Haroldo de Campos e o barroco: a criatura de ou(t)ro - ensaios para um guia das Galáxias

Abstract

This investigation consists in the proposition of a kind of reading guideline for the book Galáxias (Galaxies, in a free translation), written by the Brazilian poet, reviewer and translator Haroldo de Campos, based on the conceptual tenets of the historical and transhistorical baroque. Thus, a possible mapping of the references, which generates little rotating stories over the “galactic” pages, is proposed, aiming at providing the reader with a kind of guideline that encourages him or her to go deeper into the book fruition. For that purpose, the expressive marks that define the haroldian poetry as singular baroque practice in modernity was searched for, by means of investigating, in his poetic work, the connections interlaced with the Baroque, in order to check the operative ways the author dealt with in his translation of the literary traditions. Galáxias, in my opinion, is a baroque high voltage poetic project that blends creative resources extracted from the richest national and foreign literary tradition, processed anthropophagically in the ways of the contemporary artistic production. Published by the first time in 1984, with fifty pages, the Haroldo de Campos’ book comes out for, among other purposes, prompting the literary genres interlace, as prose and poetry; dissolving the boundaries between local color and alien diction; transfusing tradition and modernity; melting art and ideology; mixing fact and fantasy; remixing form and content, superposing signified and signifier. All these literary proceedings, intersemioticized, promote a kaleidoscopic verbal weave, which undertakes, in the author’s words, “the travel as a book and the book as a travel” (CAMPOS, 2004, p. 119, my translation). This travel, is achieved by means of an intertextual and parodic net, made known through inventive phono-prosodic resources, in which alliterations, anagrams, paronomasias and wordplays come forth, drawing on the galactic path, sibilant and sinuous images that claim the reader’s ludic copartnership for full reading fruition. Having said that, our reading guideline is chiefly focused on the attempt to amplify the construction of the epic and epiphanic echoes that transit by the work pages, and these echoes both veil and unveil little stories that, once digested, might uncover many other stories and, thus, make reading even more pleasing. The main aim of Galáxias, I think, is no other than to encourage a liking for reading. The same goes for our reading guideline: to back up the reader to enjoy the galactic reading, just like the reading of Haroldo de Campos’ Galáxias.