Dom Tanas de Barbatanas.

Isn’t that a great name? Dom Tanas de Barbatanas: say it loud and there’s music playing; say it soft and it’s almost like praying. It’s the title of a 1962 Portuguese novel that’s little read in Portugal and completely unknown elsewhere; Luís Miguel Rosa has a long and fascinating post on it and its author, Tomaz de Figueiredo, at the excellent blog The Untranslated (see this LH post). It starts with an account of the literary context and the author’s life (a monarchist who despised both the Salazar dictatorship and the left-wing authors who insisted on realist prose left over from the 19th century, he reminds me a bit of Alexei Remizov, who had a similarly florid style); I’ll excerpt the description of the novel itself:

Dom Tanas didn’t find an audience because it’s a novel that requires attention, patience and commitment from the reader. Its sesquipedalian syntax requires one reading just to identify its subject, and a second reading to get the gist of the information. His vocabulary was gigantic, so after looking up the six or seven words that stop the reading in its tracks, a third reading is in order to finally make sense of the sentence. The fourth reading, optional but essential, is to soak up the sheer gorgeousness of the language. José Saramago’s long sentences seem like school compositions compared to them. António Lobo Antunes’ Fado Alexandrino is its rightful successor, but even that one is rather tame and straightforward by comparison. Dom Tanas’ artistry is a baroque brocade of alliteration, rhymes, trains of subordinate clauses, thick paragraphs, Latin expressions, archaic words and spelling, and even regionalisms that no dictionary will explain. Tomaz had no sympathy for the people excepting the loyal servants of his childhood; there is no social concern for the people even though the people lived in abject poverty during the regime; he only loved in them their colorful language, which he recorded in notebooks when he went hunting with his remaining rich friends. Surrounded by peasants, hunters, house maids, woodsmen, shepherds, he listened to them and recorded their words, sometimes updating dictionaries by hand. Hell, he even published a dictionary. With this word-hoard he created a unique language that seems like a pastiche of how people spoke in 18th century Portugal, although it was his own invention. He knew that living people assume that people spoke in the past always with an excess of orotundity, so he made it orotund as hell. Trying to even translate a paragraph is folly; the ideal translator would need to have Paul West’s or Alexander Theroux’s domain of the English language.

The novel is kind of plotless. A nameless panegyrist pens the protracted praise of a dead aristocrat, Dom Tanas de Barbatanas, the world’s most fearless swordsman, the strongest puncher in a brawl, the smartest thinker ever to grace a University, the most gallant seducer and lover, the most lyrical poet, the most skilled counselor in political matters, a strategic genius, the most everything at everything. It’s so ridiculous, so exaggerated, it undermines the veracity of the portrayal, and Dom Tanas disappears submerged by the colossal style employed by the panegyrist, who becomes the real protagonist in an inimitable performance of linguistic virtuosity. […]

Its structure is so unusual that I don’t even know another novel that uses it. The novel is in fact an intersection of three classic genres: it plays up the outdated values of chivalric romances and some tropes like the healing potions (which in Dom Tanas’ seedy world is reduced to a hemorrhoid-healing unguent that he dutifully applies to the ass cheeks of the powerful he wants to ingratiate himself with); it has the down-to-earth comedy and social criticism of the picaro; and it uses the Greek panegyric to mock the language of power. […]

Dom Tanas is an island of extravaganza in Portuguese fiction. In it there’s pleasure in form and structure, in revitalizing old genres, and in questioning the nature of storytelling. Although Tomaz didn’t follow foreign literature, his fiction was always a bit more in synch with it, a bit ahead of what his countrymen were doing. In the 1940s he was one of the first novelists to develop techniques similar to Faulkner’s. Some of his novels from the late 1960s predate what we now call autofiction. Dom Tanas had less to do with the French novels being translated than the English-language novels not being translated, less to do with Tropisms and Jealousy than The Alexandria Quartet, The Public Burning, Ada or Ardor, The Sot-Weed Factor, those big comical, extravagant novels that were of course utterly ignored in Portugal in the 1960s. Perhaps, then, its oblivion was inevitable too.

However, it’s one of the few Portuguese novels I’d single out as worthy of translation. It’s a hilarious verbal tour de force, drawing its strength from the novel’s past but also fresh, unique, unlike anything written in the 20th century, and for those reasons deserving of more attention, of better readers.

Doesn’t that sound interesting? I hope it gets the translation it deserves.

Addendum. It turns out that Rosa has a bilingual blog, Homem-de-Livro, which is well worth your attention. The latest post begins “The insular nature of the British Isles has instilled in their writers a fear of insularity,” which brought to mind a recent Avva post quoting Alexander Genis:

Provincials are often distinguished by their desperate thirst for culture […]. Once when I was in New York I got a letter from a village in the Amur region which I was unable to locate in an atlas; it began: “You won’t believe it, of course, but not everyone here has read Borges yet.”

«Провинциалов часто отличает та отчаянная жадность к культуре […]. Однажды мне в Нью-Йорк пришло письмо из Приамурского посёлка, который я не сумел найти в атласе. Начиналось оно так.

— Вы, конечно, не поверите, — писал автор, — но у нас ещё не все прочли Борхеса».

Addendum to the Addendum (May 2025). Having just reread Rosa’s “latest post,” I feel I did it a disservice by immediately switching to Genis; it’s a superb comparison of Paul West (militant modernist) and Virginia Woolf (long refused entry into the gleaming galleries of modernism), and is emphatically worth reading for its own sake. Some excerpts:

Woolf and West, however, shared more than a fatality to overlook the good stuff. West’s essays are filled with ideas about the art of fiction that are quite similar to Woolf’s. Modern fiction obsessed them, especially how to move modern fiction away from Victorian realist tradition. Both knew that novelists and readers always yearn to return to the 19th century like the Prodigal Son, or never leave it, and defend its triumphs as the only tolerable tradition; everything else is unauthentic, puerile, sterile nonsense disguised as innovation. West disagreed: “In fact, the good old-fashioned novel has died repeatedly through the century, from body blows struck by Joyce, Beckett, Queneau, Cortázar, and others. It has lived on in the hands of literary taxidermists, of course, but effectively it was blown up before 1950, to take a handy date.” West had no patience for the “hacks” who were “still twiddling around with plain novels about plain folks, in a style whose poverty masquerades as pregnant disciple, look only to write within the expectations of the reading public, who purchase novels with the same arm-motion as they lift up pounds of margarine. For every discovery, every innovation, there will be a thousand banal returns to the fold.” Woolf profiled in “Middlebrow” those who didn’t give the New a chance, who instead entrenched themselves in the familiar past. “We highbrows, I agree, have to earn our livings; but when we have earned enough to live on, then we live. When the middlebrows, on the contrary, have earned enough to live on, they go on earning enough to buy – what are the things that middlebrows always buy? Queen Anne furniture (faked, but none the less expensive); first editions of dead writers, always the worst; pictures, or reproductions from pictures, by dead painters; houses in what is called ‘the Georgian style’ — but never anything new, never a picture by a living painter, or a chair by a living carpenter, or books by living writers, for to buy living art requires living taste.” For Woolf the middlebrow were sad sect so enslaved by the need to furbish their lives with dead detritus from a catalogue of good taste, that they missed out on the adventure of living.

Novelty, then, was vitality. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Woolf wrote that “triumphs once achieved seem to the next generation always a little uninteresting.” In this essay she predicted how the Georgian novel would differ from the Edwardian novel. To her the Edwardians were an uninteresting bunch for sticking to the Victorian novel, which had had tremendous novelists. However, the arrival of Russian literature in Great Britain had opened new opportunities for the novelist which were met with resistance. Their acceptance demanded rethinking, discarding, familiar concepts, and the Edwardians were reluctant to do that. “After reading Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, how could any young novelist believe in ‘character’ as the Victorians had painted them? For the undeniable vividness of so many of them is the result of their crudity. The character is rubbed into us indelibly because its features are so few and so prominent.” Her criticism was not against the Victorian novel, which she admired and which had done well with what its practitioners had known about the art of the novel. Woolf had mostly compliments to hand out to Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, William Thackeray, and the Brontë sisters. Her target were their descendants who, instead of absorbing new possibilities, went on writing Victorian novels with obstinate blindness to these new opportunities. Her complaint sounds familiar to whoever’s read John Barth’s quip in “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1968) about his contemporaries who still wrote as if Joyce and Beckett and Nabokov and Borges had never existed. A trace of it lingers also in Josipovici’s disappointment with the Best of 1958. West gave his own version when he pointed out “how little fiction has changed between 1905 and now, as if twentieth-century innovations in thought had never taken place.” The novel was still being held hostage by “those antiquarians who keep on trying to invent the nineteenth-century novel in the age of quasars.”

Woolf was not satisfied with the representation of character in fiction. She believed, like her contemporaries, like E. M. Forster in Aspects of Fiction, that character was the soul of fiction and that fiction existed to reveal character; for her, the Edwardian novel made a mistake by emphasizing external description, obsessed as it was with social determinism, precluding the portrayal of character from within as was the Russians way; her goal was to find a technique to get past matter and closer to unfiltered consciousness. West didn’t consider character essential, or central; you couldn’t be a reader of Gass and Guy Davenport and believe in that anymore. His tastes included Cosmicomics and the French nouveau roman, which questioned the premise of character, emphasized objects, and imbued things with as much conscience and dignity as humans. […]

Woolf, in order to reach modern consciousness, had to divest herself of the Edwardian novel since it was no longer apt to represent it. In “Character in Fiction”, she chastises Arnold Bennett for his verbose descriptiveness. After quoting several large chunks of description of a landscape outside a bedroom window, in which the protagonist is effaced by these mounting details, Woolf asserts that “one line of insight would have done more than all those lines of description.” The Edwardians were materialists too focused on the body and not enough on the soul. “It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul.” […]

Woolf had a lucid idea of what the novel of the future would be, because she was busy inventing it. West was far vaguer: “Indeed, trying to envision the next phase or the terminus of the novel is a fictional enterprise in its own right, and the right use of the novel form over the next fifteen years may well be the fingering of the novel’s future, a whole series of prophetic demonstrations predicated on almost three centuries of its entrails, a triumph of frenzied self-appraisal done by master craftsmen.” West, in a way, was Woolf’s child. Woolf had a clearer idea of what she wanted the novel to become because she needed it to serve a very definitive, functional purpose, to solve concrete artistic and spiritual problems; West was defending novelty mainly for novelty’s sake, because he had grown up worshipping Modernists, because Modernism meant making it new, because by his time there was a feeling that Modernism had been betrayed, defeated, and nothing showed that Modernism was still alive and kicking than just trying out anything and everything. Woolf still seemed capable of working within a remodeled Victorian novel, whereas West had already witnessed the novel reach a point of extreme formlessness and thought that was terrific However, it couldn’t have reached that point without Woolf’s contributions to the novel’s deformation. […]

Woolf was aware that this change to poetic prose would affect the novel’s then status as container of truth. “But unfortunately for those who would wish to see a great many more things said in prose than are now thought proper, we live under the rule of the novelists. If we talk of prose we mean in fact prose fiction. And of all writers the novelist has his hands fullest of facts. Smith gets up, shaves, has his breakfast, taps his egg, reads The Times. How can we ask the panting, the perspiring, the industrious scribe with all this on his hands to modulate beautifully off into rhapsodies about Time and Death and what the hunters are doing at the Antipodes? It would upset the whole proportions of his day. It would cast grave doubt upon his veracity.” This awareness was shared by West, who realized that purple prose is sneered also because it endangers the illusion of honesty played by plain prose. “This essentially minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive, and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant, turns its back on something almost holy, and that is the human bond with ordinariness.” […]

Woolf’s mental activity in her novels “meant not just the stream – but an extreme of – consciousness, and, rather than being an over-fastidious Bloomsbury brahmin, was relativity’s M. Jourdain, who had been talking scientific incertitudes all along without knowing it.” He praised her for her “casually esemplastic power which transforms the many into the one, partly by discovering that everything is partly something else anyway.” But this was more than play, it was a view of life, a theory of how the cosmos worked. “I think she saw too the element of play: the sheer foison, if I may use an old word, of the supposed, uncatalogable All; the web, the variety, the chancy interrelatedness of things, including the incident that human life possibly is.” West’s Woolf is half real, half his reading of her, like every writer is transformed by fans. Perhaps he wasn’t wide of the mark. Woolf had read with pleasure Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, a science fiction classic about a man whose mind fuses with the cosmos. Kim Stanley Robinson in an essay called “Science fiction: The stories of now” has suggested that Stapledon influenced Woolf in taking an interest in how the microcosmic and the macrocosmic interacted. West would have been happy with Robinson’s reading because he himself explored the interconnectedness of things in his fiction. From his essay “A Rocking Horse on Mars”: “Nothing is separate from anything else. Yet so much of what’s written, in prose anyway, reflects so little of what makes us what we are. The provincialists, the minimalists, the suburbanists, the hacks of all persuasion, haven’t the faintest idea of – or reverence for – the idea of humanity as a local fungus that has so far prospered, thanks to a whole train of biological fluke. Superstitious primitives have a sharper sense of life, of our place among other forms of being, other creatures.” Science, to him, had obliterated the certainty of the self that had been so central to the 19th century with the rise of individualism, and Woolf was on the forefront of that revolution, a revolution that would continue into the avant-garde novel of the 1960s, the French novel and the Latin American novel. The “homocentric or homo-chauvinist” parochialism of the novel was a reality he tried to fight. His novels are a testament to an ambition to look beyond our little perspective. […]

Nothing suggests West’s responding to Kenner more than his linking Woolf to her time’s scientific breakthroughs. Kenner saw Modernism as an attitude by artists to take on everything around them to create something new, as a sensibility attuned to what was changing, as a feverish sweeping of sciences and different artistic media onto the page. Kenner, fascinated with the impact of technology on writing, was the first person to write about how the typewriter changed poetry writing; he sought the similarities between Modernist poetry and avant-garde painting; he studied how cinema made writers rethink description. West looked at Woolf through this cross-fertilization and showed how her concept of fiction was moving in lock-step with science. West’s essay, then, is a vindication of Woolf and an explanation of himself, a tribute and a fine literary analysis of a great novelist who was also a master of the literary essay.