Celso Ferreira da Cunha

Celso Ferreira da Cunha (1917–1989) was a Brazilian professor, philologist and essayist. He was the fourth occupant of seat 35 at the Brazilian Academy of Letters, to which he was elected on August 13, 1987, succeeding José Honório Rodrigues. He was received by academic Abgar Renault on December 4, 1987.

Life and works

Cunha was born in Teófilo Otoni, Minas Gerais, the son of Tristão da Cunha, a professor and politician from Minas Gerais. In 1921, his family moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he began his education at the Colégio Anglo-Brasileiro. He graduated in law (1938) and Letters (1940) from the former Universidade do Distrito Federal. There he had among his professors renowned European philologists such as Jean Bourciez, Jacques Perret and Georges Millardet, and the Brazilians Antenor Nascentes and Sousa da Silveira.

In 1947, he obtained a doctorate in Portuguese literature from the National Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Brazil, with the thesis O cancioneiro de Paay Gómez Charinho, a troubadour from the 13th century.

His early research focused on archaic Portuguese. Celso Cunha made an essential contribution to the study of songbooks, fundamental to the knowledge of the origin and evolution of the language. He wrote three works on the songs of medieval troubadours such as Paay Gómez Charinho (1947), Joan Zorro (1949) and Martin Codax (1956). A renowned medievalist, his philological research in books such as Estudos de poética trovadoresca and Língua e verso are considered exemplary in this specialized field. In latter years, he devoted himself to Portuguese in the sixteenth century and to the study of the Brazilian form of Portuguese. He left his history of the Portuguese language in Brazil (História da língua portuguesa no Brasil) incomplete.

He also wrote numerous books on Portuguese grammar, starting with Manual de português (1965) and continuing with Gramática do português contemporâneo (1966), Gramática moderna and Gramática da língua portuguesa (1972). His last major work was the groundbreaking Nova Gramática do português contemporâneo, written in collaboration with Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra of the University of Lisbon.

The third strand of Celso Cunha's work consisted of longer essays on language and culture, including the books Língua portuguesa e realidade brasileira, A questão da norma culta brasileira, Uma política do idioma, Conservação e inovação do português no Brasil, Língua, nação, alienação, and Em torno do conceito de brasileirismo.

Teaching

He began his teaching career in 1935, as a professor of Portuguese at Colégio Pedro II. He was a professor of Portuguese at the Faculty of Letters of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he was Dean of the Center for Letters and Arts. He was the first Brazilian professor at the Sorbonne, where he taught in three stints from the 1950s to the 1980s. In 1966, he was professor at the University of Cologne. In 1984, he taught History of the Portuguese Language in the postgraduate course at the Classical University of Lisbon. He received the titles of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Granada, Spain (1959), and Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Letters of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (1987).

Cunha's father Tristão da Cunha and his grandfather Benjamin Ferreira da Cunha were both teachers, as were his daughter Cilene da Cunha Pereira and his son-in-law Paulo Roberto Dias Pereira.

Honours

In addition to teaching and writing, he held important public functions at the local, regional and federal levels. He was also an eminent figure on the UNESCO Texts Commission and Brazil's representative at the International Institute of the Portuguese Language.

He was a member of the Machado de Assis commission, in charge of preparing the critical edition of the writer's works, and of the commission for fixing the Brazilian Grammatical Nomenclature, in 1957. He was president of the Working Group, created by the Minister of Education and Culture Nei Braga to present suggestions aimed at improving the teaching of Portuguese, in 1976. He was also the reviser of the text of the current Constitution of Brazil, at the invitation of the Constituent Assembly, in 1987.

He belonged to the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, the Academia Mineira de Letras, the Academia Brasileira de Filologia, the Círculo Linguístico do Rio de Janeiro, the Société de Linguistique de Paris, the Société de Linguistique Romane, the Association Internationale de Sémiotique, the Associación de Lingüística y Filología de la América Latina, the Oficina Internacional de Información y Observación del Español and the PEN Club of Brazil.

He received the José Veríssimo Prize (Essay and Erudition) from the Brazilian Academy of Letters (1956); the Paula Brito Award, from the City Hall of the former Federal District (1958); the Moinho Santista Prize for Philology (1983). In his honor, the volume Miscelânea de estudos linguísticos,filológicos e literários in memoriam de Celso Cunha was published, coordinated by Cilene da Cunha Pereira and Paulo Roberto Pereira, in 1995.