Of Red Dust, Regional Tales, and Life Stories: Paul Melo e Castro on Translating Goan Fiction
By
R. Benedito Ferrão
Apart from his work as a critic and scholar of literature from the Portuguese period in Goa, in recent years, Paul Melo e Castro has steadily been translating the Portuguese-language works of Goan writers into English. Primarily focusing on those authors of the mid- to late-twentieth-century whose genre of choice was short fiction, Melo e Castro’s most recent translations are three books, each anthologizing the work of a specific author. Those writers are Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues (1911-1999), Maria Elsa da Rocha (1924-2007), and Epitácio Pais (1924-2009).
Through such endeavours, Melo e Castro, presently a lecturer in Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow’s School of Modern Languages & Cultures, has provided a new generation of readers the stories of the previous century, saving several of these tales from obscurity or, even, complete disappearance. After 1961, when Portuguese colonialism in Goa ended, lusophone literary production in Goa tapered off as Goans grappled with the socio-cultural changes brought on by the Indian annexation. Simultaneously, concerns about the status of Goa’s regional languages, Konkani and Marathi, took on political valences while English and its ties to globalization also meant that that language (replete with its own history as a colonial remnant) occupied the public imaginary. In the meanwhile, Portuguese continued to fade into the background in Goa.
While on the one hand the eclipsing of Portuguese literature by Goans has much to do with the diminishing presence of the Portuguese language in Goan society and culture, its decline arguably also has to do with the lack of engagement with non-contemporary literature (in any language) by Goan civil society and academia more broadly.
In this interview with R. Benedito Ferrão, Melo e Castro talks about the translations Life Stories: The Collected Stories of Maria Elsa da Rocha (Goa 1556, 2023), Weeds in the Red Dust: The Collected Stories of Epitácio Pais (CinnamonTeal, 2023), and Regional Tales (CinnamonTeal, 2024) which brings together stories by Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues.
RBF: How did you discover the writing of these particular authors and what led you to the task of translating their stories?
PMeC: I encountered these stories in a mix of ways. Some colleagues who visited Goa for material on early-twentieth-century Portuguese-language feminism – specifically the Goan Maria Ermelinda dos Stuarts Gomes – went to the old Central Library and were told about Rocha by Maria de Lourdes Bravo da Costa Rodrigues, who was head librarian then and continues to be a very active scholar. One of these colleagues, Claire Williams, brought me back a copy of Vivências Partilhadas (2005), an anthology of Rocha’s stories put out by Óscar de Noronha, who has done an enormous amount to preserve and promote Goa’s heritage. Vivências Partilhadas provides the bulk of the stories in my translation, though it also includes work that only appeared in local papers and some that went unpublished and which Óscar graciously passed on to me.
I met Maria de Lourdes personally a few years later when I myself had the opportunity to work in the old Central Library. When I mentioned I was after stories in Portuguese, she went and fetched Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues’s Contos Regionais (1987) off a shelf. I’d never heard of it, and in all honesty the collection would likely have remained in oblivion were it not for Maria de Lourdes. It might well be that the copy in the central library is the last remaining.
Epitácio Pais is a slightly different case. Another Goan author I’ve worked on and translated, Vimala Devi (the pen name of Teresa de Baptista Almeida) organised an anthology of Goan writing in Portuguese with her husband, the critic, translator and novelist Manuel de Seabra. It’s entitled A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa (1971). The anthology is accompanied by a companion volume on Goan history, society, and identity that deserves to be better known. A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa is very easy to find in the UK. The Portuguese government, which published the work, must have offered copies to all the British universities with Portuguese departments. It was where I first learnt about Goa’s Portuguese-language heritage.
Devi and Seabra discovered Pais’s work after soliciting information and contributions in Goan papers like O Heraldo and Diário da Noite. A couple of years after the anthology, in 1973, a collection of Pais’s stories entitled Os Javalis de Codval was published in Lisbon by Editorial Futura with an introduction by Seabra. Most of the stories in my translation come from there, though a number are unpublished and were shared with me by his daughter Sharmila Pais (also a very active scholar). As some of Seabra’s own work was brought out by the same publisher, I imagine he brokered Pais’s collection. While Javalis is long out of print, it’s easy to find in libraries or second hand and was one of the first full pieces of Goan literature I ever read. It was Javalis and Devi’s Monção that made me think there was something worthwhile for me to do with Goan writing as a scholar of literature.
As for the translations, I think the impetus for those came from Frederick Noronha. I think everyone in the world with any kind of interest in Goa winds up in contact with Frederick sooner or later. We met briefly in Goa and corresponded by e-mail about my work. In essence, with the DIY attitude he has, he said something like: “We don’t know the authors you’re talking about and don’t speak Portuguese. I’ve got my own publishing venture. I’ll publish them if you translate them.” I’d always been interested in translation and as I set about putting together an anthology of Goan writing in Portuguese for Goa, 1556, I realised I enjoyed translating very much and felt I was doing a good job. I haven’t stopped since, also translating Portuguese, Brazilian, Macanese, and African authors.
RBF: These have not been your first efforts at translating writing by Goan authors. For instance, your two-volume Lengthening Shadows: An Anthology of Goan Short Stories (Goa 1556 and Golden Heart Emporium, 2016) similarly gathers works by Goan writers in Portuguese, reoffering them in English. However, in an essay that appears in the anthology, you claim that it functions as an “autopsy of a dead literature,” understandably because Portuguese is a language that Goan writers seldom write in anymore but, perhaps, even more so because Goan writing in Portuguese is very rarely consumed in Goa in the present day.
Even so, by the very fact of the reappearance of these stories in English, do they present the opportunity to re-enliven the study of Portuguese outside of that language itself and, also, to breathe new life into these works of fiction by making them available to contemporary audiences?
Further, what possibilities might you envision for the use of your translations of these stories by Pais, da Rocha, and do Rosário Rodrigues, especially as one contends with the fact that writing by Goans tends to find such limited readership institutionally and more generally?
PMeC: “Autopsy of a dead literature” is a rather histrionic metaphor, isn’t it? My thoughts and feelings on this sort of thing have moved on somewhat. All literatures “live” – if that’s even the right word – when they’re read. A “classic” in Italo Calvino’s definition never stops being read and so accretes a cultural meaning that goes beyond itself, never stops being turned into slightly different works by all who read them, a sort of inexhaustible mine. I think something similar is true across the literary spectrum. A literature might no longer be produced – though even something as “dead” as Goan literature in Portuguese still shows surprising signs of life, such as Ave Cleto Afonso’s sadly unheralded pastiche of Camões, O Vaticínio do Swârga (2013) or the very recent fiction about Goans in Mozambique by Álvaro Carmo Vaz – but it can always go on being “refracted,” which was Belgian translation theorist André Lefevere’s term for the many ways in which literary works can be re-written (and includes adaptation, translation, scholarship, journalism, education, and the myriad forms of online discussion Lefevere never lived to see, having died in 1996).
Goan literature in Portuguese continues when it’s refracted (translated into a different language, written about in relation to other Goan literatures, other Portuguese-language literatures, and any other literatures that might bear some comparison – Filipino literature in Spanish is one possibility among many). This exchange between us here, for instance, breathes life into the stories we’re talking about, adds to their stock of meanings and affects and maybe makes possible further refractions. For me, one of the most important things translation in particular does is make possible unexpected readings and connections, as it opens texts up to very different readers across space and time. But what goes for Goan literature in Portuguese applies to all other Goan literatures – the more they’re refracted, the more they’ll “live.”
RBF: Born in Aldona in 1924, Maria Elsa da Rocha’s stories reflect the social concerns of her time. Yet, despite her twentieth century nascence, one picks up on the zeitgeist of a previous era (perhaps the nineteenth-century) that seems to permeate a few of da Rocha’s stories, even when they may be set in the author’s day.
Evidently drawn from an earlier period, “Dom Teotónio,” a tale your note describes as being about “the gradual decline of the bhatcars,” is replete with swashbuckling masked intruders whom readers may associate with another epoch. Contrastingly, at the same time as “Destyagi”/ “The Émigré” feels more recent (especially because of its mention of Dabolim, site of the airport in Goa, from whence the titular returning diasporic character makes his way to his ancestral home), its depiction of feudal conditions has an inescapably archaic quality.
Revealingly, both, your translation of da Rocha’s own preface to Vivências Partilhadas, from which Life Stories is drawn, and the preface to the English version written by Helga do Rosario Gomes, da Rocha’s niece, convey that the short-story writer often drew from her own family’s oral history.
In the hands of da Rocha, her contemporaries, and even writers who follow, Goan fiction, but the short story most specifically, appears to never fully eschew the nineteenth-century; to put this conversely, a generic quality of the Goan short story seems to be the influence it bears of the legacy of that period. Is it too simple to say that this is because social realities, like the persistence of caste differences, continue to be imbued by the feudality of yore? As someone conscious of her own elite familial history, how might da Rocha’s stories, then, be instructive in their fictionalized chronicling of such heritage?
PMeC: I think you’re right to suggest that Goa had its own particularly long nineteenth-century and that this in turn cast a long shadow across the twentieth. There are others who can write about the 1800s with more authority than me, but I see its influence on later authors in the paradox that if on the one hand it was when a certain Goan elite began to see itself on the historical margins – as regards British India, and especially a Bombay in dramatic expansion, though this modernisation process might seem less simply positive to us today than it did to Goan intellectuals then – it was also a period when socially, politically, and culturally this elite’s position and influence in Goa was at a zenith.
The Goan “casa grande” that so fascinates Rocha – and Rodrigues, for that matter – are consolidated in the nineteenth-century. The sort of interiors Rodrigues and to a lesser extent Rocha describes – metonyms of an identity they wish to transcend but can’t help sighing for – are stuffed with the nineteenth-century. At the same time, if the nineteenth-century weighs heavy, then the advent of Salazarism is equally important, in that it both brought the positive aspects of the nineteenth-century to a shuddering halt and gave its negative elements a sort of zombie existence that would continue until 1961. It’s worth saying that this shock was unevenly distributed though, which is why figures like Rocha, Rodrigues, and Pais, in their different ways, felt it so keenly. I imagine the peasantry didn’t notice too much difference. Indeed, the shock of moving from the First Republic, with all its chaos but real idealism, to Salazarist dictatorship might have had the most powerful psychological effects in Goa out of all the spaces that constituted Portugal at that time (though again, for an elite). In Europe, initially at least, there was some perception of stabilisation. In Goa, on the contrary, it was as if history – as progress, at least – had been thrown into reverse.
You’re right to pinpoint caste as an overriding theme. I sometimes see comments to the effect that caste is largely implicit in Goa, powerful but not mentioned. The same can’t be said for Goan literature in Portuguese, where caste is probably the most common theme (besides, marriage, which is obviously related). All sorts of anxieties about modernity and tradition, change and identity, injustice, and progress revolve around the issue of caste in Rocha, Rodrigues, and Pais, though there are as many differences as similarities to their respective attitudes towards it.
It seems to me that there are two elements in Rocha’s stories that pull in different directions. The first is their basis in real life, the anecdotal origin you mention. She says in her introduction that her stories are largely adapted from things she herself had lived through or stories that she had been told. It’s why the title of her anthology in Portuguese – Vivências Partilhadas – is such a well chosen one. A “vivência,” derived from the verb “viver,” is an experience lived through. The other element is a certain idealism or romanticism that has a certain conventionality. The struggle between the messiness of life and the attempt to shape it into a story – the attempt to turn vivência into experiência, perhaps – is at its most interesting in Rocha.
RBF: Two stories in Regional Tales by Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues stood out to me for their shared concern about familial continuity. Without giving away too much, “The Heir Apparent” and “Felicidade and Ventura – a Christmas Tale” hinge upon orchestrations of identity, where closely guarded secrets allow for the preservation of the heteropatriarchal family. While again having to do with caste, as you note in the essay that closes the book, these stories expose “[t]he myth[-making] of bloodlines.”
The recurrence of this theme in do Rosário Rodrigues’ stories, as it relates to Goan Catholics, echoes the analysis of the malleability of caste that Anjali Arondekar lays out in Abundance: Sexuality’s History (2023), a book about the Gomantak Maratha Samaj, a Bahujan Hindu Goan community. In both instances, caste and genealogy are always precarious, their “reality” bounded by the acceptance of their fictionalization. For do Rosário Rodrigues’ part is there a delicious irony to be savoured in his metafictional approach to revealing the artifice of caste and genealogy as constant fictions through the very form of fiction?
PMeC: Absolutely. Caste is largely stories people tell themselves and others, the reality of which is in their effects on ideas and interactions (the same goes for race, which is another social category that features prominently in Rodrigues’s work). One of the interesting things about Rodrigues is that, though he’s very clear race and caste are hoary mythologies that should be abandoned, he still can’t quite get away from caste and race-inflected thinking. The two stories you mention are curious examples. As you say, both are about the reproduction of a certain social formation when procreation fails. In the “Heir Apparent,” there’s a very real moral bankruptcy, but the second is a question of misfortune. But as subversive as the stories are in some ways, essentially the plots come full circle. There’s something of Lampedusa’s The Leopard about the whole collection – caste must be abandoned, but so that society will stay pretty much the same (but yet also somehow become fairer and more meritocratic). There is a similar structure of magic feeling in Rocha. Pais, though, for whom history is tragic, has a quite different outlook.
It's very interesting to bring up Anjali’s work. Your comments show, I think, the uses of refraction and the sort of comparative approach the study of Goa could only benefit from. On the one hand, a complex and nuanced archival work. On the other, a series of apparently light-hearted short stories about vanished times and outdated elites who might have thought themselves almost to be in a different world to the Bahujan group Anjali writes about. But by bringing them together for a moment, we can think about issues of caste and genealogical constructions as they effect agency and identity across Goa and beyond in broad terms, casting a little new light on both sides of the comparison.
I greatly enjoyed translating Rodrigues’s work. At their best, they made me laugh out loud. But his particular weakness, especially in the lesser stories, is with plots, which either peter out or end patly. His critical eye allowed him an irony to savour, as you say, but he had great trouble conceptualising an alternative to the world he depicted. I don’t think it’s surprising that the stories in which he did offer some kind of programme, such as it was, represent wishful thinking to the highest degree. Apparently, he told Devi and Seabra that he was writing a “novel of manners” (romance de costumes). I don’t know if it was never finished or simply lost, but it’s a great shame we don’t have a novel-scale example of Rodrigues’ attitudes, with the more structural working out of relations that would imply.
RBF: I found Weeds in the Red Dust: The Collected Stories of Epitácio Pais to be prescient for its author’s attention to issues of land and labour rights, economic instability, and social immobility; the earthiness of Pais’ characters is signalled by the book’s title in its symbolic reference to that most recognizable feature of Goa, its rust-coloured soil.
Yet, inasmuch as Pais’ stories portray the condition of the marginalized, as you point out in “The Tragic Visions of Epitácio Pais,” which readers’ can find at the book’s end, the author delivers a keen understanding of the socioeconomic infrastructure underpinning the disenfranchisement of his characters. As you observe, in stories like “Shanti,” “On the Train,” or “A Woman’s Fate,” where female characters toil in fulfilment of gendered expectations, Pais’ object is not so much to have his readers feel pity for these women’s plights but, rather, to have them notice the “inevitability” of these characters’ condition. Put differently, the characters suffer as women because it is the prevailing order of things (society, economics, caste, gender) that predetermine their lives.
“Characters, like the humans they model, always act in space,” you write in analysis of Pais’ stories, adding that “[s]pace, in turn is produced by actions and interactions.” As poignant as this observation is, I wondered if Pais’ stories may alternatively be seen as apprehending inertia rather than action. Thus, is the author’s “tragic vision” the cognition he offers of the potential immutability of circumstances: where his tragic figures are only symbolic of others who will interchangeably meet with similar fates for as long as the ground realities remain unchallenged?
PMeC: There is a lot in your last point. I would counter though, that in terms of how space is made, and portrayed, inactivity itself might be thought of as a kind of action (which might well show the limitations of these sorts of metaphors). Actions can be performed, can fail, can be thwarted, can be dreamt-of but not undertaken all with knock-on effects for space. A certain dynamic of space and behaviour continues because contextual forces are not yet strong enough to overcome the social point of rest. I agree with your take on Pais’s stories. One way of summarising his “tragic vision” (as Seabra called it) would be “structure trumps agency.” And, as you say, there’s nothing dewy-eyed in Pais’s writing. There’s no fishing for sentiment. Only a sort of despairing small “c” conservatism that expects worse unintended effects from radical change. If Rodrigues and Rocha both articulate a slightly unconvincing idealism, Pais is almost entirely pessimistic. That, ultimately, is what I take as the tragic in literature, the representation of individuals caught up in forces that exceed individual control and in which volition and outcome rarely coincide.
RBF: In closing, I wanted to ask about what you are presently working on and also what you might like to pursue in terms of future research.
PMeC: In terms of translation, I’ve been working in fits and starts on the work of José da Silva Coelho (1889–1944). His satirical stories might be roughly compared to the work of Francisco João da Costa (Gip) in the preceding generation. But where Gip is recognised today – if not read, perhaps – Coelho has been largely forgotten. I think here we see the value of publishing in book form. Jacob e Dulce (1896) was published as a printed book and so Costa is remembered. Silva Coelho’s work wasn’t and he’s now almost entirely out of mind. It’s true that, in one of her texts, Maria Aurora Couto describes him as being “considered Goa’s greatest short story writer in Portuguese,” but it’s not clear who did the considering or whether she herself had read any of his work.
There’s also a very odd publication history in Goa. His press work was popular and well known in Goa in the 1920s, if somewhat controversial. Afterwards, however, it disappeared from view. Partly due to the ephemerality of the press, partly due to the onset of Salazarism. When Seabra and Devi were preparing A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa, they corresponded with the poet Mário da Silva Coelho, José’s brother, who shared clippings of his brother’s work. It is down to this exchange that what is left of Silva Coelho’s work has survived. A good deal of the papers in the Central Library from the time are too fragile to consult and could well be lost now. Needless to say, the condition of Goa’s nineteenth and twentieth century press archives is an extremely sad state of affairs. In the 1970s, Manuel de Seabra prepared an “Almost Complete Works” of Silva Coelho for publication in the old Boletim do Instituto de Menezes Bragança. But only sections ended up being published, for obscure reasons, partly to due to anti-colonial feeling against an “old guard,” partly due to their content, which is by turns unforgiving and bawdy.
My translation will have five sections: “Regional Tales” (a collection of satirical short stories which provide a pocket panorama of First Republic Goa, and which likely inspired the title of Rodrigues’ collection), “Blithe Times” (a selection of Silva Coelho’s crónicas, a journalistic form popular across Iberia and Latin America mixing aspects of the short story and the opinion piece), “Harmonies and Melodies” (prose poems that set the Goan landscape to Western classical music), “Indian Legends” (re-writings of Goan myths and tales, often with a contemporary frame), “Oriental Mischief” (ribald tales of the Novas Conquistas, where Silva Coelho lived and worked, and which could equally be titled “Orientalist Mischief”) and “Truths and Lies” (sketches of manners, often based around some sort of interpersonal moment and which are almost modernist in their own way).
I think one of the most interesting things about Silva Coelho was how secure he seems in his identity. He has plenty of criticisms of the world around him and certainly wasn’t backwards in coming forward about them. But the sort of existential angst you see in Goan poets living in Portugal in the 1920s and 30s or someone like Bragança Cunha is completely absent. He doesn’t measure Goan identity against an outside ideal and find it wanting.
You asked what I thought my translations might achieve (or at least contribute to). As I say in my afterword to Rodrigues work, I’m pretty sure that he read those of Silva Coelho’s stories that came out in the Boletim and that they must have spurred his own Regional Tales (hence the common title). Here we have a practical example of the importance of literatures recycling their pasts. The hope would be that, as well as illuminating the past, the stories might offer something that can be adapted, overturned, improved on. In a word, refracted.
R Benedito Ferrão is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary, Virginia, USA and its recipient of the Jinlan Liu Prize for Faculty Research.
Weeds in the Red Dust can be purchased here.
Image credit to Josue downloaded from Unspalsh.com