António Vieira’s The Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish and Other Texts is the first collection of his writings to appear in English.

António Vieira (1608-1697), orator, missionary, statesman, and visionary, who was to Portuguese prose what Camões had been to poetry, was born in Lisbon and emigrated with his family to Bahia, in Brazil, at the age of six. There he was educated by the Jesuits, joined the Order in 1623 and was ordained in 1635. He began preaching at an early age and was professor of rhetoric at the College of Recife. His dream was to do missionary work among the Indians, but in 1641 he was sent to Portugal along with the Viceroy’s son to show the colony’s adherence to the restoration of the Portuguese monarchy in the person of John IV of Bragança. There Vieira gained the king’s favor and was sent as his emissary to France and Holland with an aim to convince the expelled Jews to return to Portugal to bolster the sagging economy. In 1649 he was denounced to the Inquisition for the first time, but he enjoyed the protection of the king. He returned to Brazil in 1652 to do missionary work in Moranhão and defend the natives against enslavement. In 1654 he went back to Portugal to petition the king in their favor. In Brazil once more in 1656, he set up missions and worked among the Indians, protecting and preaching in their own languages, but the colonists revolted and forcibly embarked Vieira and his Jesuits back to Lisbon. In the meantime he had been denounced by the Inquisition once again and, with the death of John IV, had lost favor in the court of his son Afonso. Vieira was sentenced to prison in Coimbra and to silence “both active and passive.” In prison he worked on his History of the Future, expounding the notion that had got him in trouble with the Holy Office in the first place. When the king’s brother Pedro declared himself regent, Vieira was freed and went to Rome, where Pope Clement X granted him perpetual freedom from the authority of the Inquisition. He also became friends with Queen Christina of Sweeden, who wanted him to be her preacher, but he chose to go back to Portugal. With no influence at court anymore, he left Lisbon for Bahia in 1681. There he died after overseeing the collection of his sermons for publication.

• 2009 — 111 pages — Paper
  ISBN: 978-1-933227-30-6
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“Inspired by the ornate Baroque structures and acutely political insights of a great and egregiously overlooked Luso-Brazilian writer, Gregory Rabassa has never been more brilliant as a translator than he is here. The verbal wit and intricate conceptual play of Father Vieira’s extraordinary texts are recreated here in pitch-perfect form, thus allowing their English reader to feel that she has come to know the real Antônio Vieira, a compelling Jesuit preacher, intellectual dynamo, and influential man of his age.”

Earl Fitz, Vanderbilt University

Gregory Rabassa, Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY, has translated more than forty works from Portuguese and Spanish, including those of Machado de Assis, Jorge Amado, António Lobo Antunes, Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. He is the recipient of the National Book Award, the Thorton Wilder Prize for Translation, and the National Medal of Arts. Support for the Vieira translation came from a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Portugal and Brazil. He holds the Order of Rio Branco (Brazil), the Order of San Carlos (Colombia), and the Croce al Merito di Guerra (Italy). Rabassa is the author of O Negro na Ficção Brasileira (Tempo Brasileiro); his memoir on translation, If This Be Treason (New Directions), received the PEN Martha Albrand Award. He lives in New York with his wife, Camões scholar Clementine Rabassa.

Vincent Barletta is Associate Professor of Iberian Studies at Stanford University.