SIbilA – AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POETRY

LIES ABOUT THE TRUTH

A post-modern Brazilian Poetry Anthology from 50's on.
Edited by Régis Bonvicino.

Classics
Murilo Mendes
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
João Cabral de Melo Neto

References
Mário Faustino
Paulo Leminski

New Poets
Júlio Castañon Guimarães
Horácio Costa
Régis Bonvicino
Josely Vianna Baptista
Carlito Azevedo
Claudia Roquette-Pinto

Promising Names
Antonio Moura
Anibal Cristobo
Tarso M. de Melo

THE LEAF LEAF
Paul Hoover

The most significant recent anthologies of Brazilian poetry in English translation have been An Anthology of Twentieth Brazilian Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Bishop and Emnauel Brasil (Wesleyan University Press, 1972) and Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: 20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets, edited by Michael Palmer, Régis Bonvicino, and Nelson Ascher (Sun & Moon Press, 1997). The first anthology presents Brazilian modernism up to but not including the concetist movement of the 1950s. The second features poets such as Torquato Neto, Paulo Leminsky, and Duda Machado whose production began, for the most part, after 1970. Together, they show the vitality and variety of Brazilian poetry since roughly 1922, the year in which modernism arrived in Brazil.

This new selection be Régis Bonvicino, gathered at the invitation of New American Writing, contains the best features of both collections. Beginning with long sections from three great figures of Brazilian modernism, Murilio Mendes, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, it includes the transitional generation of Paulo Leminsky and Mário Faustino, younger poets such as Horácio Costa and Josely Vianna Baptista who were born between 1951 and 1963, and even younger poets such as Antonio Moura and Tarso M. de Melo (b. 1976). The translations were done for the most part by the team of Jennifer Frota, Scott Bentley, and Marta Bentley. The beginning lines of Drummond's "This is That" reveal the complexities faced by the translator: "the facile the fossil / the missle the fissle."

As a leading Brazilian poet of his generation, editor of Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain, and an advocate of avant-garde writing, Régis Bonvicino has the perfect position from which to represent Brazilian poetry of this century. A translator of the work of Robert Creeley who keeps an active correspondence with such poets as Michael Palmer and Charles Bernstein, he has long been interested in literary developments in the United States. To understand the freshness of this selection, it's useful to compare the Carlos Drummond de Andrade poems in "Lies About the Truth" with those of Elizabeth Bishop in her 1972 anthology or Mark Strand's in the chapbook Souvenir of the Ancient World (Antaeus Editions, 1976). Bishop and Strand represent lyrical and elegiac poems such as "Don't Kill Yourself, Carlos" and "Travelling in the Family." Drummond's personal poems are wonderful, but they reveal nothing of the vanguard side of his production such as we see in "Declaration of Love," "F," and "This is That." Selections from the work of João Cabral de Melo Neto in the Bishop anthology are grounded in the persona, situation, and narrative. In "Lies About the Truth," however, we get a more cerebral and experimental Melo Neto: "Leafed through, the leaf of a book recovers / the languid and vegetable of the leaf leaf...." The editor gives us a broader view of Brazilian poetry, one that is innovative beyond the well-known contributions of concretism.

I should also mention the anthology Brazilian Poetry (1950-1980), edited by William Jay Smith and Emanuel Brasil (Wesleyan University Press, 1983). Appearing more than a decade after the Bishop anthology, it is limited to six poets of the generation of the 1950s and 60s: Ferreira Gullar, Haroldo de Campos, Mário Faustino, Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, and Lindolf Bell.

I have asked the editor to include his own work as part of this project. I would especially recommend to readers his Sky-Eclipse: Selected Poems, a bi-lingual collection recently published as a Green Integer Book by Sun & Moon Press.

INTRODUCTION
Régis Bonvicino

Paul Hoover generously invited me to edit an anthology of Brazilian poetry from this century for New American Writing. I proposed a selection of the poets whom I consider the most resilient of my generation, at least until the present, and also likely to withstand the judgement of time.

To provide context, I have also included work of previous generations who have acted as references for contemporary Brazilian poetry. This includes decisive work written after the 1950s under the impact of post-war cultural influences and the Concrete Poetry Movement (1956). Such interlocutors are, in my eyes, the three greatest Brazilian poets of the century: Murilo Mendes (1901-1975), Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987), and João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999). To this group, I have added two younger poets whose production began after the 1950s, Mário Faustino (1930-1962) and Paulo Leminski (1944-1989), both of whom suffered untimely deaths. Each in his own way functioned as a model for the younger poets Júlio Castañon Guimarães (b. 1951), Horácio Costa (b. 1954), Josely Vianna Baptista (b. 1957), Carlito Azevedo (b. 1961), and Claudio Roquette-Pinto (b. 1963).

Concretism was the most complex avant-garde movement from the 1950s to the present. But the same period also saw the rise of Tropicalism (1968), a movement whose effects derived largely from popular music and radiated out to the entire culture. Neither movement, however, reached the deep and renovating character of Brazilian Modernism (1922), of which both Concretism and Tropicalism are in fact off-shoots. Haroldo de Campos, a leading Concretist and innovator, introduced the important concept of relativism to the movement, as well as the theory of post-utopia (1980s). The work of de Campos, especially The Education of the Five Senses (1985), an important collection for the new generation, would have been included in the References section, along with Faustino and Leminski, had he given permission. Other relevant names go unmentioned for not being common to all. Among these, I would mention, nevertheless, Ferreira Gullar of the generation of the 1950s.

At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Concretist Movement was already waning, and the Tropicialist Movement of Caetano Veloso had drifted far from its original concerns. It was now possible to discern different kinds of vanguard poetry, which diverged from their predecessors and which continue to profoundly affect the scene. As the fall of the Berlin Wall is an historic mark, so the anthology Nothing the sun could not explain (1997)1, is a visible sign of a new cohesion in Brazilian poetry.

Despite the oppression of the Military Dictatorship (1964-1985) and pressure to view Concretism as “the only avant-garde possible”, Júlio Castañon Guimarães, Horácio Costa, Josely Vianna Baptista, Carlito Azevedo, and Claudia Roquette-Pinto managed to construct a significant body of individual work. They also managed to alter our concept of Brazilian poetry by formulating new possibilities for experimentation. Unfortunately, their contribution is still largely unrecognized by the critics.

In my view, Concretism was “dislocated” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade's 1962 poem “Isso é Aquilo”. This poem, with its semantic instability, distrust of the signifier, and hesitations, establishes a poetry that could be called “post-modern”. Nevertheless, Concretism continued as a fruitful movement until the beginning of the 1980s. This is due to the international perspective of Brazilian culture it afforded and its influence on a younger generation that includes Régis Bonvicino, Júlio Castañon Guimares, Horácio Costa, Josely Vianna Baptista, and, indirectly, Carlito Azevedo and Claudia Roquette-Pinto.

Concrete Poetry was based on the idea of “progress”, and in this, and other aspects, can be understood as the prolongation of historical European vanguards from the beginning of the century and also of Brazilian modernism, led by Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) and Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954). This movement found in its ranks Carlos Drummond de Andrade (in my view the greatest Brazilian poet of all time) and Murilo Mendes, among others. João Cabral, who debuted in 1945 under the influence of Drummond and surrealism, acknowledged Concretism, but despite his admiration his poetry remained untouched by its proposals. Cabral invented his own vanguard, a tension between the rigor of forms and the vigor of imagination that has served as a model of independence for the new poets. On this point, Michael Palmer observes, in his recent essay on Octavio Paz: “Perhaps, Paz notes, only Brazilian Concretism can be seen as a genuine extension of Historical vanguardism into the recent past movements”2. Though it appeared chronologically in the early post-modern period, Concretism cannot be represented as a post-modern phenomenon, except for Haroldo de Campos, whose investigations continued beyond the precepts of the movement. Even in Galáxias (1963-1976) — a work which points, though less frequently and incisively, to the relativism of his original beliefs — many traces of international post-modernism can be found: self-reference, inter-textuality, pastiche, parody, and transgression of borders, especially between literature and popular music.

Such characteristics are not found, explicitly, in the work of the new poets, who refuse a dialogue with popular music (in search of a reconfiguration of the literary itself); with graphic and visual poetry (but not with the visual and sculptural arts); with pastiche; and with irony while distancing itself from the world and the universe of mass media. Among the five contemporary poets, the only one close to international post-modernism is Horácio Costa, who values pastiche and parody in much of his already extensive body of work.

For the current generation, the revolution of the word, connected with existentialism rather than counterculture, and the reassertion of the anti-lyrical, as seen in Drummond, Mendes, Cabral, Faustino and Leminski, are fundamental. This poetry differs both from the dominant practice of free-verse, confessional poetry and the pallid formalism of metrical verse, which still insists on reviving the sonnet.

Ultimately, this group of poets, which is relativistic in its view of “progress”, is vanguard in contrast to the conservatism of poetry in Brazil today. Its characteristics include the exploration of language itself and its possibilities for representation, difficulty, and even a degree of “illegibility”.

It should be of interest to the North American public that Ezra Pound (as translator and theorist) and e.e. cummings (the poem as visual construction) were essential references for Concretism. Paradoxically, the latter also influenced Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat poet whose goals are contrary to those of the Brazilian vanguard. Today, some of this new generation's authors turn their attention to the Objectivists, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Michael Palmer and Language Poetry.

Both Murilo Mendes and Drummond de Andrade refuse worn-out forms and see modernity as liberation. However, Andrade differs from Mendes in his pursuit of the oneiric and hallucinatory. As Alfredo Bosi notes, “It was João Cabral de Melo Neto who hit the target when he recognized: 'the poetry of Murilo always was for me mastery, for its plasticity and novelty of image. Above all it was he who taught me to privilege the image over the message, the plastic over the discursive'. In this characterization, they recognize the futurist process of montage and the surrealist process of the oneiric sequence […]”3.

Traces of oneirism and hallucination can be seen in all the poets published here but principally in Josely Vianna Baptista and Horácio Costa. In his emphasis on innovation, Mendes, an independent cosmopolitan in touch with key figures of the historic vanguards of Europe, holds the most fascination for Brazilian poets.

A word about the importance of Faustino and Leminski is fitting. Though Faustino refused affiliation with Concretism, he anticipated the movement and eventually promoted it. An independent avant-gardist, his interests surpassed the limits of movement and of his own time. He linked himself with Blake, Rimbaud, Nietzsche and Dylan Thomas. He wrote and published the first homosexual love poems in Brazil. At the time of his death, he was, along with Haroldo de Campos, the greatest intellectual of his generation. He also had in mind the construction of a long poem, biographical and cosmic, which would combine ideogramatic syntax with linear syntax. The most “Poundian” of his peers, he is the archetype for the new poets presented here.

Of the generation of Caetano Veloso, Torquato Neto and Duda Machado, Paulo Leminski began as a Concretist, but was to write a monumental work of Joycean character, Catatau (1975), after which he broke with Concretist values and would influence younger poets to do likewise. Alfredo Bosi writes: “A name apart which evokes a radiant presence, not only poetical, but cultural, is that of Leminski, who died young, in 1989. His trajectory brought to light the fractures of the whole post-68 avant-garde. Leminski tried to create not only a writing but a poetic anthropology by which his stake in the situation and in the ultramodern technologies of communication did not inhibit the appeal of a 'utopic community'.”4. These five new poets (and others who could not be included here) represent the community glimpsed by him. Members of this non-conformist group include younger poets still: Antonio Moura, whose experimentation with forms comes accompanied with a great feeling of “Brazilianness”, and Anibal Cristobo, an Argentinian who opted to write in Portugeuse, linguistically reflecting the intense changes in the world today.

I want to thank Jennifer Sarah Frota, Marta M. Bentley, Scott Bentley and the promising young Brazilian poet Tarso M. de Melo – collaborator in the selection of these poems – who made this work possible. My gratitude to Paul Hoover for his comments on the translations and overall help with the project.

I thank also Marjorie Perloff, Douglas Messerli, Michael Palmer, Charles Bernstein and Robert Creeley for their continuing dialogue, which has made new Brazilian poetry a subject of discussion in the United States.

Tr. Jennifer Sarah Frota & Paul Hoover

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