Digging Up the Cemetery of the Living: A Comparative Study of Rosalía de Castro and Lima Barreto

Abstract

In her poem “Santa Escolástica,” published in 1884 as part of the collection En las orillas del Sar, the Galician author Rosalía de Castro uses the image of the “cementerio de los vivos” to describe the solitude and inhabitability of a peripheral Spanish city, in the wake of a mass exodus of workers and artists from the region. Nearly four decades later, the Brazilian writer Lima Barreto deploys the same metaphor as the title of his unfinished novel O cemitério dos vivos, which is a fictionalization of the diaries he wrote while institutionalized, between 1919 and 1920, at the National Hospital for the Insane in Rio de Janeiro. This terminological coincidence is taken here as a starting point for an unlikely comparison between two authors from immensely different backgrounds. In reconstructing the history of the phrase “cemetery of the living,” this essay recovers a range of texts published in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French dating back to the 17^th century. This provides the necessary context for understanding how and why these two authors turned to this same image as a means of giving a name to the spaces that simultaneously oppress them and, paradoxically, offer them creative refuge.