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Brazilian avant-garde: the epic of Haroldo de Campos

Donaldo Schüler

Epic poetry seduces Haroldo de Campos as a translator and as a poet. Is translation a betrayal? That is a widespread opinion. Can a betrayal become a virtue? That is the firm position of Haroldo de Campos.

Despising restrictions made to translation, he translated systematically for many years. Faithful to his decision to translate only what pleased him, he rarely translated entire works. After his successful translations of Ezra Pound, Joyce, Mallarmé, Maiakovski, Goethe, Heraclitus, Dante, Homer and Octavio Paz, he risked translating the Bible, indeed not the whole Bible, but only the parts which interested him.

Genesis

The epic shade of many biblical passages attracted Haroldo. He translated the forth verse of the second chapter of Genesis this way:

Esta a gesta do céufogoágua / e da terra /
enquanto eram criados ///
No dia / de os fazer / Ele-O Nome-Deus /
terra e céufogoágua

This is the gesta of the heavenfireearth / and of the earth
while they where created ///
The day / He-The Name-God / made them
earth and heavenfirewater.

In the King James´ Bible this same passage reads thus:

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day the Lord God made the earth and the heavens

Haroldo de Campos calls our attention to the strangeness of the Hebrew. As a Semitic language, one understands that it offers greater difficulties to the translator than Greek, which belongs to the Indo-European linguistic group. Nevertheless, difficulties never cause any trouble to Haroldo's preferences. On the contrary, strangeness gives him the opportunity to make “strong” translations, to originate new resources for the users of the Portuguese language.

Instead of “heaven”, the translation of shamaym, Haroldo gives us “fireearth”, or, as here, “heavenfireearth”. He justifies this neologism by the etymology of the Hebrew word, composed of esh (fire) and maym (water). That is one of his reasons. The other is a textual crossing. The author reminds us of the cosmological metaphors cultivated by modern physics: the universe born through a hot explosion, for example. The term gesta , a translation of the Hebrew noun toldoth , recalls medieval tales or epic narratives in general. This connotation is not encouraged by the usual translations which interpret toldoth as 'generation'. He presents yet another reason for his choice, a merely acoustic one : esTA a gesTA, in Portuguese. The emphasis is thus dislodged, from the original text to the effects it might produce.

The importance given by Haroldo de Campos to the signifiers reduces the signified to 'nothing', as becomes apparent in his translation of the second verse of Ecclesiastics:

Nevoa de nadas / disse O-que-Sabe//
névoa de nadas / tudo névoa-nada.

Mist of nothingness / said He-Who-Knows
mist of nothingnesses/ all mist-nothing.

Haroldo stresses the opposition synchrony/diachrony in the notes which we find at the end of his re-creation. Nietzsche and the avant-garde delimit the realm of synchrony. 'Mist of nothingness' corresponds to the vanitas vanitatum of Ieronimus' translation and to the 'vanity of vanities' in modern translations. Orthodox interpretations, taking 'vanity of vanities' for an opposition to eternity, moved without conflict in the gloomy atmosphere of Ecclesiastics. The translation ‘mist of nothingness' troubles. Haroldo touches an ample context of unrest which discloses itself in Pindar, in modern and in ancient skeptics, in Calderón de la Barca. Ecclesiastics, translated by Haroldo de Campos, tastes of mannerist and of avant-garde rebellion. Haroldo's comentaries, juxtaposing conflicting interpretations, afford an amazing struggle of interpretations. While sense dissolves in the mist, it lets a skeleton of signifiers which say everything and therefore, nothing. 'Mist of nothingness' opens abysses under our feet.

Menis, the Wrath of Achilles

Haroldo's attitude does not change when he approaches the first book of the Iliad in his book 'Menis, a ira de Aquiles' (Menis, the Wrath of Achilles). His prior choices let us presuppose that it was nothingness that attracted him to the first book of the poem: where the Achaeans struggle in vain to overcome the unconquerable walls of Troy. The shadows which cover the book already appear in the opening verses where we read that the souls of many heroes were sent to the kingdom of death. Haroldo de Campos stretches the devastating emptiness suggested by Homer in his careful translation of the verse 231:

Devora-Povo! Rei dos Danaos? Rei de nada.

People devourer! King of the Danaans? King of nothing.

These words, which appear among the insults thrown against Agamemnon by Achilles, could be translated by one whose attention is not directed to the material aspect of the words this way: “People explorer, you govern worthless men.” But Haroldo de Campos, for whom poetry is chiefly sound, lays stress, based on the Hellenistic, on the similarity between outidanoisin (worthless men) and danaoi (Danaans), one of the words used by Homer to designate the attackers of Troy . In the word 'nada' (nothing) the first two syllables of Danaos (Danaans) reappear inverted. Haroldo, pretending to save with his translation the resemblance between the noun and the adjective, succeeds: but he introduces a concept absent in this verse. The expression “king of nothing" is not found anywhere in the Homeric poems.

The translation of Haroldo de Campos is inventive and it reveals the depth of his research. The reader enters a festival of sounds. Haroldo underlines that the task of a translator of a Greek text is to 'hellenize' the Portuguese language, rejecting the efforts of other translators who try to adapt the foreign language to the requirements of the language into which one translates.

One must not hope, however, that the translator could make us jump into the Greek world of the eighth century BC. Homer shows strong characteristics of oral poetry, while Haroldo de Campos' translation carries the marks of written poetry. What belonged to the collective resources of the chanters results in a set of erudite findings in Haroldo's translation. An attentive reading reveals an abundance of notions related to nothingness in Haroldo's Iliad. Neither Homer, however, nor Greek literature in general know the concept of “nothing” in the sense Haroldo and Derrida employ it. The absolute nothing - Haroldo knows it - was developed by biblical exegesis and was carried to its ultimate consequences by contemporaneous nihilism, including God, world and man. Haroldo displays a hellenized translation with a strong modern accent. Is it an error? Not at all. We observe what can hardly be avoided. Every translation shows the marks of its time. It would be an error to see in Haroldo a new Homer. But that would be a mistake of the receivers, not of Haroldo himself, who enriches translations of Homer. We only regret that Haroldo did not have the intention to translate the whole Iliad. Would he do it, he would have given us many hours of pleasure and would have obliged us to reflect.

Signantia quasi coelum

Let us pass from the epic translations to the epic production of Haroldo de Campos. 'Signantia quasi coelum' is a cosmogonic poem. Signantia comes from signans - one who signals. The neuter plural signantia means things that signal, or things that produce signs. The Latin title alludes to medieval thinking, and inverts it. In the conception of the Middle Ages, matter was determined (signatio) by form, while in Haroldo´s poem matter determines matter. If we choose to understand this determination, we either have to go back to the stoics, following Gilles Deleuze, or we must reflect on Chinese thinking with Haroldo de Campos.

Chinese thinking clarifies the connotations of heaven (coelum ) in Haroldo´s poem. Haroldo transcribes - in his book Ideograma (Ideogram) - an essay written by the Chinese thinker Chang Tung-Sun, which points out the particularity of Chinese conceptions of heaven. The Chinese do not reflect on the nature of heaven. For them, there are no gods prior to heaven. They ask heaven for orientation. The heaven shows them how to avoid misfortune.

Quasi means like. We could render the title 'Signantia quasi coelum' as 'Things make signals as the heaven', understanding it as the transfer of the creative power from heaven to things. If our interpretation is correct, things derive their creative power from themselves. Let us proceed oriented by this hypothesis.

The first part of the poem shows, in the original language, a sentence written by Novalis: "Das Paradies ist gleichsam über die ganze Erde verstreut - und daher so unkentlich geworden." " Paradise is spread all over the world, and therefore it became unknown." Haroldo wants us to see the coincidence of the Chinese and the romantic conceptions in a process of montage, which allows the creation of a new reality from fragments brought together from different parts. In this way he follows Ezra Pound, who also aimed at the unity of a fragmented world.

The poem of Haroldo de Campos was published in 1979. Years before, in 1966, Foucault had written 'Les mots et les choses' (Words and Things), an essay which discusses the relationship between signs and referents. For Foucault, resemblance oriented Western knowledge until the end of the sixteenth century. Earth reflected the sky, literature reflected life. Man occupied a privileged position because he was conceived as a mirror of the world. In Haroldo's poem, notwithstanding, similarity does not represent any privilege for the man. In Signantia quasi coelum the murder of man, proclaimed by Foucault, has already happened.

Signantia quasi coelum opens as a symphony of the uni/verse (uni/verso). Universe and verse appear identified. As the verse, the universe is a poem written by itself. Rutilant (glowing red) / last (rútilo/último): the final brightness but one with such an intensity that it illuminates everything. The opening splendor and the closing splendor are the same, the primeval explosion vibrates in the stars and in the tinkles of the bells. The poem anticipated events in the ancient epopee because the teller dominates the further stages. Where the poem was, vibrates now the chord of an explosion. The blue of the sky rounds over the temple open to those who breathe and to those who do not breathe. What kind of watch, what kind of calendar could measure universal time? Light, architecture and sound compose together the universal poem. The universal links of the poem eclipse any authorial authority.

Phanopoeia precedes logopoeia; things appear before being named by a word. Art produces itself spontaneously. The sun suns (se ensolara), it makes itself sun. During thousands of years the fish digs its image into the stone. Fossils are self-made portraits. Nature´s splendor is a theophany of signs which form texts to be heard, song, touched, tasted, seen, read. The poet, recovering medieval discussion, declares the whole naturing nature (natura naturante, natura naturans) and not the result or an external act (natura naturata). There are signs, but signs of themselves, 'erection of signs' (ereção de signos). Solar writing reigns. The sun writes. The air speaks through the trill of the birds. In opposition to Genesis, it is not the word that produces things, things, on the contrary, produce signs, seeds, semen. Poetic energy dispenses man. The abilities that operate in man do not distinguish him from the stones designing fishes in their bodies. The genius which from a romantic point of view honored men is now present even in rocks. The stoic seminal discourses (logoi spermatikoi) no doubt, return.

The phallic character of the poem, acquired from its first chord 'glande de cristal' recalls Hesiod's Theogony. In this Greek poem, Cronus, sensitive to the complaints of the Earth, his mother, attacks Uranus, his father, and mutilates him. From the amputated organ, fallen into the sea, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, is born: origin of the ordered development of the cosmos. There is evidence that this version is prior to that found in Homer (according to whom Aphrodite is a daughter of Zeus). In Homer's conception, the generating power comes from the father of gods and men. His endless marriages are a testimony of his creative power. Although Haroldo de Campos pays homage to Homer, he appears as a follower of Cronus, enemy of any power superior to the earth. In Haroldo's theophany, after the death of the gods, creative power is given to nature.

'As one who looks through the crystal/ of the time' ( como quem olha pelo cristal/ do tempo): the poem leads us to concrete objects, not only to those which we are at liberty to touch but also to those which survive suspended in the time as particles of dust in the air. 'To write on the glass/sentences of glass' (escrever no vidro/ sentenças de vidro). Hermetic texts were written on opaque materials. Interpreters interpret signs recorded on parchment, papyrus, paper. Images reflected in mirrors are there retained. In the place of mirrors, the poet elects glass to write on. Glass annuls itself as an instrument and favors things as concrete bodies. The poet wants us to consider words as things, things that lead to other things, offered more to the senses than to the intelligence.

The poet speaks of a theophany (teofania). But in context of the poem, theophany cannot be taken as the fundament. How could it be primitive, being a composed word? Primitive is phanos, derived from phanos (light, torch), prior to all beings. Theophany is related to phanopoeia, the poetical process which puts things before our eyes. If we keep in mind that etymologically theos enters the lineage of words which mean light, we are led to the conclusion that theophany is 'light from light'. Brightness generates itself everywhere. Phanos appears in a moment, it is the splendor of the inaugural explosion indefinitely repeated. It shines in the sun, it is light in the lens (luz na lente), it makes the silence sound.

In the second part of the poem, Status viatoris: entrefiguras, the sign breaks its links with things. The sign is reduced to the condition of an instrument manipulated by those who come to the newly discovered territories to make fortune. The poet thus returns to the very beginnings of Brazil 's history. The strange look cast by traders on things transforms them into merchandise. Scientists search the trees looking for marks of their age. The newcomers, depraving the world from its reality, reduce things to signs in order to decipher them. The value, be it economic or scientific, is placed beyond the concrete things which one touches. The explorers choose to know what was hidden behind the mountains. One sea opens the doors to another, one continent leads to another. The hunger to carry, to transfer, to trade is enormous. The market establishes the value in the world changed into merchandise. Nothing competes with merchandise, not even life. The instrumental word takes the place of the inaugural visibility. Waters and territory are covered with signs, signs of other signs in an infinite chain. The bodies retreat, the quest increases, poetry disappears. The symposium of Plato's intellectuals who searched the good beyond the clouds originated the symposium of the managers (o simpósio dos gerentes) who depart to enrich beyond the seas. The manager is one who knows, one who establishes values. He interprets desires and the manner to satisfy them. The manager´s discourse reminds the 'liquorous neon light' (a licorosa luz neon). The words, once perfect as the seeds, languish now enchained in instrumental discourses.

Esboço para uma nékuia (Outline for a nekyia) is the title of the third part of the poem. What does 'nekyia' mean? According to Plutarch, nekyia is a magical ceremony through which ghosts were called up and questioned about the future. Nekyia designates also the eleventh book of the Odyssey which tells the descent of Ulysses to the kingdom of the death in order to obtain from Tiresias information about the best way to Ithaca. From Homer, Ezra Pound obtained the suggestion to open his Cantos and penetrate into the realm of death in order to consult the wisdom of former generations. Haroldo works out his own 'nekyia', keeping to the path of his forerunners.

The poet links 'nekyia' to 'those-without-nostrils' at the bottom of the first page. Who are they? How are they related to nekyia? Let us investigate. In Avestan, an Indo-European language in which the Avesta was written (a sacred collection of Persian Zoroastrian texts) nasu means corpse, in Sanskrit nasyati means to perish, to disappear, in Latin neco means to kill. The four terms show a common origin. Poetical imagination induces Haroldo de Campos to include nasus (nose) in this semantic context, attaching a negative sense to the first syllable of nekyia. Conclusion: 'those-without-nostrils' are those in death, that means, all those who do not breathe the air of paradise. Those-without-nostrils lack air, lack blood, magical products which poetry gives us to live.

Were we not reading an outline, our effort to understand this one single word would not be necessary. Homer, who carefully explains, requires less attention. He knows that he addresses an audience who may at moments become distracted from his telling, therefore he repeats insistently. When we compare Homer's abundance with Haroldo's economy, we discover an enormous difference. Writing took the place of oral composition; work took the place of feast. 'Signantia' was written to be heard and read. On top of the opening page we see 'I descend' (desço) surrounded by words. The descent eventually reaches 'those-without-nostrils' in the isolate neighborhood of death at the end of the empty page.

Faceted chaos opens 'Outline for a Nekyia'. Paradise Lost by Milton had already shown a close relationship between hell and chaos. The faceted chaos sounds new. One facets diamonds, crystals, the world in which we live. Don't the scientists affirm that every chaotic happening, including the clouds, obeys an organizing system? In this poem, the faceted chaos: fragments of experience chaotically brought together in life and in lecture receive the same careful attention which lapidarists display while they cut precious stones.

Haroldo leads us to the depths of a hellish landscape where Lethe flows edged with daffodils, symbolising life. The waters of that gloomy river, visited by poets of the past, extinguish the memory of those who approach them. Haroldo does not only look for information, like Ulysses, but he also shows the poets the paths of life, taking them out of oblivion. Sousândrade, named here, a revolutionary and forgotten last century poet to whom Haroldo dedicated a whole book, is one of them.

The 'Luciferine lapse' (lapso luciferário) makes allusion to the Bible. Lucifer, the light bearer, cast out of heaven falls into the abyss. The falling Lucifer traverses the poem. Signantia is not a redemptive poem, it is a poem of the fall. Who was Lucifer before the fall? While he lived in the brightness, light effaced his personality. Lucifer only appears as an individual being when he falls. As one who falls, he is degraded to the condition of a light bearer, because it no longer belongs to him. As he falls, he becomes more and more a being of the shadows. As a luminous splinter of the primordial explosion, Lucifer falls into a falling universe. Lapse is also an undesired error, a writing error. In a lapsing world, remains a lapsing poetry. The poet is Lucifer, a gloomy light-bearer.

The outstanding visibility, based on new procedures, and the absence of subjectivity follows a tradition which goes back to Homer. Homeric epic tradition crosses that which comes from Dante. Haroldo alludes to Dante and inverts the order of his Divine Comedy, where the traveler starts the journey which leads him to the brilliant glory of the heaven in hell. Paradise, on the contrary, is the first experience of those who pass through Haroldo´s poem, which ends with a descent to the hell. The new order relocates attention from Dante´s metaphysical hopes to the earthly world.

Haroldo, who begins where Dante finishes, derives the method of beginning at the end from the Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. Machado de Assis, an earlier reader of Poe, also faces the problem of the narrative sequence. The deceased narrator of the novel 'Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas' (Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas) does not know whether he should tell the story of his life beginning with his birth or with his death, and finally decides to begin with his funeral. The choice comprehends more than just a technical decision. Haroldo, by placing the hell at the end, opposes the messianic hopes present in Brazilian texts since the baroque writings of Antônio Vieira.

The reader should not look for a teller in 'Signantia' in a traditional sense. One finds rather a story in process which counts on the cooperation of the reader. The poet follows a technique apparent in the dodecaphonic music of Webern who proposes chords which are systematically interrupted. An inattentive reading does not perceive the links between elements separated by empty spaces and by fragments of diverse origin. Spaces and words, in former times bound to precise cultural conceptions, now parade free to enter unexpected combinations. The void which scared in the past dominates. Sheherazade spoke to erase silence and death. Few words now form original constellations which cause silence to speak.

Finismundo, a última viagem

Haroldo surrenders again to the seduction of epic poetry in his poem 'Finismundo, a última viagem'. In order to preserve the reference to Finneganswake by Joyce, we could translate the title of this work, Finisworld, the last voyage. Based on Dante and on studies about Dante, Haroldo imagines that in Odysseus, the Greek name for the Latin name Ulysses, the desire to search the unknown seas is stronger than the nostalgia for his native land, his wife, and his son. With only one ship and few sailors, Odysseus traverses the forbidden columns of Hercules; he dies in the ocean and his dreams die with him. He wakes again, certainly, but in a different way. Haroldo´s hero pushes us to the other revolutionary novel by Joyce, Ulysses. Like Leopold Bloom, the second part of the brief poem presents us an urban hero attached to daily trifles. The awoken Odysseus shows a completely new personality. He approaches Joyce´s Ulysses, but, even less ambitious than Bloom, Haroldo´s urban Odysseus, satisfied with homely well-being, does not look for a son, he does not even travel through the city. He receives a postcard from paradise and desires no more.

Through the veins of the venturer of the first part, flows the blood of Columbus. Like the Genoese navigator, Haroldo´s Odysseus dies without finding the dreamed terrestrial paradise. Finisworld, remembering the Mallarmaic 'Un Coup de dés', brings together fragments of rotten poems. Nothingness devours the strong links which supported the ancient epic poems.

Galaxiás

Galaxiás, although concluded before Finisworld appeared, is a book born from the wake left by Odysseus´ ship in the sea. Haroldo has said that Galaxiás started as an epic insinuation and finished as an epiphanic insinuation. As an insinuation, the work remains uncompleted. Indeed, more so than Finisworld, Galaxiás points out the shipwreck of the epopee. Memory, plot, characters, myths, verses, chants, the entire epic arsenal, disappear with Odysseus, and a book of essays emerges, the writing about the art of writing, the epiphany of nothing. Instead of an Iliad, we are given a nihiliad (nihilíada), a macaronid (macarronídia). A hero without a project, without inner life, without a name, fights against the signs which cover emptiness in quest of the naked body of nothingness, the void page. Instead of a eldorado we have a 'eldolorous Latin-American faildorado' (eldorido feldorado latinoamericano). The rhythm of the book recalls the waves of the sea, which begin again and again going nowhere. There are no punctuation marks because they would trouble the rhythm, they would break this movement. Instead of paragraphs, there are streams supported by the insistent employ of the gerund. To write is nothing less than to produce, to translate. One reads in Galaxiás that 'white is a language which is structured as a language' (o branco é uma linguagem que se estrutura como linguagem). This definition is a paraphrase of what Jacques Lacan said of the unconscious. The white, having taken the place of Lacan´s unconscious, cannot possibly be put in the category of stable structures. The language formed by streams comes from a white that is pregnant with infinite possibilities, a dawn of unexpected possibilities.

From 'Signantia quasi coelum' to 'Galaxiás' the idea of the constitution of the world has changed. There is no longer an inaugural explosion, an origin of the universe. There is no possibility to start at the end, a choice taken for the construction of 'Signantia', because there is no longer an end. All beginning is beginning again. The beginning would push us to an authorial instance or to an unchaining happening. We are in a play without prelude, interlude or postlude. After the erasing of the cause/effect relationship, we observe phenomena which display their reaches by their proper energy:' the snow snows, the night nights, the end ends' ( a neve neva, a noite noita, o fim finda). We have in 'Signantia' lost islands in a sea of silence, points only connected by the reading experience. In 'Galaxiás' the text itself constructs its own connections. The text produces its own textuality, it textualizes.

The stream which moves in Galaxies is not the river of Heraclitus. The thinker of Ephesus required a dry and firm place from which to reflect upon the flow. The demand to reflect produced fragments. The flow of 'Galaxiás' demands the senses, not reason. Logocentric discourse fragments the whole, placing the flow in abysses which reason cannot attain. In antilogocentric thinking, the movement of the waves agitates the surface. 'Galaxiás' is a book of essays, as the narrator asserts, because nothing is defined. One hears voices proceeding from unknown speakers. No explosion happens or has happened behind these words; behind the words silence reigns, the hollow of things. Nevertheless, we are by no means rendered to an uncontrolled chaos. In spite of the dissolution of the borders, we recognize places and personalities.

The void at the bottom of the poem is not only modern nihilism, but also reflects Latin-American poverty, in contrast to previous Brazilian conceptions of a grandiose future. Conscious of our failures, we are obliged, as poets of the space in which we live, to construct what not yet exists.