Daniela Omlor, Hispanic editor of the Modern Language Review, talks to David Bailey, winner of the prize for the best article in 2025 (in Modern Language Review 120.3).

DO. Your article ‘Literature as Parrotry: Jorge de Sena’s “Homenagem ao Papagaio verde” and the Search for a Lusophone Postcolonial Voice’ is about a short story by the Portuguese author Jorge de Sena (1919-78) whose main character is a parrot. What drew you to this?

David Bailey

DB. First and foremost, I felt this extraordinary short story hadn’t quite attracted the critical attention it deserved. It had been read chiefly through an autobiographical lens by critics, and the author certainly had plenty to say about his unhappy childhood, but I was struck far more by its playful engagement with other tales about parrots from different languages, cultures and traditions.

One of the ironies of Portuguese literature is that it tends to be both very outward-looking and simultaneously overlooked by the cultures it tries to foster dialogue with. When I noticed how Sena was essentially rewriting (or parroting) Flaubert’s ‘Un coeur simple’, and drawing too on art history, early colonial historiography and children’s literature, I wanted to emphasise the story’s transnational intertextuality that in effect becomes an organising principle.

 
Few would deny that Madame Bovary and Frédéric Moreau are Flaubert’s most iconic characters: and yet it is Felicité’s pet parrot which seems most able to flit from one fiction to another.

I also read the avian leitmotif as an exploration of ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ copying, a distinction that dates back to Ancient Greece where Plato advocated for emulation over imitation. Jorge de Sena contrasts the playful, inventive repertoire of the Green Parrot with the thoughtless and cruel behaviour of the narrator’s caregivers, aligned closely with the politics of the Estado Novo regime. All in all, I argue that the story should be situated within the distinctive lusophone tradition of inventive ‘copying’ as a strategy for exploring Portugal and Brazil’s postcolonial condition. The best of lusophone literature, in other words, often takes the act of writing as itself a kind of parrotry.

DO. You actually translated Sena’s story into English for the first time. How did translation enable you to look at his work in a different way?

DB. I read the story during the pandemic and was amazed that it had never been translated into English (most of de Sena’s work had been, but ‘Homenagem’ had somehow been overlooked). I decided to translate it myself and it was published by the online journal Asymptote later that year. Translation is such a great way to get closer to a text, and I began reading quite a lot about parrots and their place in the European imaginary. I also spent a fair amount of time interacting with a decidedly rude Scarlet Macaw when I was in Laayoune, Western Sahara – it had learned to swear profusely in French, English and Arabic. As usual it was a combination of personal experiences and wider reading that led me towards this particular topic.

The Scarlet Macaw, the national bird of Honduras no less, photographed by Charles J. Sharp. Scarlet macaws communicate with each other in a complex pattern of honks, and only mimic human speech in captivity.

DO. Parrots’ ability to imitate speech has led to our ongoing fascination with them, but you also link parrotry to language use in a postcolonial context and to the Estado Novo under Salazar in Portugal.

DB. Indeed, the ability of parrots to imitate sounds (words, doorbells, even WhatsApp notifications) is undoubtedly what has made them so popular as pets and objects of study over the centuries. They also have an interesting link to colonialism, because it was the Columbian Exchange and our exploitative approach to the natural world that made them so widely available to Europeans. What’s interesting about Sena’s Green Parrot is his previous history of working on ships from the world over, which furnishes him ‘with all the rudest words of the Seven Seas’. So in the first instance, the Parrot can be read as disarticulating grandiose narratives about European imperialism, which is all the more significant in the context of Portugal’s African colonies during the 1960s.

More than that, though, the underlying logic of parrotry in the story’s construction is reminiscent of what were then burgeoning trends in Brazilian culture, epitomised by the Tropicália movement that advocated for the treacherous assimilation of dominant cultural trends from elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that the Green Parrot is from Brazil, and that he contrasts perfectly with the ‘dull, unthinking litany’ of both the (African) Grey Parrot and the boys’ parents. Sena thus casts the Salazar regime as tired, rigidly imperialistic, and severely impoverished at the intellectual level.

Various Amazon species are called ‘the Green Parrot’: it was the French naturalist René Lesson who ‘discovered’ this family in 1830. This specimen is Amazona festiva, as illustrated by John Keulemans (1842-1912), in the 1891 British Museum catalogue of birds.

DO. How does turning to animals help us question the human as an epistemological category? And how can it help us think ethically about how we treat others?

DB. Clearly there has been a significant shift towards this way of thinking in the humanities since at least the 1980s, and especially this century as the breakdown of our natural world gathers pace. What’s interesting about parrots in particular is their ability to weaken one of the supposed cornerstones of the human condition: our use of language. Now scientists are finding that plants can communicate with one another, and that whales speak with what we might term different dialects. The point is that few, if any of the defining characteristics of humanness turn out to be quite so definitive upon closer scrutiny. Ultimately it was western understandings of the human as superior to other life forms that led to the multiple environmental crises we are living through today, and creating a fairer planet for all its inhabitants cannot really be achieved without unravelling this epistemological standpoint.

DO. Sena himself led a peripatetic existence, leaving Portugal for Brazil before moving on to Wisconsin and California. Do you think this has influenced his work at all? I am particularly thinking here about the use of intertextuality across different periods and across the globe. You show this particularly compellingly for the influence of Flaubert’s ‘Un coeur simple’ from 1877 on Sena’s 1966 story.

DB. Probably the most important thing to understand about Sena is that he was involved in an attempt to overthrow the Salazar regime in 1959. Aware that under torture, some of the imprisoned dissidents would likely denounce him to the secret police (PIDE), Sena was left with little choice but to self-exile in Brazil, a country that was experiencing a brief democratic and intellectual flourishing before it too became a dictatorship in 1964, after which Sena again relocated to the United States. It’s difficult to say exactly how this influenced his work, but if ‘Homenagem’ is anything to go by, he clearly saw his country as small-minded and inward-looking in the 1960s. He was a renowned polyglot and spoke French, English and Spanish to a very high level. So I suppose there is a strong element of autobiography in the Green Parrot and our downtrodden narrator – Sena seems to value intercultural awareness and intellectual agility far more than the comforts of a quiet life, which is exactly the question Flaubert asked through the ironically named Felicité in his 1877 story.

 
Flaubert (left) and Sena (right). ‘Un coeur simple’ was, despite all appearances, a partly autobiographical work: and perhaps that is also true of its refractions into other authors.

DO. Is it at all surprising that Sena’s ‘Homenagem’ was not censored by the Salazar regime?

In a way, yes: there was certainly a well-resourced and complex censorship operation in Portugal at the time, and few could read the story as anything other than a deeply unedifying portrait of domestic life in the country. On the other hand, the neorealist generation in Portugal, of which Jorge de Sena was one of the most celebrated members, had already become very adept at using allegories and extended metaphors – including animal characters – to bypass censorship laws. Perhaps Sena’s ‘parroting’ of other parrot tales functions as another such strategy. And we should remember that the regime was sometimes very clumsy in its handling of art and literature – it left Paula Rego bizarrely untouched by censorship when she was living in Ericeira, and famously awarded Fernando Pessoa’s Mensagem a prize for nationalist literature, a work that literally describes Portugal as asleep and shrouded in fog. Either way, this story demonstrates Sena’s immense skill and playfulness as a writer.

full news feed • subscribe via RSS