The Aeneid and Os Timbiras: The Song of an Unhappy America

Abstract

This article examines Os Timbiras, by Gonçalves Dias, in the light of the anti-epic tradition of the Aeneid by Virgil. The study begins from the symbolism of blood, associated with life rather than death, in order to demonstrate that the Brazilian poem reworks the Virgilian model of the founding sacrifice: just as Rome is born from the ruin of Troy, Brazil emerges from a destroyed America. However, unlike the ambiguous yet ultimately affirmative teleology of the Aeneid, Os Timbiras constructs an epic of dispossession, devoid of any reconciling promise. The article argues that the Happy America, utopian and harmonious, enters into dialogue with the tradition of the Noble Savage associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, progressively eroded by European invasion and by the imprudent hospitality of the indigenous peoples themselves. The song of an “unhappy America” assumes an elegiac and prophetic tone, denouncing slavery, devastation and the social anomaly of the Empire and, in this sense, engages in dialogue with Meditação, written some years earlier by Gonçalves Dias. Like Virgil, the poet sings of an origin marked by guilt and death, yet without a redemptive horizon. The result is an anti-epic in which national foundation remains an unresolved inheritance, an open fracture between Europe and America.