Vimala Devi
Encyclopedia
Vimala Devi is the pseudonym of Teresa da Piedade de Baptista Almeida, a Goa
n writer, poet and translator.
, across the Mandovi river from Panjim, the principal town of Goa. At that time Britona was owned by Devi's family, which belonged to the uppermost brahmin
caste
of bhatkar landowners. The bhatkar class owned the land and the labour of the mundkar class of lower-caste inhabitants in what was essentially a feudal relationship. Although this rural aristocracy was still predominant at this time, this was the period when the decline of the land-owning class first began to set in, a theme that appears in Devi's later fiction. After Goa's incorporation into India laws were passed giving the mundkar workers rights to the lands on which they had always lived and worked and abolishing their duty to provide unpaid labour to the bhatkar landowners.
As in many high caste families at the time, Portuguese was spoken at home alongside Konkani
, the vernacular language of Goa. The author pursued primary studies in Portuguese and also in English, which even under the Portuguese administration was widely used by the Christian population of the territory.
Vimala Devi moved to Lisbon
in 1957 to rejoin part of her family already established in the city and began work as a translator. The first stage of her career as a writer is marked by a concern with bringing the world of the then-Portuguese Estado da India into representation. It was also at this time that the writer chose her pseudonym, a name that brought together in one persona the divided Hindu and Catholic communities of Goa (as do the short stories of Monção in the space of the same collection). Thus, for the first time in Portugal, there appeared a writer of Hindu appellation writing in Portuguese about the country's recently lost colony. In this period she published a collection of poems entitled Súria in 1962 and a book of short stories called Monção, which was written and published in 1963.
It was in Lisbon that Vimala Devi met and married her husband Manuel de Seabra
, a journalist, poet and translator and a great influence on her writing.
"
Some of the stories that stand out in particular in this collection are: "Nâttak," an encounter between an actor in Goan Hindu dramas and an adolescent girl, who turns out to be his half-sister; "O Genro-Comensal," about a man who returns to Goa from Mozambique to father a child for a family whose unmarried daughters had produced no heirs; "Dhruva" and "Regresso," that tell the story of a man from a lower-class background who is out of place in his family home after returning from Portugal to get a university education, and the woman who faithfully waits for him to return; and "A Droga," about a forbidden romance between a Christian girl and a Hindu boy.
". Certainly, Major influences in her work that can be felt in her work, and to which she refers directly include, Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms, but also [T.S.Eliot] (above all The Waste Land and 4 Quartets), [W.H. Auden], Matthew Mead
(principally Identities), Kingsley Amis
(such as A case of samples), Alan Bold
, Gunther Grass, Blaise Cendrars
, Paul Valéry
, Cesare Pavese
, Robert Creeley
and other poets from the New Writing movement in the United States.
It is in Hologramas that Devi leaves behind the nineteenth-century world of colonial Goa to engage with both twentieth-century modernity and twentieth-century Western modernism. The guiding principle of the collection is the eponymous hologram, and the idea that the human mind creates mental holograms of the reality it perceives and decodes. In a sense, the poems contained are themselves holograms constructed from the interplay of several sets of three dimensions: past, present, and future; the microscopic, the human, and the cosmic; the mythological, the human, and the technological. In Hologramas, as in Baudelaire, for example, the most ancient and the most up-to-date in culture and technology clash and enter into dialogue.
With its internationalist poems, drawing on the experiments of concretism and modern Briitsh verse, Telepoemas is a further instance of Devi's engagement with the intellectual laboratory of Europe that was partially smashed by the World Wars - "Surgia Europa/Mais Tarde surgia/Europa chorava" (Europe arose/Later Europe arose/Europe wept). One thing that distinguishes Telepoemas from the preceding collection is the increased focus on the bodily, on man and woman, as though the pendulum between the microscopic and the macroscopic had found itself at the level of the human for the instance of this collection. Like the telephone and the television that the title invoke, and which instruments helped bring about the world with which the verse engages, Telepoemas relates the sights and sounds, both inner and outer, of man and woman, nature and science as they are distanced and brought together in the routine of the city streets of its age. There is also a notable increase in focus on the painterly, with many references to European artists and a recurrent play with typesetting and the ordering of words on the page.
, supplementing the bibliographical information contained in the work of Father Filinto Dias. The second volume was an anthology of Portuguese-language Goan writing that contains many works that might well have disappeared had they not been found and preserved by Devi and Seabra, even within the broader problematic of preservation of colonial literary production during an era characterized both by Portuguese decolonization in Asia and Africa and by the decline of authoritarian rule in Portugal. In 1972, A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa was awarded the prestigious Prémio Abílio Lopes do Rego of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa.
, Catalan
and Esperanto
, as well as doing translations of science fiction
and other literature. With Seabra, Devi also composed an up-to-date Catalan-Portuguese dictionary, which was published by the Enciclopèdia Catalana.
Translated as:
Translated as:
Goa
Goa , a former Portuguese colony, is India's smallest state by area and the fourth smallest by population. Located in South West India in the region known as the Konkan, it is bounded by the state of Maharashtra to the north, and by Karnataka to the east and south, while the Arabian Sea forms its...
n writer, poet and translator.
Life in Goa
Vimala Devi was born in 1932 in the village of Britona in the parish of Penha-de-FrancaPenha-de-Franca
Penha-de-Franca is a census town in North Goa district in the Indian state of Goa. It shares its name with a neighbourhood in Lisbon, where it is spelt Penha de França.It is the birthplace of writer Vimala Devi....
, across the Mandovi river from Panjim, the principal town of Goa. At that time Britona was owned by Devi's family, which belonged to the uppermost brahmin
Brahmin
Brahmin Brahman, Brahma and Brahmin.Brahman, Brahmin and Brahma have different meanings. Brahman refers to the Supreme Self...
caste
Caste
Caste is an elaborate and complex social system that combines elements of endogamy, occupation, culture, social class, tribal affiliation and political power. It should not be confused with race or social class, e.g. members of different castes in one society may belong to the same race, as in India...
of bhatkar landowners. The bhatkar class owned the land and the labour of the mundkar class of lower-caste inhabitants in what was essentially a feudal relationship. Although this rural aristocracy was still predominant at this time, this was the period when the decline of the land-owning class first began to set in, a theme that appears in Devi's later fiction. After Goa's incorporation into India laws were passed giving the mundkar workers rights to the lands on which they had always lived and worked and abolishing their duty to provide unpaid labour to the bhatkar landowners.
As in many high caste families at the time, Portuguese was spoken at home alongside Konkani
Konkani language
KonkaniKonkani is a name given to a group of several cognate dialects spoken along the narrow strip of land called Konkan, on the west coast of India. This is, however, somewhat an over-generalisation. Geographically, Konkan is defined roughly as the area between the river Damanganga to the north...
, the vernacular language of Goa. The author pursued primary studies in Portuguese and also in English, which even under the Portuguese administration was widely used by the Christian population of the territory.
Debuts
Whilst in Goa, Vimala Devi contributed articles and poetry to two of the main Portuguese-language newspapers, the Diário da Noite and o Heraldo. Whilst the former is now defunct, the latter continues to appear in an English language edition.Life in Lisbon
|
| Vimala Devi: "Goa" |
Vimala Devi moved to Lisbon
Lisbon
Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal with a population of 545,245 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Lisbon extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 3 million on an area of , making it the 9th most populous urban...
in 1957 to rejoin part of her family already established in the city and began work as a translator. The first stage of her career as a writer is marked by a concern with bringing the world of the then-Portuguese Estado da India into representation. It was also at this time that the writer chose her pseudonym, a name that brought together in one persona the divided Hindu and Catholic communities of Goa (as do the short stories of Monção in the space of the same collection). Thus, for the first time in Portugal, there appeared a writer of Hindu appellation writing in Portuguese about the country's recently lost colony. In this period she published a collection of poems entitled Súria in 1962 and a book of short stories called Monção, which was written and published in 1963.
It was in Lisbon that Vimala Devi met and married her husband Manuel de Seabra
Manuel de Seabra
Manuel de Seabra is a Portuguese writer, journalist, and translator. He translates Russian, Portuguese, and Catalan. He and his wife compiled the Portuguese-Catalan/Catalan-Portuguese Dictionary...
, a journalist, poet and translator and a great influence on her writing.
Súria
Súria focusses on Devi's memories of India intertwined reflections on Goa's social, economic and historical character and is, for Mauro Neves, who echoes the verdict of Portuguese critic João Gaspar de Simões, a "symbolist" work "profoundly influenced by Camilo PessanhaCamilo Pessanha
Camilo Pessanha was a Portuguese symbolist poet.-Early years:Camilo de Almeida Pessanha was born the illegitimate son of Francisco António de Almeida Pessanha, an aristocratic law student, and Maria do Espírito Santo Duarte Nunes Pereira, his housekeeper, on September 7, 1867, at 11.00 p.m., in Sé...
"
Monção
Everton Machado has described Monção as the best portrait (alongside the novels of Orlando da Costa) of what resulted from the interpenetration of the Indian and Portuguese cultures in Goa"". To some extent Devi's collection could be likened to a Goan version of James Joyce's Dubliners, insofar as the stories contained concern the constrictions placed on the lives of ordinary people located in inescapably provincial settings. A further link is the recurrence in the narrative of the epiphanic moment, so typical of Dubliners, in which the characters (or at least the reader) sees clearly the nature and structure of the limitations placed upon them. In a Luso-Asian context, however, one might as easily make a comparison with the collection of short stories "Cheong-sam," by the Macanese author Deolinda da Conceição.Some of the stories that stand out in particular in this collection are: "Nâttak," an encounter between an actor in Goan Hindu dramas and an adolescent girl, who turns out to be his half-sister; "O Genro-Comensal," about a man who returns to Goa from Mozambique to father a child for a family whose unmarried daughters had produced no heirs; "Dhruva" and "Regresso," that tell the story of a man from a lower-class background who is out of place in his family home after returning from Portugal to get a university education, and the woman who faithfully waits for him to return; and "A Droga," about a forbidden romance between a Christian girl and a Hindu boy.
London
For seven years, Devi lived in London and worked as an art critic for the BBC's Portuguese-language service. It was during this period that Hologramas and Telepoemas were written. Here, far from Goa and the far-reaching transformation of Goan society into the Indian Union, Devi turns from the Goan themes and memories that animated her earlier work to a deep engagement with Western European culture and contemporary Anglophone poetry. For Mauro Neves, the period from Hologramas onwards "reflects the marked influence of Fernando PessoaFernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa , was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.-Early years in Durban:On 13 July...
". Certainly, Major influences in her work that can be felt in her work, and to which she refers directly include, Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms, but also [T.S.Eliot] (above all The Waste Land and 4 Quartets), [W.H. Auden], Matthew Mead
Matthew Mead
Matthew Mead is an English poet. He edited the magazine Satis and now lives in Germany. A selection of his poems appears in Penguin Modern Poets 16, together with Harry Guest and Jack Beeching....
(principally Identities), Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
(such as A case of samples), Alan Bold
Alan Bold
Alan Norman Bold was a Scottish poet, biographer and journalist.He edited Hugh MacDiarmid's Letters and wrote the influential biography MacDiarmid. Bold had acquainted himself with MacDiarmid in 1963 while still an English Literature student at Edinburgh University. His debut work, Society...
, Gunther Grass, Blaise Cendrars
Blaise Cendrars
Frédéric Louis Sauser , better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.-Early years:...
, Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
, Cesare Pavese
Cesare Pavese
Cesare Pavese was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator; he is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country.- Early life and education :...
, Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
and other poets from the New Writing movement in the United States.
Hologramas
|
| Vimala Devi: "Tempo Individual" |
It is in Hologramas that Devi leaves behind the nineteenth-century world of colonial Goa to engage with both twentieth-century modernity and twentieth-century Western modernism. The guiding principle of the collection is the eponymous hologram, and the idea that the human mind creates mental holograms of the reality it perceives and decodes. In a sense, the poems contained are themselves holograms constructed from the interplay of several sets of three dimensions: past, present, and future; the microscopic, the human, and the cosmic; the mythological, the human, and the technological. In Hologramas, as in Baudelaire, for example, the most ancient and the most up-to-date in culture and technology clash and enter into dialogue.
Telepoemas
|
| Vimala Devi: "Este Agora" |
With its internationalist poems, drawing on the experiments of concretism and modern Briitsh verse, Telepoemas is a further instance of Devi's engagement with the intellectual laboratory of Europe that was partially smashed by the World Wars - "Surgia Europa/Mais Tarde surgia/Europa chorava" (Europe arose/Later Europe arose/Europe wept). One thing that distinguishes Telepoemas from the preceding collection is the increased focus on the bodily, on man and woman, as though the pendulum between the microscopic and the macroscopic had found itself at the level of the human for the instance of this collection. Like the telephone and the television that the title invoke, and which instruments helped bring about the world with which the verse engages, Telepoemas relates the sights and sounds, both inner and outer, of man and woman, nature and science as they are distanced and brought together in the routine of the city streets of its age. There is also a notable increase in focus on the painterly, with many references to European artists and a recurrent play with typesetting and the ordering of words on the page.
A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa
Financed by a grant from the Junta de Investigações do Ultramar and drawing on material from the Lisbon's Biblioteca Nacional and London's British Library, as well as more than a hundred letters exchanged with writers and intellectuals in India, Devi co-authored with Manuel de Seabra of A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa. The first volume was a ground-breaking historical account of the history and development of Portuguese-language Goan literatureGoan literature
- Small region :Goa has a population of around 1.4 million and an area of 3,700 sq. kilometres . For a small region, it has a significant amount of publication activity, possibly in part because its people write in a number of languages—as many as 13, according to one count—and also because of the...
, supplementing the bibliographical information contained in the work of Father Filinto Dias. The second volume was an anthology of Portuguese-language Goan writing that contains many works that might well have disappeared had they not been found and preserved by Devi and Seabra, even within the broader problematic of preservation of colonial literary production during an era characterized both by Portuguese decolonization in Asia and Africa and by the decline of authoritarian rule in Portugal. In 1972, A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa was awarded the prestigious Prémio Abílio Lopes do Rego of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa.
Barcelona
In 1971, Devi returned to Lisbon. A year later she left for Barcelona, where she and branched out into writing verse in SpanishSpanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Catalan
Catalan language
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
and Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
, as well as doing translations of science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
and other literature. With Seabra, Devi also composed an up-to-date Catalan-Portuguese dictionary, which was published by the Enciclopèdia Catalana.
Hora
The first collection of poetry Devi published in Spain was entitled Hora. Featuring poems written in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, within the space of Hora (with its subtly trilingual title) the three largest Iberian languages achieve a poetic co-existence and equality that has not always been permitted historically and politically.A Cidade e os Dias
In 2008, Vimala Devi published A Cidade e os Dias (published in Catalan as La Ciutat i els dies), a distillation of the writer's over forty years of experience in several major European cities since the first publication of her last collection Monção. Using an even more stripped-down short-story format that concentrates on places and instants extracted from the flow of time and urban experience, the narratives contained in the collection explore the tensions and attitudes that have grown up in the West in the post-war period. In some ways, A Cidade e os Dias can be seen to explore similar terrain to Vimala Devi's poetry, especially in its interrogation of the rapport between art and life. Despite the tensions that run through the stories and which impact so strongly on the characters' existences - for instance those between personal relationships and economic demands - there is always a space for hope and happiness, a profound faith in the potential of humankind.Prose
- Monção Lisbon: Dédalo, 1963 (2nd augmented edition: Lisbon: Escritor, 2003)
Translated as:
- Musono: novelaro Skövde: Al-fab-et-o, 2000. (version in Esperanto)
- Monsó. Vilanova i La Geltrú: El Cep i La Nansa, 2002) (version in Catalan)
- A Cidade e os Dias. Lisbon: Leitor, 2008
Translated as:
- La Ciutat i els Dies. Vilanova i La Geltrú: El Cep i La Nansa, 2008) (version in Catalan)
Poetry
- Súria: poemas Lisbon: Agência-Geral do Ultramar, 1962.
- Hologramas Coimbra: Atlântida Editora, 1969
- Telepoemas Coimbra: Atlântida Editora, 1970
- Hora. El ojo de Polifemo, Barcelono, 1991. (Poetry in Spanish).
- Rosa secreta. El ojo de Polifemo, Barcelono, 1992. (Poetry in Spanish).
- El temps irresolt. L'ull de Polifem, Barcelono, 1995. (Poetry in Catalan and Portuguese).
- Pluralogo. La Kancerkliniko, Thaumiers, 1996. (Poetry in Esperanto).
- Speguliĝoj. La Kancerkliniko, Thaumiers, 1996. (Poetry in Esperanto).
- Éticas-Ètiques. Vilanova i La Geltrú: El Cep i La Nansa, 2000. (in PortuguesePortuguese languagePortuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
and Catalan).
Reference works
- A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa (with Manuel de SeabraManuel de SeabraManuel de Seabra is a Portuguese writer, journalist, and translator. He translates Russian, Portuguese, and Catalan. He and his wife compiled the Portuguese-Catalan/Catalan-Portuguese Dictionary...
), Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1971. - A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa 2. Antologia(with Manuel de SeabraManuel de SeabraManuel de Seabra is a Portuguese writer, journalist, and translator. He translates Russian, Portuguese, and Catalan. He and his wife compiled the Portuguese-Catalan/Catalan-Portuguese Dictionary...
), Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1971. - Diccionari portuguès-català (with Manuel de SeabraManuel de SeabraManuel de Seabra is a Portuguese writer, journalist, and translator. He translates Russian, Portuguese, and Catalan. He and his wife compiled the Portuguese-Catalan/Catalan-Portuguese Dictionary...
), Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1985.
External references
- Machado, Everton. "A literatura goesa de língua portuguesa," Cronópios 16 July 2006 (in Portuguese)
- Melo e Castro, Paul. "Vimala Devi’s Monção: The Last Snapshots of Colonial Goa", Portuguese Studies 25:1. London: MHRA, 2009
- Neves, Mauro. "A poesia de Vimala Devi," Bulletin of the Faculty of Foreign Studies #34. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1999 (in Portuguese)
- Ortega, Noel Guilherme. "O Problema Social em Vimala Devi", Estudos Leopoldenses, Vol.18 No.62 1982, pp. 91–102
- Willis, Clive. "Vimala Devi and the Goan Diaspora", Luso-Asian Voices (Lusophone Studies), University of Bristol, 2000
Translations
- An English translation by Paul Melo e Castro of Os Filhos de Job appeared in issue 3 of The AALITRA Review, available on-line here