The poet Augusto de Campos.Fernando Laszlo / Other
Something happens on the façade of the Mário de Andrade Library, located in the center of São Paulo.
The architecture of the building has been modified with the installation of a 10-meter LED panel that reproduces the poem
Cidade / City / Cité
without intervals
.
Taking the text originally published in 1963 out of the paper and throwing it into the hard concrete poetry of the corners of the metropolis seems to do justice to the legacy of Augusto de Campos, who turned 90 on February 14.
Occupying the city, invariably submerged in the ugly smoke that rises and blurs the stars, was always one of Augusto's goals, even when the concrete poetry project formulated with his brother Haroldo and the poet Décio Pignatari in the early 1950s it was still embryonic.
Augusto not only produced poetry, but also essays on music, art, and culture in general, as well as translations by writers that were the basis for the theoretical formulations of concretism in Brazil.
In the last 70 years, Augusto has published books such as
Viva Vaia
(1979),
Despoesia
(1994),
Não
(2003) and
Outro
(2015), which bring together a good part of his poetic production, and has translated authors that are not easily accessible in Brazil. , like the American Ezra Pound and the French Mallarmé.
In addition, he has written essays and critical studies on literature and music in which he analyzes movements such as Bossa Nova and Tropicalia.
Despite the tributes, the poet, winner of the Pablo Neruda (2015) and Janus Pannonius (2018) awards, is not there for celebrations.
Increasingly secluded and reluctant to give interviews and appear in public, Augusto ventured to EL PAÍS to justify his apparent silence.
“I am overwhelmed by the most diverse requests.
But my silence is also the result of a kind of discouragement at the deplorable situation in which the country finds itself, "he said by email.
"The word of the poets is less and less taken into account in the context of mass consumption in which we growers of poetry live, where we are situated 'on the fringes of the margins'.
If the word of the poets had any resonance, the demonstrations would not have been so rare when I warned in Brasilia, upon receiving the Order of Cultural Merit (in 2015), of the conspiracy against President Dilma Rousseff, who was later dismissed in an
impeachment
grotesque and shameful, under the sign of praise for a notorious torturer of the dictatorship ”, he criticized.
“With such premises, I am not up for celebrations, seeing my country delivered to incompetent, opportunists and reactionaries of all kinds, in a paramilitary conspiracy.
What Brazil has to do is get rid of covid-19 and Bolsonavirus-22 (and by the latter I understand the entire band that accompanies our 'presidency').
A virus kills.
The other idiot, "he adds.
Concrete poetry, yesterday and today
The nucleus of concretism led by Augusto, Haroldo and Décio appeared in 1952 with the publication of the magazine
Noigrandes
, an indecipherable word that in semantic terms would mean something like escaping from boredom.
The magazine marked the beginning of concrete poetry in Brazil, with texts that already pointed to a radicalization of syntax, verse, the search for sound and the cult of form, subsequently ratified in various manifestos, such as the
Pilot Plan of concrete poetry
, 1958.
Other writers orbited around the hard core of São Paulo, with greater or lesser intensity, amid polemics and quarrels, such as Pedro Xisto, José Paulo Paes, Mário da Silva Brito and Ferreira Gullar.
Concrete poetry dialogued with the city and the industrial and technological development of Brazil at the time.
It is not surprising that the title of the manifesto published in 1958 refers to the modern features and futuristic architecture of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in the conception of Brasilia, inaugurated two years later.
Structurally, the concretist objective is communication-form, “the presentification of the verbal object, without screens of subjectivism”, as Haroldo de Campos defined it in his day.
His designs, symmetry and calculations on the form generate a series of details to the creation process, like an "engineering" of the verse.
Another important aspect for the emergence of the concretist group at the beginning of the 1950s was "the growth of a cosmopolitan public", as defined by the critic Gonzalo Aguilar, in a prosperous metropolis that had just seen the birth of the São Paulo Museum of Art ( MASP) and the Museum of Modern Art (MAM).
This factor contributed significantly to names like Pound, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, EE Cummings, Mayakovsky and James Joyce gaining space in the discussions based on the translations made by Augustus.
“Translation-art, a model created by Augusto and Haroldo, is one of the inheritances of concretism.
They recreated the poetry of invention in Portuguese, from the Greeks, through language creators like Apollinaire and Joyce, to contemporaries like the American John Cage, translating sound and meaning while maintaining form.
It is not just about the knowledge of the language.
They went further by recomposing the poem in our language in its original form ”, comments editor and translator Vanderley Mendonça.
The work of Augustus, concrete poetry, was rejected by critics.
The proposal of rupture that the group defended found some resistance in the Brazilian literary canon.
But, at the same time, it served for the emergence of “new aspects of criticism that could respond to works of invention, shedding the automatism of the rejection of novelty and without the immutable and sacred protection of the canon”, as Raquel Campos, postdoctoral candidate, explains in Literary Studies from the Federal University of São Carlos.
“I think that concretism was the last great avant-garde movement in Brazilian literature, due to its repercussion, not only national, but also international.
Furthermore, the changes proposed by Augusto, Haroldo and Décio continue to be explored by different poets and radicalized by the innumerable current technological possibilities ”, affirms the researcher.
The limits of paper and technology
In an interview published on the visual arts portal
New City Brazil
in 2016, Augusto commented that in his childhood he did not show any predisposition to write.
"I liked to draw.
I only thought about writing poetry around the age of sixteen, influenced by my brother Haroldo, a year and a half older than me and who also felt attracted to that field ”.
It's funny to think that the poet could not even have written.
Of the three formators of concrete poetry in Brazil, Augusto was the least verbal.
“Augusto began his career as a poet, but grew closer and closer to the visual arts.
It is not uncommon to find specific poems in his works transformed into totally visual works, as in the case of
Code
(1973) or
Viva vaia
(1972).
For me and other professors who have studied his work, especially abroad, he is better known in the visual arts community than in the poetry community, ”said Marjorie Perloff, emeritus professor of English at Stanford University.
There are several works that have broken the limits of the book, some in collaboration with the Spanish intermediate artist Julio Plaza.
In 1987, for example, Plaza installed the poem
Cidade / City / Cité
in large wooden letters painted in red, for about 80 meters, on the facade of the São Paulo Biennial building.
In 1991, poems like
Rever
and
Poesia é risco
were screened with laser on Avenida Paulista.
Ten years later, the poem “Tudo está dito” also appeared on the façade of buildings in Rio de Janeiro.
Last year, a billboard with the poem
Viva vaia
was displayed on the streets of Vitória.
“I don't see the book as a limit and I have a great appreciation for the printed vehicle.
But I understand that visual communication opens up huge areas of information and dissemination that complement and broaden the dissemination of literary matter, ”said Augusto.
Augusto has always shown an interest in technology, which was accentuated from the 80s, when computers became more accessible, and in the following decade, with the evolution of the Internet in Brazil.
“Augusto's poetic trajectory has made two basic movements since the 1950s: on the one hand, the poet has been transposing or acclimating his intersemiotic poems and experiments, previously contained on paper or analogue supports (books, phonograph records, video art) to the current digital devices and platforms ”, explains critic Ronald Augusto.
Music.
And the tropicalistas
The tropicalista group formed by the artists Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Gal Costa, Torquato Neto, José Carlos Capinam, Nara Leão, Rita Lee and the brothers Arnaldo and Sérgio Baptista, which emerged in the sixties, was constantly attacked with allegations that music produced in communion with the novelties of the time, such as the sound of the electric guitar, was detrimental to Brazilian popular music.
Augusto, however, identified in the group, especially in Caetano, a kind of vanguard that united them.
For the poet, the Bahian musician was responsible for giving continuity to the aesthetic changes promoted by Bossa Nova at the end of the previous decade, in the production of João Gilberto, Tom Jobim, among others.
These considerations were published in 1968, in the book
Balance (o) de la bossa nova y otros bossas
.
“A friend showed me an article by Augusto about my song
Boa palavra
, which was competing at the Excelsior festival [the first popular music festival on Brazilian television].
That intrigued me.
Later, in São Paulo, Augusto contacted me and we met.
From then on, we started seeing each other, he introduced me to his brother Haroldo and Décio Pignatari.
And the work of Oswald de Andrade, the texts of Joyce, the poems of EE Cummings,
A roll of the dice
by Mallarmé ”, Caetano Veloso explains to EL PAÍS.
“Augusto saw in what we began to make some kind of identification with his work.
That atmosphere brought us closer to the composers Júlio Medaglia, Rogério Duprat, Damiano Cozzella.
We had a program, a project, a plan.
The concretists saw something that coincided with their own expressive adventures, ”says Caetano.
Augusto's defense of Tropicalist intentions represented the way in which the writer relates to music, an enthusiast for avant-garde names such as Cage, the German composer Stockhausen and the Austrian Webern, little known in Brazil, but who were in the backbone of the experiments promoted by Tropicalia.
The desire to see his poems come off paper also turned some of his works into songs.
Augusto put music to part of his work in collaboration with his son, Cid Campos.
Caetano recorded the poem
Pulsar
(1975) on his
1984
album
Velô
. Other artists, such as Tom Zé and Arnaldo Antunes, also took a similar path, bringing concrete poetry to popular music.
“They [the concretists] were avant-garde.
They had an attitude similar to that of the avant-garde creators of the early 20th century.
For me, Augusto was a radical avant-garde.
He looked for the letters of colored lights in
Poetamenos
.
The wordless poems of the
Pop-cretos
series
.
And he never stopped experimenting.
And to search.
Until today, ”says Caetano.
On the role of the avant-garde in contemporary Brazil, the embers of the concretists and tropicalists production, Caetano oscillates between hope and fear.
“There is a lot of horizontal production and, with the Internet, we see the inhabitants of the favelas composing electronic pieces into funks with few (and shameless) words.
Brazil is a country of horrendous situations: prisons that are dungeons, in which 80 guys occupy cells that were built for 15. It seems insurmountable and still dreams of saving the world ”.