There was a time when the world fit in a letter. Or in a diary. I thought about this when I accepted the challenge of a regular colleague in this Sheet, of the most beloved: Noemi Jaffe. From her came the unexpected invitation to teach classes on travel writing!
I am, of course, an avid reader of this genre, even older narratives that I never imagined would earn this classification. And, with my texts in this space, which are almost ten years old, I think I can also consider myself an author of the genre.
But, it’s one thing to browse through reads and writes. Another is to organize a course to delight people with these stories. Naomi’s provocation, however, proved irresistible.
With little time to organize myself, I started to recap the good travel writings I had come across in my life. There were so many possibilities!
If each author, each author, has his own compass, can we group them in literary boundaries? When did travel change from being a mere record to being a central theme for some writers?
I started thinking I was on a road without a map, and I only started to get my bearings when I realized exactly what I described at the beginning of today’s column: before they were books, travel writings were informative letters or simply diaries, not always published.
Think of the famous letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha. With the simple intention of informing “El-Rei” Dom Manuel about what Pedro Álvares Cabral’s caravels saw here, it became the first narrative of a future Brazil.
“They were brown”, describes Caminha, “all naked, with nothing to cover their shame”. Details of the encounter between Portuguese and indigenous people who already lived here sound bizarre to our contemporary eyes.
They were, however, a noble attempt to describe the indescribable: the colors, the inhabitants and the customs of a “terra incognita” where everything was new. An exercise I would have loved to have done.
I went a little further back in history and wanted to start the first class with Homer’s “Odyssey”, a saga where landscapes like the island of Ithaca appear accidentally — often in fantastic ways. And I followed with “The Travels of Marco Polo”, with even more surreal passages.
We have advanced a few centuries to speak of Goethe’s voyage to Italy, and of Charles Darwin on the Beagle. I summoned Orwell’s diaries in Burma, Kerouac’s for the US, Che Guevara’s for South America.
And I also sprinkled a Graciliano Ramos with his brilliant diary of a trip to Ukraine and Russia, recently re-released by José Olympio. And so began our journey through writing… of travel.
In the second class, today, I intuitively put together other books: those that have a distant (and often exotic, adjective I despise…) setting as a background for a story.
Think of “The Sky That Protects Us” (Bowles); “A Passage to India” (Foster); “The Talented Ripley” (Highsmith), “A Relíquia” (Eça de Queiroz); all from Jorge Amado!
Then come the books in which the journey is the protagonist of the narrative: “O Grade Bazar Ferroviário” (Teroux); “In Patagonia” (Chatwin); “The Island” (Fernando Morais); “Eat, Pray, Love” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
And let’s end with those who are exploring new ways of talking about places, as Teju Cole does with New York in “Open City”; Rodrigo Lacerda with the carioca landscape in “Vista do Rio”; WG Sebald in all his work.
In the end, no one guarantees that we will have actually arrived somewhere. But, what if the greatest fascination of these travel writings is precisely the route, not the end point?
