Fumo de rolo

I been having a bit of a Lévi-Strauss fest recently, a French anthropologist who was all the thing in the 1960s. I have no idea whether students of anthropology still give him much air time.

A few days ago, I was rereading the book about him at reference 1, to come across a bit about his arrival in Brazil in 1930s. The story was that you knew about the approach of land from a ship some time before you could see it, with a strong whiff of wet forest and tobacco, specifically the 'fumo de rolo' of the interior. With the stuff itself being made by fermenting the raw tobacco in molasses, with both of these being readily available in Brazil.

I had, not so many days before that, come across the corresponding account in Lévi-Strauss's account at reference 3, written, as it happens some twenty years after the event.

This morning I thought to ask Gemini about the smell of tobacco drifting out to sea.

His opening line is that this is most improbable; the work of a fertile imagination indulging in a bit of purple prose. There had, after all. been a very exuberant description of a sunset just a few pages previous.

He is right that the episode is in the chapter called 'The Doldrums' in English and 'Le-Pot-au-Noir' in French. See references 8a and 8b. He presumably has access to both.

He seems to be on fairly firm ground about the smell of burning wood drifting out to sea, with part of his response to a supplementary shown above. The reference to Conrad checks out, complete with aromatic wood, even if I had to have recourse to my Kindle to find it. It is also the case that in this (autobiographical) story, the narrator smells the land - but only after he has seen its lights, it being night time.

He was right about 'fumo de rolo' which I must have read first time around in reference 3, but I don't think that I ever bothered to check it out.

But he does not challenge the assertion implicit in my original question that Wilcken in reference 1 was only replaying Lévi-Strauss in reference 2 or 3. Presumably, there are lots of big brains at Google puzzling about how to assign a proper weight to the sayings of their customers.

At which point, I turn up the original (in English that is), and find that there is indeed plenty of purple prose, but stops well short of saying that he actually smelt the tobacco. Which turns out to be a reasonably close translation of the French.

Gemini now backtracks a little, with a likely cause being slightly careless glossing of the original by Wilcken. One of the hazards of glossing, particularly when you are in a hurry or don't have access to a good editor or proof-reader.

But as to the sequence of events in my own mind, I am now quite unsure. What was I thinking when I read the original previously? Had my memory glossed the business in the same way that Wilcken went on to?

All, as Gemini says, very Proustian. He can do the Liberal Arts stuff too!, 

PS 1: either I had a bit of finger trouble - still getting use to using a touch pad rather than a mouse - or Google Images got into a muddle, as from looking at the snap at the top of the post, I jumped to that above. Figs not fags.

PS 2: further confirmation that checking of this sort is time consuming. It might take hours to check what Gemini is knocking out in seconds. And I am lucky enough to have access to considerable print resources, free of any taint from the Internet. It is all too easy not to bother!

PS 3: I have now read 'Youth', probably not for the first time, although it is hard to know for sure. A fine story, and a fine subject for psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and assignments at schools and colleges. I wondered about two bits of plot, and rather than think under my own steam, I asked Gemini, who proceeded to convince me that what had sounded like an improbable yarn was all too probable in the circumstances of 1900 or so.

And in response to a supplementary, no there wasn't any decent coal to be had, at the time, between Tyneside and Bangkok. British coal was the business and steamships insisted on it!

Inter alia, an interesting reminder that a story of this sort is not self-contained, is not closed. The reader has to bring a fair amount of stuff to the party if he is to enjoy it, to get full value. A sentiment which I am sure my mother, a teacher of English in schools, would have signed up to, although I dare say she would not have put it in quite the same way. I associate to all the obsolete and obscure vocabulary & usage in the plays of Shakespeare: you do need the notes (to be found in the likes of the Arden edition) if you are to understand what is going on.

No more checking today. But maybe I will check the business of balancing the volumes of cargoes moving around the world. I don't think that you would move both coal and grain in the same ship, even on different occasions.

PS 4: the next day, Monday: Gemini told me a good story about how colliers to the Far East got their cargoes for the return journey, minimising non-fee-earning ballast runs, with part of that story being the availability of cheap labour, that is to say the crews of the ships in question. He also told me a lot about the wealth of primary sources linking Conrad's fictional account to the true life story that it was derived from.

All of which reminded me that while Gemini had been trained on the secondary sources available on the Internet, in this case a variety of academic papers, he did not, in general have access to the primary sources, in this case, for example, the biography at reference 12. But he did have access to reference 11, which appears to have drawn heavily from it. And I did turn up a extended preview of reference 12, perhaps 15% of the total, enough to provide some corroboration of his story.

Which presumably all means that Gemini is vulnerable to attacks by waves of academic and media fashion, just as much as the rest of us. The good thing is that he is capable, at least up to a point, of talking about his own limitations.

References

Reference 1: Claude Lévi-Strauss: the poet in the laboratory – Patrick Wilcken – 2010.

Reference 2: Tristes Tropiques - Claude Lévi-Strauss - 1955. On screen version.

Reference 3: A World on the Wane - Claude Lévi-Strauss – 1961. This English edition of reference 2 omits some of the chapters of the original French edition.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=wilcken. This seems to be as far as notice of my previous reading of Wilcken went. While my copy from that time was not to be found - and putting out a fiver or so for another one seemed a better bet than continuing the hunt.

Reference 5: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/a-thought-experiment-on-forensic.html. A recent outing for the man himself.

Reference 6: https://sergipeemfotos.blogspot.com/2013/10/dia-de-feira-no-municipio-de-carira.html. The source of the snap at the top of this post. A roll of the stuff in question, on a fair-time market stall in the Município de Carira in Brazil, about 100km inland, southwest of Recife.

Reference 7: https://www.gov.br/anvisa/pt-br/assuntos/tabaco/danos-a-saude/tabaco-mascavel-fumo-de-rolo. Most of the stuff turned by Bing about 'fumo de rolo' is in Portuguese, but if this is a fair sample, the stuff is not thought to be very good for you.

Reference 8a: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_de_convergence_intertropicale. For pot au noir. Literally, a pot containing something black, figuratively something unpleasant.

Reference 8b: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertropical_Convergence_Zone. For doldrums. A word derived from dold or dolt, a dull fellow. Then 'I'm a bit in the doldrums today', for being a bit seedy, a bit vacant or off colour. Then, rather as in the French, albeit by a different route, to name a tropical band where the winds are uncertain or absent for long stretches. Not good for a sailing boat.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn. Portugal is briefly mentioned, Brazil not at all. But, it seems clear from other sources that there was plenty of clearing by fire in Brazil, there called queimadas. Search confused by there being other, additional meanings in Portugal.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_(Conrad_short_story). I can clearly remember what my copy looks like, but I cannot put my hand on it today. And, all too often this happens because my memory of what the book looks like turns out to be quite wrong when I eventually do put my hand on it. Perhaps, since I have the complete works on the Kindle, probably near free, it was simply culled, never to be read again.

Reference 11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad%27s_career_at_sea.

Reference 12: Joseph Conrad: A Life - Najder, Z. - 2007. A long book, which looks to be the major source for reference 11.

Group search key: aisk.