By SAMUEL JORGE MOYSÉS*
Considerations on the life and work of Dalton Trevisan
1.
No quarter. No mercy. No quarter. Without mercy.
Count Daltinho is gone. Where could he be? Writing short stories in some lead zeppelin?
I am now reading Daltinho, in his latest Personal Anthology published in 2023 by Record, remembering songs made by “then restless young men”… now in the quarter do Led Zeppelin, now Clara Crocodilo by Arrigo Barnabé. And, curious reader, I ask about her youthful years, her initiation into literature and the arts of transfiguration, her obsession with cutting, suppressing, redoing, insinuating, simplifying.
Daltinho simplified. He adopted an unsurpassed principle of concise writing: pluralitas is not ponenda sine necessitate. He adopted the razor of occam, soon after the first renegade works. He understood that the simplest form is often the best, “plurality should never be postulated without necessity”.
This is not a biographical archaeology, but rather a record of some formative heterotopias, concrete and real spaces out of place, because Daltinho's Curitiba is more than a geographical space, it is the space of his displacement towards the creative intimacy.
In December 1934, Daltinho was nine years old and must have seen the Zeppelin passing over Santos Andrade Square, in the center of Curitiba. Poty Lazzarotto, a boy from the Capanema neighborhood, was ten years old and also watched its flight, passing through Água Verde and Rebouças. Later, in addition to collaborating with Joaquim magazine and illustrating Daltinho's works, Poty also left an engraving of the Graf Zeppelin (1971), which portrays this moment in the artists' childhood in Curitiba.
In 1939, at the age of 14, Daltinho was already writing chronicles for the student magazine The book. In 1940, he founded and directed the newspaper Tingui (1940-43), printed by the Humberto de Campos Literary Center and, later, by the General Rondon Cultural Center. The Tinguis were indigenous people skilled in making weapons out of wood and stone. Interestingly, the name of the newspaper reflects “Paranist” influences, the backward-looking ideology that was the target of Daltinho’s future struggle, as will be seen later. The newspaper reproduces a text in the first issue (woe is me, of all people?), by Romário Martins, one of the main Paranist ideologists.
But, stop there! The teenager, who was no fool or anything, had already armed himself with clubs and hatchets of criticism in this school experience. Later, much more advanced in age, he saw the Tupi-Guarani people, with their “sharp noses” and who originally inhabited Curitiba, being honored with the naming of a neighborhood and a park, where the statue of Chief Tindiquera stands. Daltinho could not have considered this anything other than a most inappropriate tribute!
2.
In 1944, he began working as a police reporter and film critic at Paraná Diary, at the time he began studying Law. On March 1945, 1927, a boiler at the “Fábricas de lámpara, refractory e vidro João Evaristo Trevisan” exploded. It was the company founded by his father in XNUMX, at the address next to his childhood home. Memories of what happened indicate that the explosion was strong, as the chimney itself, built with special bricks, fell over.
Among the injured was young Daltinho, who was then his father's assistant in the role of "legal consultant" in this family enterprise. It has been said that the thirty days spent in the hospital, due to his fractured skull, produced a change in Daltinho's perspective, as he himself confided in a rare interview that "for the first time he was faced with death... there the writer was born."
In another vein, it has already been established in the medical scientific literature that exposure to a shock wave of explosive origin can cause post-traumatic stress, with symptoms that include cognitive, memory and behavioral changes. The writer is not born from post-traumatic stress, but is born with an explosion. It was as if the Zeppelin, portrayed by his friend Poty as a childish kite, pulled by a spool of thread, now explosively revealed to him the implacable face of common tragedy, in the everyday iliad of the characters in his stories. No longer childhood, but the anxieties and dilemmas of the gothic universe of young adults, in progressive literary and stylistic purification with techniques such as stream of consciousness.
So, barely out of puberty (and out of the hospital), Daltinho sharpened his canines, drawing blood from the conservatism of the province. No quarter, without mercy!
From the age of 20 to 21, he began his literary activism at the head of the magazine Joaquim (1946-48). The editorial address of Joaquim It's the same one where he ran the newspaper Tingui: Rua Emiliano Perneta, 476. He used a room given to him by his father, in the large property owned by the family, which occupied several numbers on the aforementioned street (Aquidabã at the time the family settled, and later Emiliano Perneta). In fact, they lived there and operated their factory in the vicinity of the “Polish Church”, so often mentioned in his work – a partially preserved family address where a pleasant café now operates, but at the new number 492.
Ironic, isn't it, Joaquim? The old "Rua da Entrada" of colonial Curitiba, and later the Aquidabã Street of Daltinho as a boy until he was 10, was renamed in 1935 in honor of the Paranista poet he had criticized. Was he simply outraged by the change in the name of the street where he lived as a child, from Aquidabã to Emiliano Perneta? Certainly not, since the issue with Emiliano was of a programmatic and literary nature, but it is worth noting that in his first (renegade) book from 1945, Moonlight Sonata, the young author writes a novel about his street, only referring to it as Aquidabã, although it had already changed its name ten years earlier.
3.
In the first issue of Joaquim, publishes “Eucaris – a dos olhos doces” (Eucharis – the one with the sweet eyes), a short story illustrated by his long-time partner Poty. In fact, the entire magazine, in its 21 editions, dedicates significant space to illustrations, and Poty is the illustrator of the striking covers of the first issues. The periodical used a special technique of zinc engraving (metal engraving in high relief, adapted directly to the typographic cliché).
As Poty observed, [Daltinho's] characters have something to do with the drypoint technique, with many shades and layers... it is a direct process of drawing by scratching the zinc plate with a steel tip. In this way, lines with burrs are created, and the engravings capture this sharp, intense and somewhat poignant characteristic of his literature. This is what we can already read, early on, and what will demarcate his singularity in the universe of short stories, starting with Eucaris.
It was the immediate post-World War II. Not for Daltinho. In Joaquim his youthful warlike verve, already trained under the inspiration of the tinguis, police reporting and journalistic criticism, is enhanced since the second edition, demolishing the “prince of Paraná poets” with the critique Emiliano, Mediocre Poet”. He stuck his teeth in: “Emiliano Perneta was a victim of the province, in life and in death. In life, the province did not allow him to be the great poet he could have been, and, in death, it worships him as the great poet he was not”.
No quarter. No mercy!
And he continues, iconoclastic, against Paranists in general and against Monteiro Lobato in particular. Dissatisfying the chorus of the happy, Daltinho declares: “Mr. Monteiro Lobato, while still alive, is a posthumous author. A Cornélio Pires cleaned up. Although today, in Brazil, he represents the most sordid type of writer: the one who betrayed. The betrayal was to himself, to others and to his time.” And about Paranism: “A certain reactionary mentality is strengthened (disguised by the beautiful adjective 'Paranist'), which, in the name of holy traditions, amputated the hands and gouged out the eyes of young artists.” In a joking tone, it has been said that he enjoyed expressions like “Emiliano and other one-legged people” or satirical epigrams against enemies, whether Paranists or not.
No quarter, no quarter!
– For every blue jay in Paranism, Count Daltinho fired a drunken macaw. Or a mischievous wren.
– For each pine tree in Paraná and its cones and its pine nuts and its vines, a sordid burning bush in the curves of the dark callipygia.
– For every gourd of yerba mate, a raspberry soda or, who knows – more acidic? – hidden recreation in the artificial paradises of the Marrocos nightclub?
– For every sleepy yawn from the verbose province, another ellipsis from the sleepless text born at three in the morning, anticipating the delicate cornmeal cookies of dawn.
– For each peak of Marumbi, a lowland in Curitiba where the Walter Benjaminian flâneur He crossed streets incognito, observing events “as if behind the door”.
4.
In 1953, already making the transition to maturity, style and deliberate gradual isolation, Daltinho moves to the “little castle” at 487, on the corner of Ubaldino do Amaral and Amintas de Barros – the emblematic and inscrutable address of Curitiba. It was in this house that the man who hosted his free birdlife without restrictions lived in seclusion. He only moved from there in 2021, during the Covid pandemic, and began living in the apartment in the São Bernardo building 839, on Alameda Dr. Muricy, in the fraternal company of the ghosts of Helena Kolody and Paulo Leminski – also former residents of this address. That is another story, just as the book is another story. Not at all exemplary novels from 1959, winner of the Jabuti, consolidating the mature short story writer.
Since the beginning, Count Daltinho has continued to pursue in the faces of anonymous (or not so anonymous) passers-by and in the fragments of random phrases overheard, almost all the (per)versions of the human. And in the streets and squares with their sidewalks in downtown Curitiba, Daltinho repeated the small pavé mosaicked with the Paranist symbols he rejected.
Where is our Count? Rewriting nursery rhymes? “Today is Sunday, he asks for a pipe; The pipe is made of horn, there is no one to decipher it; The little polaquinha in leather, climbs the bull; The bull is horned, doubly horned; The horned one is weak, falls into the hole; The hole is deep, the world has ended.”
The Count would be you, a hypocritical good citizen, or a transvestite Clara Crocodile from Londrina/São Paulo/Curitiba, in the dodecaphonic and atonal scream of another lover serial killer… Where is it? “Could it be that it is dormant in your mind, waiting for the right moment to awaken and descend into your heart?” … [my reader, my brother?]”
For Daltinho, like the young (and prematurely deceased) Newton Sampaio – who he occasionally hailed as “the greatest short story writer from Paraná” –, also served “meridians that do not pass through 15 de Novembro Street”. Even so, his life and work vampirized the Transylvanian 15th Street, just as they vampirized the world. And isn’t it a mysterious coincidence that he had a devotion to the Tomazina Newton Sampaio and the Russian Chekhov, both parsimonious and precise short story writers, both doctors, both who died young of tuberculosis?
The vampiric epithet, far from any damnation of a cursed personality, camouflages Poty's generous friend, the reclusive and good-humored plotter, voracious reader and bird lover.
In the quarter, I hear the dogs of doom are howling more.
Howl, dogs of perdition, for our count is already flying over Santos Andrade square in his inexorable zeppelin.
*Samuel Jorge Moyses He is a retired professor of public health at PUC-PR and active at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR).
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