V
TWO BOOK-HUNTERS IN SOUTH AMERICA
In Collaboration with Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt
The true bibliophile will always find time to exercise his calling, no matter where he happens to be, or in what manner he is engaged in making his daily bread. In some South American cities, more particularly in Buenos Ayres, there is so little to do outside of one’s office that were there more old bookstores it would be what Eugene Field would have called a bibliomaniac’s paradise. To us wanderers on the face of the earth serendipity in its more direct application to book-collecting is a most satisfactory pursuit; for it requires but little capital, and in our annual flittings to “somewhere else” our purchases necessitate but the minimum of travelling space. There are two classes of bibliophiles—those to whom the financial side is of little or no consequence, and those who, like the clerk of the East India House, must count their pennies, and save, and go without other things to counterbalance an extravagance in the purchase of a coveted edition. To the former class these notes may seem overworldly in their frequent allusion to prices; but to its authors the financial side must assume its relative importance.
Among the South American republics, Brazil undeniably takes precedence from a literary standpoint. Most Brazilians, from Lauro Muller, the minister of foreign affairs, to the postmaster of the little frontier town, have at some period in their lives published, or at all events written, a volume of prose or verse. It comes to them from their natural surroundings, and by inheritance, for once you except Cervantes, the Portuguese have a greater literature than the Spaniards. There is therefore in Brazil an excellent and widely read native literature, and in almost every home there are to be found the works of such poets as Gonçalves Diaz and Castro Alves, and historians, novelists, and essayists like Taunay, Couto de Magalhãens, Alencar, and Coelho Netto. Taunay’s most famous novel, Innocencia, a tale of life in the frontier state of Matto Grosso—“the great wilderness”—has been translated into seven languages, including the Japanese and Polish. The literature of the mother country is also generally known; Camões is read in the schools, and a quotation from the Lusiads is readily capped by a casual acquaintance in the remotest wilderness town. Portuguese poets and playwrights like Almeda Garret, Bocage, Quental and Guerra Junquera; and historians and novelists such as Herculano, Eça de Queiroz, or Castello Branco are widely read.
In Brazil, as throughout South America, French is almost universally read; cheap editions of the classics are found in most homes, and bookstores are filled with modern French writers of prose or verse—sometimes in translation, and as frequently in the original. Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo abound in old bookstores, which are to be found in fewer numbers in others of the larger towns, such as Manaos, Para, Pernambuco, Bahia, Curytiba, or Porto Alegre. In the smaller towns of the interior one runs across only new books, although occasionally those who possess the “flaire” may chance upon some battered treasure.
The line which is of most interest, and in South America presents the greatest latitude, is undoubtedly that of early voyages and discoveries. Probably it was because they were in a greater or less degree voyagers or explorers themselves that the Americans and English who came to South America seventy or eighty years ago brought with them books of exploration and travel, both contemporary and ancient. Many of these volumes, now rare in the mother country, are to be picked up for a song in the old bookstores of the New World.
The accounts of the Conquistadores and early explorers, now in the main inaccessible except in great private collections or museums, have frequently been reprinted, and if written in a foreign tongue, translated, in the country which they describe. Thus the account of Père Yveux was translated and printed in Maranhão in 1878, and this translation is now itself rare. We picked up a copy for fifty cents in a junk-store in Bahia, but in São Paulo had to pay the market price for the less rare translation of Hans Stade’s captivity. Ulrich Schmidel’s entertaining account of the twenty years of his life spent in the first half of the sixteenth century in what is now Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, has been excellently translated into Spanish by an Argentine of French descent, Lafoyne Quevedo, the head of the La Plata museum. We had never seen the book until one day at the judicial auction held by the heirs of a prominent Argentine lawyer. Books published in Buenos Ayres are as a whole abominably printed, but this was really beautiful, so we determined to get it. The books were being sold in ill-assorted lots, and this one was with three other volumes; one was an odd volume of Italian poetry, one a religious treatise, and the third a medical book. Bidding had been low, and save for standard legal books, the lots had been going at two or three dollars apiece. Our lot quickly went to five dollars. There was soon only one man bidding against us. We could not understand what he wanted, but thought that perhaps the Schmidel was worth more than we had imagined. Our blood was up and we began trying to frighten our opponent by substantial raises; at fourteen he dropped out. The dealers in common with every one else were much intrigued at the high bidding, and clearly felt that something had escaped them. The mystery was solved when our opponent hurried over to ask what we wanted for the odd volume of Italian verse—it belonged to him and he had loaned it to the defunct lawyer shortly before his death. We halved the expenses and the lot, and, as a curious sequel, later found that the medical book which had quite accidentally fallen to our share was worth between fifteen and twenty dollars.
Prices in Brazil seemed very high in comparison with those of Portugal and Spain, but low when compared with Argentina. On the west coast we found books slightly less expensive than in Brazil, where, however, the prices have remained the same as before the war, though the drop in exchange has given the foreigner the benefit of a twenty-five per cent reduction. There are a fair number of auctions, and old books are also sold through priced lists, published in the daily papers. We obtained our best results by search in the bookshops. It was in this way that we got for three dollars the first edition of Castelleux’s Voyage dans la Partie Septentrionale de l’Amerique, in perfect condition, and for one dollar Jordan’s Guerra do Paraguay, for which a bookseller in Buenos Ayres had asked, as a tremendous bargain, twelve dollars.
In São Paulo after much searching we found Santos Saraiva’s paraphrase of the Psalms, a famous translation, quite as beautiful as our own English version. The translator was born in Lisbon. His father was a Jewish rabbi, but he entered the Catholic Church, became a priest, and went to an inland parish in southern Brazil. After some years he left the Church and settled down with a Brazilian woman in a small, out-of-the-way fazenda, where he translated the Psalms, and also composed a Greek lexicon that is regarded as a masterpiece. He later became instructor in Greek in Mackenzie College in São Paulo, confining his versatile powers to that institution until he died.