I’m so happy that I’m moved to quote Drummond:

Bem-aventurados os que não entendem nem aspiram a entender de futebol, pois deles é o reino da tranquilidade.

Unless I’m misinformed, this translates as:

Blessed are those who do not understand or who do not wish to understand football, for theirs is the kingdom of peace.

She also used football as background in one of her short stories (“À procura de uma dignidade”—Searching for dignity) about an elderly lady who finds herself lost in a labyrinth she later discovers to be the tunnels of Maracanã, the stadium.

Both texts can be found (in Portuguese) in “Donos da Bola,” by Eduardo Coelho. Feel free to contact me if I can help you finding these.

Still about the Drummond quote, it seems that Bellos had a bad reference, as Drummond died in 1987—11 years before that game … But, as Bellos’s book can be found here in Brazil, both the original and the translated versions, I’ll try to buy a copy to discover more. Thanks!

This urge to sing and dance
That comes from you
That comes from your blessed hands
Which defend the last piece of earth
Of the Fatherland.

Bellos says it appeared in Jornal do Brasil the day after the semifinal.

On a similar topic, do you know if Clarice Lispector treated football in her crônicas or in her other writing? I have a collection of her crônicas, in English, but there is no evidence of football, or allusions to football, even in 1970.

I have just a doubt about your quote of Brazilian author Carlos Drummond: are you referring to Carlos Drummond de Andrade, the poet? I couldn’t find any reference to any novelist called Carlos Drummond and the verses are very similar to a popular, anonymous poem that Brazilians used to “sing” between 1994 and 1998 (Taffarel’s years in Brazil’s national team). Maybe you had the verse wrongly attributed to Drummond—unfortunately, here in Brazil it has become very common lately to attribute to famous authors almost any text, misleading even newspapers and academic authors. It might just be the case here.

Even so, it is great to see “Carlos Drummond” name—no matter how he was mentioned—among the authors. Drummond, the poet, wrote several poems and articles about soccer, some of them compiled in Quando é dia de futebol (When It Is Soccer Day). One of his best verses on the subject is about Pelé, written when the player scored his 1,000th goal:

Harder than scoring a thousand goals as Pelé did is to score just one goal as Pelé does.

Once more, congratulations on the great article.

Hamlet as goalie. Actually Bloch is pretty happy to be back in goal at his home village. I always felt that as soon as he felt secure, a cop came up from behind and arrested him, for we meet Bloch again as one of the workers in Handke’s Walk About the Villages, which I translated as well—fresh out of jail, but still doing some interesting sadistic things by leaping out from behind tree stumps in the woods.