In Memoriam
Haroldo de Campos 1929 - 2003

Haroldo de Campos died at his home in São Paulo on August 16, at the age of 74.

Haroldo De Campos

The scale and complexity of connections that Haroldo's varied actions set into motion make his contribution to the history of poetry and visual art difficult to estimate. Certainly - via correspondence, publication and personal contact – it would stretch from Japan across Europe , South America and the USA.

With Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, Haroldo was one of the three founding members of the post-war concrete poetry movement Noigandres. The movement was founded in 1952 and developed in three stages. The formative organic or phenomenological stage (1952-56); the best known heroic or orthodox stage (1956-60) - within which the famous Pilot-Plan for Concrete Poetry was issued and a radically reduced spatial syntax governed the production of poems; and the third stage, the concrete poetry of the sixties, which returned to more flexible notions of creativity and invention. One might add a fourth, post-concrete stage, during the eighties – which saw the publication of Augusto's controversial poem ‘pos-túdo' and Haroldo's articulation of the notion of the post-utopian poem. Haroldo's creative output of the eighties also included the finalisation of the vast prose-poetry cycle Galáxias , and the continuation of his ongoing practice of translation.

It is important to also remember Haroldo de Campos as an art critic whose sensitive and original voice opened up the work of several generations of Brazilian artists, including Volpi, Tomie Ohtake, Mira Schendel, and Antonio Dias. He often produced original poems or works of prose to accompany or elaborate the works of artists that he was engaged with, and he also provided practical support – using the informal international network put in place by the concrete poetry movement to quietly disseminate the work of Brazilian artists abroad.

Haroldo's particular contribution to the concrete poetry movement, and another of his most important legacies, was his work in translation. Haroldo termed his theory of translation ‘transcreation'. It was not only a theory that helped to conceptualise the difference between places via language and linguistics, but one which he continuously developed in practice. Rather than being straight translations, Haroldo's intense attention to the workings of language produced works that were original and revealing in the most radical sense of those words. Haroldo produced original translations of a vast heap of texts, including works by Pound, Joyce, Mallarmé, Maiakovski, Goethe, Heraclitus, Dante, Homer and Octavio Paz and incorporating a breathtaking universe of languages, including Chinese, German, Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, English, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Latin and Provençal.

Reading Donaldo Schüler's paper ‘Brazilian avant-garde: the epic of Haroldo de Campos' – which includes an examination of De Campos translation of excerpts of the old testament from ancient Hebrew into contemporary Portuguese - will shed more light on the complexities contained within de Campos process of translation.

Concrete poetry has often been subject to easy criticism for its periods of stridency and polemicism. However, what I find most convincing about Haroldo's theorising is that it did not occur in a precious vacuum. He was not only drawn to collaboration and translation as intellectual ideals or interests, but proved their practical value: whether poetically transcribing his reactions to artworks, or producing collaborative translations, such as Transblanco: a 1986 project which he drew on correspondence and discussions with Octavio Paz.

I would like to end my short introduction to Haroldo's work with a list of sources where readers can go directly to find out more:

Oxford and Yale universities joined in homage to Haroldo de Campos on his seventieth birthday, in conferences organised respectively by David Jackson and Else R P Vieira:

Conference Report (PDF)

ubuweb is a first-rate internet resource which publishes excellent, difficult to locate in print, papers on the ongoing history of experimental poetry, and you can also find reproductions of concrete poems here:

ubuweb pages on Haroldo de Campos

And, in print rather than on-line, Charles A. Perrone's Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry since Modernism (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1996) re-evaluates poetic vanguards in Brazil from the 1950s to the 1980s and includes detailed consideration of the work of Haroldo de Campos within all stages of the development of concrete poetry.