Untranslation and Brazilian Visual Poetics: Augusto de Campos in Spanish America

• In Event: Brazilian Literature in a Globalized World

Abstract

How do Brazilian poetry and poetics contribute to contemporary Latin American letters? When and how is translation between Spanish and Portuguese used for aesthetic gains — and when is it unnecessary? The Concrete poetry movement that began in Brazil in the 1950s and spread internationally marked one example; Octavio Paz claimed this was the first moment Spanish American poets took note of Brazil. Augusto de Campos (born 1931, São Paulo) won the prestigious Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda in 2015; he is the first Brazilian to receive this honor from the Chilean government since the prize was established. While he is best known for his association with Concrete poetry, his work contributes to a range of poetic movements associated with Latin America including anti-poetry, protest poetry, literary translation, and more. Yet he also directly critiqued the surrealist vein in Spanish-American poetry, an aesthetic Pablo Neruda is associated with. In fact, when he translates from Spanish to Portuguese, he deliberately chooses poets who he identifies as less surrealistic than their Southern cone compatriots: Vicente Huidobro and Oliveiro Girondo. In this paper, I use these translations from Spanish and selected visual poems by Augusto de Campos to argue that his work represents a point of both conciliation and divergence between these two strains of contemporary poetics of Latin America written in Spanish and Portuguese.

Author

• Isabel C Gómez, University of California/Los Angeles