Ri-Rá in Rio – Frank McNally on an Irish weekend in Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro is not the sort of town you associate with Bloomsday, somehow. Yet there it was last weekend, when a small but committed band of Brazilian enthusiasts and a smattering of Irish visitors celebrated Joyce’s Dublin epic with readings, lectures, and whiskey.

Never mind Ulysses, the Rio Joyceans included at least two scholars who had translated parts of Finnegans Wake into Portuguese, although even some of the writer’s greatest admirers would say that book is untranslatable (if not unreadable in the original).

In a local bookshop I visited, you could also buy hard and soft-back editions of Joyce’s “Epiphanies”: youthful jottings of the embryonic writer that no English language publisher has yet seen fit to put between covers.

This demonstrates either an insatiable appetite for the Dubliner’s work, or a canny calculation by Brazilian publishers – since the collected epiphanies are easily Joyce’s slimmest work of prose – that there is a local market for readers who want to say they’ve read at least one of his books, without investing the time or effort normally required.

‘Worst morning of my life’ – Alison Healy on tricky tourists

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Custer’s Last Tune – Frank McNally on the dubious history of the ballad Garryowen

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Drama and spirituality – Desmond O’Neill on Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle

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Dutch gold – Frank McNally on a weekend in idyllic Amsterdam

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In case the outdoor readings frightened away any curious locals, Rio’s Bloomsday also featured a music session from Comhaltas Brazil.

Yes, there really is a Comhaltas Brazil, here reduced to one man: Kevin Shortall, a Brazilian-Irish bouzouki player who rattled through a medley of lively ballads, also including Finnegan’s Wake (the one with the apostrophe).

He confided afterwards that you can’t do sad Irish songs for Brazilian audiences, reared as they are on samba. Even so, one of the Irish visitors did sneak a rendition of Raglan Road into the programme without protest, some of the Samba lovers having been softened up first by shots of Jameson.

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Bloomsday also brought the curtain down on a three-month exhibition called “The Irish in Brazil”, a banner for which has bedecked the front of the National Library in Rio since St Patrick’s Day.

There is a happy synchronicity between the two countries’ history, last year’s centenary of Irish independence coinciding with the bicentenary of Brazil’s. Less happy was one of the key events featured in the exhibition, an 1828 revolt in which Irish and German mercenaries were put down by a local force bolstered by African and Afro-Brazilian slaves.

The Irish, mostly farmers from Cork, had been recruited to help Brazil in the war against the new Argentine republic. But the man who did the recruiting, Col William Cotter, presented the adventure as one of land acquisition, primarily, playing down the bit about four years’ army service until his recruits arrived in South America.

They took the news badly and joined the also disgruntled German mercenaries in a Rio rampage, suppressed after three days. Survivors were shipped home, although many didn’t make it.

On the plus side, as well as contributing several far more illustrious emigrants to Brazil, Ireland may have given the country its name. The Portuguese-preferred version is that the name come from the pau-brasil tree, blood-red on the inside and a native of the Azores.

A competing theory is that it derived from the mythical Hy-Brasil, an island long held to be somewhere off Ireland’s southwest coast but supposedly hidden in a dense fog that cleared once in every seven years to reveal a civilisation of supernatural beings.

Roger Casement, who as British Consul in Brazil exposed the mistreatment of indigenous rubber workers in Putamayo, supported the latter version.

“Strange as it may seem, Brazil does not owe its name to the abundance of certain Pau-Brazil wood, but to Ireland,” he wrote. “I believe that the honour of naming the great South American country surely belongs to [...] an ancient Irish belief.”

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On a Rio walking tour, of which more tomorrow, our 30-something guide (Brazilian) mentioned that he had a son called Liam. It was the (Norwegian) mother’s idea, he said, confirming the name’s globalisation. “But it’s Irish, isn’t it?” he asked.

It used to be, anyway, I agreed, and then heard myself recall that, back when we still had the monopoly, a certain Liam Brady once scored the winning goal in a football match against Brazil.

This drew only a blank look from the guide, for whom 1987 was ancient history and who wasn’t much interested in football anyway. Ju-jitsu was his thing. “Brazilian ju-jitsu is the best,” he said. I had to take his word for it.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Ireland introduced football to Brazil. And indeed, the Rio Irish exhibition made no mention of our role in that regard.

But we may have at least a minority shareholding in the glory that became Samba soccer. The reason is Thomas Donohoe, a Scottish-born calico dyer who emigrated to Rio in 1894 and organised the city’s first known football matches in Bangu, where a statue to him now stands.

As you might guess from the surname, he had been an immigrant in Scotland too, or nearly. The father of the supposed “father of Brazilian football” was from Wicklow.