Haroldo de Campos: The Education Of The Five Senses

The great Sergio Bessa, poet and indefatigable -- yes -- Haroldo de Campos scholar, has forwarded to me the following translation and bio of the late poet.

There is, of course, a whole load of interesting stuff on ubu.com (Haroldo de Campos search) -- including the Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry written by the Noigandres group and partly inspired by Lucia Costa's "Pilot Plan for Brazil."

Brazil's version of Concrete poetry may be the only art movement ever premised on the idea of a creating an "exportable" art form -- specifically for exchange within the global economy. Though I can't find the exact quote that states this, the Pilot Plan ends: "A general art of the word. The poem-product: useful object." I'm sure you neo-Romantics will find this yucky.

The following poem is from de Campos' post-Concrete phase:

The Education Of The Five Senses

1.
chatoboys (oswald)
itching
like fleas

peirce (proust?) considering
a color—violet
or an odor—
cabbage
rotten

rot—consider
this word: wines,
horace, odes
(principle of a
poem—
ogre)

2.
the purgatory is this:
enter / inter-
consider
the journey from the word stella
to the word styx

3.
(marx: the education of the five
senses

the tactile the mobile
the difficult
to read / readable
visibilia / invisibilia
the audible / the unheard
the hand
the eye
the hearing
the foot
the nerve
the tendon)

4.
the air
lapidary: see
how connects, this word,
to this other

language: my
consciousness (a parallelogram
of forces not a simple
equation of one
sole
unknown factor): this
language is made of air
and vocal cord
the hand that instills the thread of the
trellis / the breath
that unites this to that
voice: the point
of torsion
diaphanous work but that
is made (throughout) with the five
senses

with the color the odor the cabbage the fleas

5.
rare labor such as
to spin a top on one’s
nail

but that leaves its trace
minimal (non prescinded)
in the common division (incision)
of labor

pulsating trace / pulse
of the senses that are (pre) formed:
un-prescinded (if minimal)

the flicker of sunlight in the eye
—claritas: flash of epiphany!
a few registers modulations
rough paper or smooth a fold
secure a cut
a sure shot
on the bull's eye

in a flash the tiger trail the deer
(sousândrade)

the tiger-like assault

6.
that what accrues
rests
(in the senses)

even though minimal
(hubris of the minimal
that rests)

Translated by A.S. Bessa

Haroldo de Campos, (1929-2003), gained worldwide recognition in the early 1950s as one of the founders of Noigandres, the Brazilian group of poets who set the agenda for concrete poetry. Campos earned a law degree in 1952, but never practiced in that profession. He taught literary theory at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica, in São Paulo, for most of his life, and published several volumes on translation theory and on Brazilian and international literature. In 1972 Campos defended a controversial doctoral dissertation on Macunaima, a landmark of Brazilian modernism, based on the theories of Vladimir Propp. A decade later, his book on Gregório de Mattos, an elusive figure of the Brazilian baroque, also created a stir among academic circles in Brazil. Campos's "anti-logocentric" readings of Brazilian literature, admittedly influenced by Derrida's deconstructive model, have been of capital importance in the re-evaluation of authors such as Mattos, Kilkerry, Sousândrade and Oswald de Andrade—authors who, according to Campos, constitute a "tradition of rupture" in Brazilian literature. He was a prolific translator who introduced the work of many foreign poets to Brazil, beginning in the early 1950s with Ezra Pound, and most recently Charles Bernstein. His last work of translation, Homer's Iliad, has been published in two volumes by Mandarim, in São Paulo. An English volume of his collected poems and essays is due next spring by Northwestern University Press.

Haroldo de Campos died last Saturday, August 16, at the Hospital Oswaldo Cruz, in São Paulo.

Posted by Brian Stefans at August 29, 2003 12:08 AM | TrackBack