The setup is straightforward. There is a dead man’s fortune, his loyal caretaker, and the dead man’s dog. The dead man’s fortune falls to his loyal caretaker, as does ownership of the dog. The fortune is his to keep if he also keeps the dog. The fortunate caretaker is called Rubião. The dog and the dead man are both named Quincas Borba. Then the story begins.
When Quincas Borba, written by Joaquim de Assis and translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, appeared as a novel in 1891 after five years of serialization in a women’s magazine called A Estação, Joaquim Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was already a star in the Brazilian literary firmament, an author who was, as now, widely respected and celebrated in Brazil and beyond. For good reason: the nine novels Machado wrote between 1872 and 1908 are touchstones in the history of the New World’s synthesis and advancement of the European novel. Machado knew well the achievements of the form’s great artists — from progenitors like Cervantes and Defoe, Fielding and Sterne to contemporaries like Eça de Queirós and Émile Zola — and he made hay of his European patrimony. A member of Rio de Janeiro’s Portuguese Circulating Library since January 1881 (where his library card remains on display), Machado had centuries of novels available to read, and chose an allegiance to no one. There is no dichotomy between the Realist or the Romantic novel, the English or the French novel, in Machado’s work. The differences are either resolved or overcome. In this, Machado found a way forward that we still follow. The novels of Joaquim Machado de Assis are open fictions containing many levels of meaning and multiple plausible readings, full of voices, lives, tones and subtle shifts in language and theme that greet the unknown and ineffable of life with the skeptical wonder we may now, two centuries later, identify as a hallmark of modernity.
From a humble but not uncomplicated background to a pillar of Brazil’s literary establishment, Joaquim Machado de Assis did not take long to rise. A mestizo born near the docks of Rio de Janeiro in Livramento Hill on June 21, 1839, Machado was middle class and of mixed ethnic descent. His paternal grandparents were freed slaves, descendants of a system of capture, imprisonment and enslavement that lasted from the early 16th century up to 1888, when Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery.
Machado had only cursory schooling but wide exposure to languages (whether Latin from the local curate or French from household servants), which equipped the ambitious young carioca to become the artist time would make of him. A prodigious start in journalism as a teenager along with his polyglot reading habit — ancient & modern, Tacitus to Turgenev — turned Machado into a prolific man of letters by the time he was 30 years old. In 1867, Machado was even decorated with the Imperial Order of the Rose by Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil. Recognizing his contributions to Brazilian literature and his status as a prominent man of letters, the honor was an acknowledgment of Machado’s significant impact on the cultural and intellectual life of Brazil during his career. In 1873, Machado received a sinecure in the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce and Public works. He worked as head of section for the next 30 years, and the stability of the job gave Machado time to write more. His great novels, including Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas) (1881), Quincas Borba (1891) and Dom Casmurro (1899), alongside more novels, plays, poems and hundreds of stories and newspaper columns, were written while he worked. But then his wife Carolina died in 1904 at seventy, and Machado passed into a deep, lasting depression. His prolific career had, more or less, come to an end. One more novel came out — Memorial de Aires — and in 1908, Machado de Assis died. A period of official mourning was declared in Brazil for the dead man, a peerless and varied artist who was nevertheless categorized by occupation on his death certificate as “Civil servant.”
It’s apt, then, that one of the foundational themes of Quincas Borba is the complex hierarchy of relationships and duties of a stratified and ossified society deeply embedded in the language of service, mastery, and servitude. Machado wove many terms of service into the lexical fabric of the book, where terms like senhor (master), escravo (slave), and servo or criado (servant) are used repeatedly in contexts with shifting gradations of tone. In the narrative of Quincas Borba, these words signify relationships that are open and ambiguous, difficult to pin down, with justifications implicitly assumed, rarely challenged and hardly subjects of consciousness. Like water to the fish, these terms and the hierarchical structures they signify were an intrinsic and often unexamined part of the flow of daily life in Machado’s Brazil.
His hometown of Rio de Janeiro, frequent subject of his fictions and central setting of Quincas Borba, was a city of stark contrasts, deeply marked by its legacy of slavery. According to the 1872 census, Rio de Janeiro’s population was approximately 274,972, with a significant portion consisting of people of African descent. About 17.8% of the population were enslaved individuals, and overall, people of African heritage made up nearly half of the city’s residents. The province of Rio de Janeiro had the highest proportion of enslaved people in Brazil, with 32.3% of its population in bondage. The influx of European immigrants and the presence of a significant Portuguese bureaucratic system added to the city’s complex demographic makeup. The Portuguese court’s relocation to Rio in 1808 had established the city as the administrative heart of the Portuguese Empire in the Americas, further embedding European influence. By the time Machado de Assis wrote Quincas Borba, Rio was a paradox: a vibrant, culturally rich metropolis grappling with profound social inequalities. Machado’s own mixed-race heritage and rise from poverty to literary prominence mirrored the city’s intricate social fabric, his work and life reflections of the societal transformations and the lingering shadows of slavery in Brazil.
But then maybe the country’s past horrors were not so past; the present always complicates history. The Lei Eusébio de Queirós (1850) and the Lei do Ventre Livre (“Law of the Free Womb”) (1871) were critical milestones in the slow and contentious process of abolishing slavery in Brazil; they were not strictly enforced. The Lei Eusébio de Queirós aimed to halt the transatlantic slave trade woven into the foundations of Brazil’s economy and society. Enforcement was lax, though, and illegal trafficking continued for years, with the law only gradually taking effect over the subsequent decade. This period of partial enforcement allowed the system of slavery to persist, creating a societal structure heavily reliant on the labor of enslaved Africans. This history of enslavement is reflected in the present-day ethnic makeup of Brazil’s population, with the latest census data reporting that approximately 54% of Brazil’s population — approximately 114 million people — identifies as Black or mixed-race (Pardo), a group that includes those of African, Indigenous, and European descent, with a significant portion being of African descent due to the extensive history of slavery in Brazil. Brazilian readers of Quincas Borba, particularly in Rio de Janeiro — Machado’s audience — might have looked past the favelas and damning statistics, but they would not have been unaware, on some level, of what they saw in the mirror Machado held up to them.
Machado must have known his readership, because none of this is explicit in Quincas Borba, where the movements of history are implicit in the narrative. Rubião the protagonist is a servant, but the inheriting of his master’s fortune — with the stipulation that he care for his dead master’s dog — provides for his doom as a man without an identity. The world of society adds to the central irony of Quincas Borba, Rubião’s attempt to live out the life of his inheritance in a world constitutionally inhospitable to such changes in fortunes. Machado is an outrageous but subtle ironist, more in the digressive mode of Laurence Sterne than the acerbic excoriations of Swift — think of the gentle Uncle Toby saving a buzzing fly at the dinner table in Tristram Shandy and not the Irish for breakfast in The Tale of the Tub — and as the novel proceeds through 201 chapters of varying length to narrate Rubião’s acquisition of his fortune, his attempts to rise in society and eventual descent into madness, Machado illustrates the paradoxes of freedom and servitude through a drama of characters who navigate a world still held by the hand of dead masters.
While the philosophy of Humanitism that Quincas Borba relates to Rubião at the novel’s start sounds like a farce of Auguste Comte’s positivism — much in vogue at the time, along with Darwin’s theories of evolution and their perversion into what was called Social Darwinism — there’s still something in the joke of the author’s personal vision of the novel as a historical form. In Machado’s comedy of life after other deaths, the quanta of history are the relationships humans create between themselves and the world. Even when one life ends — like that of the philosopher Quincas Borba — its story isn’t over. Society endures, civilizations change, the wheel turns. Thus the dog Quincas Borba, the earthly reminder of the inheritance of history. Thus the central paradox of Quincas Borba where the good master becomes the faithful servant who oversees the decline and fall of great fortune’s inheritor.
Translation of Machado’s Portuguese, with its intricate and subtly ironic language of servitude and mastery, requires cultural interpretation and mediation rather than mere linguistic this-for-that. You need a light deft hand to carry the spirit across into another language in another time, and the translators Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson aptly carry Machado’s vision into English. Jull Costa’s and Patterson’s success is apparent in how they refract the various the language for the relationships — personal, societal and historical — that form the bedrock of the world of Quincas Borba. One example is in chapter 138 (page 237 of their translation), where one character criticizes her lover with a seemingly unobtrusive remark. “Você esteve hoje insuportável; parecia um criado,” reads Machado’s Portuguese, which Jull Costa and Patterson render: “You were just unbearable today; you behaved like a servant.” The key word in this passage is the Portuguese word criado, which the translators reasonably turn into “servant.” The word criado is derived from the verb criar, itself derived from the Latin for “to create,” and is still used in Brazil to describe a domestic servant. Implicit in the word is a lack of agency: a servant is contracted into creation, passively subject to another being’s demiurgic powers. Brazilian Portuguese has myriads of synonyms for criado, and Machado did not use the word indiscriminately. The translators know this. Instead of trying for a more idiomatic and current English translation of criado or the sentence itself, Jull Costa and Patterson make clear the sense of subjugation and service in Machado’s Portuguese with the word “servant.” It’s subtle, small, but history is made with the accumulation of incremental motion. This view of history is quietly everywhere in Machado’s work, and in their translation of Quincas Borba, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson give Anglophone readers a new way to see it.
Some eighteen-hundred years ago, Plotinus asked in The Enneads, “but we — who are we?” Movingly, the question has lingered unanswered. Maybe the question is more rhetorical than interrogative, but here we are still trying to answer. In Quinca Borba, you can hear a response to the question. “Strictly speaking,” the philosopher Quincas Borba tells Rubião before he dies, “there is no death, only life, because the survival of one depends on the suppression of the other.” The phenomenon of life disappears, passes, while the substance of life “remains the same.” Individuals are like bubbles forming and unforming in a boiling pot, always there, waiting to appear again. “Do you see this book?” says Quincas Borbas.
It’s Don Quixote. If I destroy my copy, I won’t be destroying the work itself, for it lives on eternally in surviving copies and future editions. Eternally beautiful, beautifully eternal, just like this divine and superdivine world of ours.
“But we — who are we?” There’s no record of whether Machado read Plotinus, but subsumed in his works is the echo of an answer. “We are our relations,” a voice would seem to reply; our lives are more than lifetimes, they are relations. Life then takes the form of the relationships, connections and hierarchies we create between ourselves and other lives in the world of sensory experience and memory. In Quincas Borba, Machado illustrates this truth. The dead master reappears as the faithful dog, whose life is as necessary to the fortune of the servant as that of the master of the fortune he inherits. Rubião’s descent into spiritual malaise began with material acquisition and ends with a future of madness. This is lived history, created by an invisible hand or paw. We are always servants of many masters.
acts of translation: Grammars of Servitude in “Quincas Borba” by Joaquim Machado de Assis was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.