Eduardo de Almeida Navarro

In 2021, Eduardo Navarro announced that he had translated the six letters of the Camarão Indians, discovered more than 130 years ago in the Netherlands, where they have been kept for almost 400 years. The letters, all in Tupi, are the only record of literate Indians writing in the colonial period. He plans to publish them as a book.

In 2013, Navarro released Dicionário de tupi antigo: a língua indígena clássica do Brasil (Dictionary of Old Tupi: the Classic Indigenous Language of Brazil), in which he describes almost eight thousand words of this language, thus surpassing Tesoro de la lengua guaraní, by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, which displays about five thousand entries. He is currently preparing a Nheengatu dictionary.

Since the year 2000, Eduardo Navarro has been training teachers of Old Tupi for indigenous schools in Paraíba, in an initiative called Projeto Poti. The first course in Old Tupi, held in Baía da Traição, lasted two years and trained 17 monitors to act as teachers in Potiguaras schools, aiming to multiply the knowledge about this language in order to recover it.

Eduardo Navarro was responsible for the translation into Tupi of the entire script of the film [pt] about the German adventurer Hans Staden, who visited Brazil twice in the 16th century. The feature film, directed by Luiz Alberto Pereira [pt], was released in 1999 on the occasion of the celebrations for Brazil's 500th anniversary.

In 1998, Navarro launched the book Método moderno de tupi antigo: a língua do Brasil dos primeiros séculos (Modern Method of Old Tupi: The Language of Brazil in the First Centuries), which aims to enable students to read 16th and 17th century texts in this language, showing the penetration of Old Tupi in Brazilian culture. In 2005 he did a post-doctorate in India, where he went to study the origins of the myth of São Tomé in Brazil.

Eduardo Navarro was the organizer and main translator of the books Poemas: lírica portuguesa e tupi (Poems: Portuguese and Tupi poetry), of 1997, and Teatro, of 1999, in which he wrote explanatory notes and modernized the original spelling of the texts, most of which had been written in Old Tupi by José de Anchieta.

Eduardo Navarro graduated in Geography from the São Paulo State University and in Classics from the University of São Paulo. In 1995, she received her PhD with a thesis on the issue of languages in the Renaissance. In 1997, he published Anchieta: vida e pensamentos (Anchieta, Life and Thinking), a book about the Spanish Jesuit priest José de Anchieta, author of the first grammar [pt] of the Old Tupi language and one of the first authors of Brazilian literature.

Eduardo de Almeida Navarro (Fernandópolis, February 20, 1962) is a Brazilian philologist and lexicographer, specialist in Old Tupi and Nheengatu. He is a full professor at the University of São Paulo, where he has been teaching Old Tupi since 1993, and Nheengatu since 2009. Eduardo Navarro is also the author of the books Método moderno de tupi antigo (Modern Method of Old Tupi), 1998, and Dicionário de tupi antigo (Dictionary of Old Tupi), 2013, important works on the Tupi language.

He was also responsible for writing the preface and footnotes of the reedition of Ferdinand Denis [fr]' book Uma festa brasileira [pt], and translated part of it directly from the Old Tupi language. The first edition of this book had been published in 1850 in Paris. The new edition was launched in October 2007, with a bilingual version in French and Portuguese. The excerpt translated by Navarro was Poemas brasílicos (Brazilian Poetry), by Father Cristóvão Valente.