Prudente de Moraes Neto (1904–1977) wrote this letter to Alfonso Reyes from Rio de Janeiro on April 28, 1931, and Reyes published it in his epistolary journal Monterrey: Correo literario de Alfonso Reyes. The Brazilian poet and journalist remarks on the affectation of certain Latin American elites who act as though they are merely passing through the region, perhaps to satisfy the European expectation of exoticism. Little known today, de Moraes Neto was active in Brazil’s modernist circles of the mid-1920s, establishing Rio’s Revista estética in 1924. He is also known for his sports chronicles published under the pen name Pedro Dantas in many of Brazil’s leading dailies, including Diário de notícias, Folha carioca, Diário carioca, O Estado de São Paulo, O Globo and Jornal do Brasil. This translation, as well as that of the following document by Ribeiro Couto, is from the original edition of Monterrey [(Rio de Janeiro), no. 8 (1932), 2].
“. . . BY CHANCE, I DISCOVERED YOUR NAME in European magazines, as always happens when the writers are Spanish-speaking Americans who pass through our borders only indirectly. It was when I was reading Valéry Larbaud that I learned of the existence of Ricardo Güiraldes, whose admirable Don Segundo Sombra I consider one of the great, perhaps the greatest, literary accomplishment of the South American spirit. It was, if I am not mistaken, in La Gazeta Literaria that I found the first references to [the Mexican writers] Mariano Azuela, [Xavier] Villaurrutia, [and Jaime] Torres Bodet. Surprisingly, I was able to get a copy of Los de Abajo [The Underdogs] here. But of the two poets, I still know no more than what I saw transcribed in the aforementioned periodical. Books from Mexico, Argentina, and the other Spanish-American countries only rarely appear here, after a success in Europe (Don Segundo [Sombra], Los de Abajo), or through one of those mysterious ways accessible only to the professional Ibero-Americanists. While in only fifteen or twenty days I am able to receive the most recent books and magazines published in any European country, it took months, three or four months, to get some books by Jorge Luis Borges, [Oliverio] Girondo, [Francisco Luis] Bernárdez, Norah Lange, [Raúl] González Tuñón, [Nicolas] Olivari, Piñero, in sum, the Argentines of Proa and Martín Fierro. To this day, I have tried in vain to obtain Güiraldes´s first books. I was informed recently, through Les Nouvelles littéraires [The Literary News], that a posthumous collection of Güiraldes’s short stories was published, with a preface written by you. And I have just finished reading, in French, that Mrs. Victoria Ocampo is publishing a magazine in Buenos Aires that must be very interesting.”
“I believe that I see, in the little I am able to know of X.’s work, a fusion between the two elements that are disputed about all of us American [writers]. If the critic and the humanist cannot deny their European influences, the poet is drawn by the spectacle of the land and the social environment, in whose service, moreover, his culture is always placed. In this field, any theoretical explanation is necessarily arbitrary and incomplete, but I deem it undeniable that our connections with Europe are accentuated in the temporal plane, while our connections with America take place in the spatial plane: history and geography, tradition and reality. The question, ultimately, is one of international law: we must reconcile in ourselves the “jus sanguinis” [rights of the “blood”] with the “jus soli” [rights by the “soil”]. The American spirit emerged, for each of our countries, with the first son of Europeans born in America. Whereas for the father America represented a phase, a dream, good or bad, from which he expected to awaken some day by returning to his country and to the reality of the life of his times, for the son reality was just the world that surrounded him, an insecure and uncomfortable life, but free [and] the only one he knew. Europe could hold for him no more than the mythical prestige bestowed upon it by his own imagination. It had to belong to the realm of fantasy. This, perhaps, is the problem that each of us has to resolve within himself even today.
“Material progresses, man’s slow adaptation to the land, [and] manifold miscegenation, have, undoubtedly, altered the problem. But these [“jus sanguinis” and “jus soli]” are exactly the two great forces that operate on us. Our makeup is such that, for many of us today, Europe is still the true reality. I believe it was [the Brazilian writer and abolitionist] Joaquim Nabuco who used to say: “We do not go to Europe, we return to her.” Conversely, the majority of those among us who devote themselves to intellectual or artistic questions behave toward America as if they were mere travelers. From this comes an art and literature that are exotic, although they were created here. This particularly aggravates the misunderstanding that you so lucidly denounced that leads the Europeans to ask from us only an exoticism that, although no longer appealing to the best of us, nevertheless continues to be stubbornly cultivated.
“What we desire is the coexistence in a sole individual of a critical spirit equal to the best of Europe—which would be reminiscent of Classical culture, emphasizing the Latin side of our civilization—and of a pure poetic sensibility— in whose origin can be seen as a reflection of the awe we still feel for our own land, our natural reaction to our physical environment.”
Rio, April 28, 1931