The Modern Renaissance Man

In the last chapter, we learned that Machado made his debut as a writer by publishing a poem in a local periodical when he was 15 years old. From then until his death at the age of 69, he never refrained from writing and publishing. Along with poetry, Machado wrote articles, essays, reviews, crônicas, plays, stories, novellas, novels, forewords, speeches, letters, reports, and translations. As a translator, he translated into Portuguese texts originally written in French, English, Italian, Spanish, and German. During the last period of his life, while old and retired, he spent his time learning ancient Greek (much like Borges, by the way, who took Arabic lessons during the last months of his life). Machado never stopped learning. Beyond literature, his many writings drew from multiple areas of knowledge, such as art, music, philosophy, religion, politics, economics, and history. Machado’s curiosity had no bounds. His capacity to absorb knowledge was unrestrained. His continuous ability to articulate his vast repertoire with clarity and wit constitutes a hallmark of his impeccable style. In this respect, Machado admirably embodies the superior ideal of the Renaissance man: a type of intellectual who seeks to develop his capacities as fully as possible by studying and achieving accomplishments in varying disciplines.

With the triumph of the modern division of labor, and the consequent segmentation of knowledge, the figure of the polymath (a person who has accumulated great knowledge on a variety of subjects) and the polygraph (a person who is able to write across genres on different subjects) became rarer with each generation that passed. This idea of an encyclopedic knowledge was, perhaps, last celebrated by the eighteenth-century thinkers during the Age of Enlightenment. From the nineteenth century on, specialization has prevailed over breadth. Similarly, nationalism has ruled – at times perversely – over universalism. In more than one aspect, Machado epitomizes the spirit of the homo universalis, that is, the modern Renaissance man who strives to understand the world in a holistic man-ner, particularly by availing himself of every possible tool of analysis.

Machado worked across every literary genre available in his time. Nonetheless, he is considered to be a master of the short story (novella included) and the novel. To a certain degree, it’s logical to affirm that Machado the translator, the poet, the playwright, the cronista, and the critic prepared the ground for Machado the notable short-story writer and the novelist to emerge.