2019s poetics, develops the idea of the happenable and the possible, creating a bridge between History (what has happened) and Poetry (what is possible). Literature draws on this in-between space to reveal everything that is possible or happenable, whether it has or has not occurred. In this case, although historiography contributes to the identification of historical episodes which did take place during the military dictatorship and the guerrilla struggle in the Amazon region, fiction is grounded in the narratives of those who are unaware of their own history. Vanja is the fictional version of many real-life sons, daughters, and relatives who live and die every day, in the uncertainty of not knowing the whereabouts of the bodies of their loved ones who were murdered during the dictatorship. Verisimilitude is anchored precisely in such liminalities of knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrative also touches upon another type of disappearance: that of the political history of Brazil, a nation that insists on rehashing the past in a distorted and often violent manner. The overlapping of past and present is the path along which the reader travels, reflecting on the impacts of yesterday. The lack of information and the need to construct memories make narrativizing an act of justice, since, as Ricoeur (2007, p101) has claimed, \u201cthe duty to do justice, through memories, to another than the self\u201d can be grounded in the effects of forgetting as a catalyst for memory and history. As such, through the act of remembering, literature can be a means of reviving social memory, revealing the horror and violence of this period of history as an aesthetic experience. Vanja and her mother\u2019s ex-husband, Fernando, a former guerrilla who fought in Araguaia, experience the \u201cpotential shadow of the past\u201d and, in their own lives, the deviation between the events of their own personal stories, the knowledge of facts hitherto unknown to Vanja, and the certainty that \u201cnothing is going to be the same as before\u201d. Knowledge has a way of doing this: it allows us to plunge into immense abysses and discover our own history within someone else\u2019s. To break the silence surrounding the country\u2019s political history is to recover the memory of that period and to challenge the lack of answers and the silence regarding the countless bodies that are still unaccounted for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What, then, is behind the absence of personal and social critical awareness of the dictatorship? The lack of memory, or the unwillingness to face it. From an aesthetic perspective, in Merleau-Ponty\u2019s words, \u201cArt is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting\u201d (p. 116). Is this lack of vision responsible for the invisibility of the death and violence perpetrated in this period? As such, art as a \u201cprocess of expression\u201d (p. 119) can make accessible \u201cthe spectacle in which most men take part without really seeing it and who makes it visible to the most \u2018human\u2019 among them\u201d (p. 120). Perception is the action of seeking; Merleau-Ponty points out that depth is always new, it demands to be sought out, not just once in life but throughout one\u2019s entire lifetime (p. 293). The more immersed people are in the search for a historical event and its repercussions, the closer they will become to discovering the \u201cvoids\u201d in the landscape of their memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further Reading<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRAUCKS, Noraci Cristiane Michel; BARZOTTO, Leon\u00e9 Astride (2016). Mobilidades culturais em\u00a0Azul-corvo<\/em>, de Adriana Lisboa.\u00a0Ra\u00eddo<\/em>, v. 9, n. 20, p. 191-201.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CAMPOS FILHO, Romualdo Pessoa (1997).\u00a0Guerrilha do Araguaia \u2013 Esquerda em Armas<\/em>. Goi\u00e2nia: Universidade Federal de Goi\u00e1s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GENETTE, G\u00e9rard (1979). Discurso da narrativa<\/em>: ensaio de m\u00e9todo. Tradu\u00e7\u00e3o de Fernando Cabral Martins. Lisboa: Arc\u00e1dia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice (2013). A d\u00favida de C\u00e9zanne. In<\/em>: O olho e o esp\u00edrito<\/em>. Tradu\u00e7\u00e3o de Paulo Neves e Maria Ermantina Galv\u00e3o G. Pereira. S\u00e3o Paulo: Cosac & Naify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAREYSON, Luigi (1989). Os problemas da est\u00e9tica<\/em>. S\u00e3o Paulo: Martins Fontes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PIZZUTTI, Geovana Turella (2023). A mem\u00f3ria coletiva em rela\u00e7\u00e3o \u00e0 protagonista na obra <\/em>Azul-corvo, de Adriana Lisboa<\/em>. Disserta\u00e7\u00e3o (Mestrado em Letras) \u2013 Universidade Estadual de Mato Grosso do Sul, Campo Grande.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RANCI\u00c8RE, Jacques (2009). O inconsciente est\u00e9tico. <\/em>S\u00e3o Paulo: 34.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

REIS, Marina (2015). Identidade e pertencimento em <\/em>Azul-corvo de Adriana Lisboa<\/em>. Monografia (Bacharelado em Portugu\u00eas) \u2013 Stockholms Universet, Estocolmo. Dispon\u00edvel em: https:\/\/www.divaportal.org\/smash\/get\/diva2:848981\/FULLTEXT01.pdf<\/a>. Acesso: 05 mar. 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RIC\u0152UR, Paul (2007). A mem\u00f3ria, a hist\u00f3ria, o esquecimento. <\/em>Campinas: Editora da Unicamp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iconography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n