servant through examination. In 1933, he went to Barbacena in the position of Doctor of the 9th Infantry Battalion. Rosa later recalled that the experiences from his time as a doctor and a soldier were significant for his formation as a writer. In the following year, Rosa began his diplomatic career. In 1938, he served as assistant-consul in Hamburg, Germany, where he met his future second wife, Aracy de Carvalho Guimarães Rosa, the only Brazilian woman to be officially granted the title of Righteous among the nations for her assistance to Jews escaping the Third Reich. In 1963, he was chosen by unanimous vote to enter the Brazilian Academy of Letters (Academia Brasileira de Letras) in his second candidacy. After postponing his acceptance for four years, he finally assumed his position in 1967, just three days before passing away in the city of Rio de Janeiro, victim of a heart attack, at the summit of his diplomatic and literary career. Work Sagarana Although Guimarães Rosa began to write with poetry, his only volume of verse, “Magma”, was relinquished by the author and was only published posthumously. In turn, Rosa began pursuing a literary career by inscribing a collection of twelve short-novels in a contest, in 1938, whose jury was chaired by the then already prestigious Graciliano Ramos. The older writer denied him the first prize. Ramos himself later explained his devaluation of the first drafts of a work later known as Sagarana: in spite of the author's talent and the many beauties of the collection, he thought that the uneven quality of the stories and their often exaggeratedly long passages resulted in a work that was incoherent and immature. Guimarães Rosa extenuously reviewed his work, until finally considering it ready for publication only in 1946. In its mature form, already noticeable in Sagarana, Rosa's style vastly differs from that of Ramos. The latter's succinct, dry expression is in harsh contrast with the former's exuberance of detail and quality of language, rich in vocabulary and adventurous in its exploration of the grammar of the Portuguese language, qualities the Ramos himself would endow as his fellow writer's greatest virtues. “Sagarana” is a portmanteau word crafted from the union of “saga” (homonym in Portuguese for saga) and “rana” (Tupi for “in the manner of”), thus translating as “(stories) in the manner of folk legends”. The book is composed of nine short-novels, three less