The Discovery of America by the Turks

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA BY THE TURKS

JORGE AMADO
(1912–2001), the son of a cacao planter, was born in the Brazilian state of Bahia, which he would portray in more than twenty-five novels. His first novels, published when he was still a teenager, dramatize the class struggles of workers on Bahian cacao plantations. Amado was later exiled for his leftist politics, but his novels would always have a strong political perspective. Not until he returned to Brazil in the 1950s did he write his acclaimed novels
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon
and
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
(the basis for the successful film and Broadway musical of the same name), which display a lighter, more comic approach than his overtly political novels. One of the most renowned writers of the Latin American boom of the 1960s, Amado has had his work translated into more than forty-five languages.

GREGORY RABASSA
is a National Book Award–winning translator, whose English-language versions of works by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Amado have become classics in their own right. He was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1922, and in 2006 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He is distinguished professor emeritus of Romance languages and comparative literature at Queens College, City University of New York.

JOSÉ SARAMAGO
(1922–2010) was a Nobel Prize–winning Portuguese writer. His many novels include
All the Names
and
Blindness
.

JORGE AMADO

Translated by
GREGORY RABASSA

Foreword by
JOSÉ SARAMAGO

PENGUIN BOOKS

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Foreword: A Certain Innocence by
JOSÉ SARAMAGO

Preface by
JORGE AMADO

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA BY THE TURKS

Postscript by
ZÉLIA GATTAI AMADO

A Certain Innocence

For many years Jorge Amado tried and knew how to be the voice, the feeling, and the joy of Brazil. Few times will a writer succeed as well as he in becoming the mirror and the portrait of an entire people. An important part of the world of foreign readers came to know Brazil when they began to read Jorge Amado. And for many it was a surprise to discover in the books of Amado, along with the most transparent evidence, the complex heterogeneity, not only racial but also cultural, of Brazilian society. The generalized and stereotyped picture to which Brazil had been reduced, to the sum of white, black, mulatto, and Indian, was now being progressively corrected, albeit in an unequal way, by the dynamics of development in the multiple sectors and social activities of the country, and has received in the works of Amado a most solemn and at the same time delightful disavowal. We were not ignorant of the historic Portuguese immigration, nor, on a different scale and in different periods, of the German and Italian ones, but it was Amado who laid before our eyes how little we knew about it. The ethnic fan that cooled Brazil was much richer and more diversified than European perceptions had it, always contaminated by the selective habits of colonialism: After all, one had to include the multitude of Turks, Syrians, Lebanese, and
tutti quanti
who, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, almost right down to the present moment, left their countries of origin to turn themselves over, body and soul, to the seductions and also to the perils of the Brazilian El Dorado. And also so that Amado could open wide for them the doors of his books.

I take as an example of what I have been saying this small and delightful book, whose title,
The Discovery of America by the Turks
, is capable of immediately arousing the attention of the most apathetic of readers. Here will be told, in principle, the tale of two Turks—who, as Amado says, weren’t Turks but were Arabs—Raduan Murad and Jamil Bichara, who had decided to immigrate to America for the conquest of wealth and women. It’s not long, however, before the story that seemed to promise unity subdivides into other stories, in which dozens of characters are involved—violent men, whoremasters and tipplers, women as thirsty for sex as for domestic felicity; all of this in the district of Itabuna, Bahia, precisely where Amado (a coincidence?) happens to have been born. This Brazilian picaresque is no less violent than the Iberian ones. We are in the land of paid gunmen; cacao farms that were gold mines; fights decided by the stabs of a knife; colonels who exercised a lawless power, the origins of which no one is capable of understanding; and whorehouses where the whores were fought over like the purest of wives. These people think only of fornicating, of piling up money and lovers, and of drinking bouts. They are meat for Judgment Day, for eternal condemnation. Nevertheless, all through this turbulent story of evil counsel there breathes (to the reader’s distress) a kind of innocence as natural as the wind that blows or the water that flows, as spontaneous as the grass that grows after a rainstorm. A wonder of the art of narration,
The Discovery of America by the Turks
, in spite of its almost schematic brevity and apparent simplicity, deserves a place beside the great novelistic murals such as
Jubiabá
,
Tent of Miracles
, and
The Violent Land
. It is said that you can recognize a giant by his finger. Here, then, is the giant’s finger, the finger of Jorge Amado.

JOSÉ SARAMAGO

Roundabout the end of May 1991, I was in my house in Rio Vermelho, Bahia, when I got a phone call from Rome. The director of a public relations outfit was filling me in on a project and making me a proposition.

An important Italian official had decided to commemorate the fifth centennial of the discovery of America with the publication of a book consisting of three stories by authors from the American continent: one in English by the American Norman Mailer, one in Spanish by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and one in Portuguese by me. The project called for the book to be published in four languages: Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, three hundred thousand copies of which would be given out free to all passengers on flights between Italy and the three Americas on the various airlines between April and September 1992, the year of the fifth centennial.

The agency would acquire the rights for the texts of the three writers for a period of three years in the four languages. They asked me whether or not I might have some piece of a story tucked away somewhere of the anticipated length (they told me the number of bytes or such, and as I understand nothing about computers, I translated them into typewritten pages, seventy or so) and if I didn’t have one whether I would consider writing one. They proposed a set amount in payment of author’s rights. It seemed a bit low to me, so I hesitated and we agreed to discuss the matter further in July in Paris, where I would be traveling a month from then.

The idea was starting to grab me, so I gave it some thought. I remembered that when I was putting
Showdown
together I’d begun to think about an adventure (or misadventure) for the Arab Fadul, but I hadn’t gotten around to writing it down. I didn’t think it was needed for the structure of the novel. It was an amusing idea. I thought about it again and about bringing it to fruition.

I waited in Paris but the Italians never appeared, and I said to Zélia: “The mafiosi have disappeared. So much the better; now I can keep on working in peace on
Home Is the Sailor
.” I’d begun writing
Sailor
in Bahia. It so happened, however, that those guys contacted me again, came to Paris, accepted my price, and we signed a contract. I postponed writing the anti-memoirs and invented the novella you are about to read. In November of that year in Rome I turned in the manuscript, got my check, and began squandering the pittance.

At the same time I began selling the story in languages that had not been included in my contract with the agency. I signed agreements for translations into French, German, Russian, and Turkish. In September 1992 the French edition came out (Editions Stock) in a magnificent translation by Jean Orecchioni. The little book about the Turks was well received by the French critics and sold—and is still selling—quite well. It will appear in a pocket edition beginning next year. I must add that the Turkish edition, published early in 1993, is beautiful. As for the translation: I consider it perfect. Perfect translations are those in languages the author can’t read.

The editions of the three stories in Italian, Portuguese, English, and Spanish in one volume should have been published in April 1992, but they weren’t. They didn’t become part of the commemorations of the fifth centennial, which had evidently degenerated, as anticipated, into a harsh and basic polemic: Epic or genocide? Discovery or conquest? Time passed, and I received no further news from the agency.