OXFORD/YALE CONFERENCE IN HONOUR OF HAROLDO DE CAMPOS, BRAZILIAN POET

By Else R. P. Vieira and K. David Jackson

The Universities of Oxford and Yale will be the venues of an integrated conference in honour of the Brazilian author Haroldo de Campos on his seventieth birthday. The conference at Oxford will be conducted at Wadham College on the 13th and 14th of October and the Yale symposium at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, on the 17th, 18th and 19th of October. This joint initiative of the Center for Brazilian Studies (University of Oxford) and the WHC/Yale International and Area Studies (Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies) pays tribute to a distinguished Brazilian poet, essayist, translator and theorist, bringing together internationally renowned poets and literary scholars to discuss and debate the work of Haroldo de Campos in the context of the current critical agenda.

Haroldo de Campos (b. 1929, São Paulo) graduated in law and later completed a doctorate in literature from the Universidade de São Paulo. One of the founders of the movement of "Concrete Poetry" in São Paulo in the 1950s, Haroldo de Campos is also an essayist, translator, and theorist whose works are internationally known. He was one of the most active figures in world movements of experimental and visual poetry for over three decades, corresponding and collaborating with poets in Japan, Europe, and the Americas. In 1996 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Montreal and has since won several important prizes, among which are the Lumière UNUPADEC (Rome, 1998), the Octavio Paz Foundation prize (Mexico, 1999), and the Roger Caillois prize (France, 1999). In Brazil, his works have been awarded the Jabuti prize five times (1991, 92, 93, 94, 99). An emeritus professor of semiotics of the Catholic University of São Paulo, Campos' academic career includes visiting professorships at Yale University (1978), at the invitation of the eminent hispanist Emir Rodriguez Monegal, an Edward Laroque Tinker visiting professorship at the University of Texas at Austin (1981), as well as teaching and lecture tours in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Canada, and others. He is well known for essays expressing his view that late twentieth-century poetry is "post-Utopian". Nicknamed by German semiotician Max Bense "the locomotive of São Paulo", Haroldo de Campos' prolific career includes some 12 books of poetry, 18 of literary studies, 14 of "transcreations", as well as projects for the theatre, cinema, and plastic arts. In 1996 the Catholic University from a constellation of intellectuals including Jacques Derrida, Nobel prize winner Octavio Paz, Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and the Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto. Campos was the focus of the 1995 "Yale Symphosophia on experimental, visual, and concrete poetics", and the italian poetry journal Baldus dedicated a special issue to his works in 1996. CONCRETE POETRY In the 1950s, Haroldo and his brother Augusto de Campos, with Décio Pignatari, launched the polemical Concrete Poetry movement in Brazil. Departing from an early correspondence with Ezra Pound, the Campos brother refined their concept of a synchronic universal, from the Chinese ideogram to contemporary Brazilian prose, as well as practice of translation as criticism and invention. Attempting to unite the verbal, vocal, and visual dimensions of poetry in a poem-object, the São Paulo poets exhibited their works in galleries and published a Theory of Concrete Poetry (1964) describing their isomorphic "word-objects in space time". The Campos brothers published the journals INVENÇÃO and NOIGANDRES (now rarities), working in contact with composers of new music, plastic artists, and the vocalists who were forming the TROPICALIA movement in the mid 1960s. Schools of twentieth-century musical composition, from Webern to Stockhausen to Cage, were an important influence on their poetry, as were the geometrical and abstract painters. One of Haroldo's best-known poems, "Nasce/Morre" ["Live/Die"], became the text of a choral composition by the distinguished composer Gilberto Mendes. His visual poetry was featured in anthologies of world concrete poetry, and he continued extensive travels, lectures, and exhibits. In Xadrez de Estrelas (1976), the collected poetry representing twenty years of the Concrete movement appeared. NOVEL OF FRAGMENTS Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Haroldo de Campos was composing his great novel of prose in poetry, the Galaxias (Galaxies), which was finally published as a book of 50 full-page prose fragments in 1984. Reflecting the epics and oral sagas of the pre-classical world, the Galaxias recount the wanderings and adventures of the poet through lands, texts, and language in a mosaic consisting of torrential verbal forms and inventions. Its complete French translation was published in 1998. TRANSCREATION: TRANSLATION AS REINVENTION Translation was the Concretists's literary and cultural project, devoted to inventive authors little translated into Portuguese. they jointly translated Pound, Cummings, Dickenson, William, Dante and Joyce, Japanese haikus, Maiakovsky and Mallarme. Conceiving of his role as that of a transformer or transcreator, Campos drew on creative Brazilian language in order to "reimagine" the texts of Western tradition. At the same time, the Concretists "rediscovered" forgotten or neglected Brazilian poets of the past, from the Baroque poet Gregorio de Mattos to the bizarre romantic Sousandrade, the symbolist Kilkerry, and the modernist Oswald de Andrade. Turning increasingly to translation in the 1990s, Haroldo de Campos recently published new Portuguese versions of the Biblical books of Genesis e Ecclesiastes, classical Chinese poetry, and the first two cantos of the Illiad. CRITICAL ESSAY Haroldo de Campos is also well known as a major contributor in the press to the critical discourse on Latin American nationality, identity, and cultural autonomy through his essays on the school of "Antropofagia" ["Cannibalism"], drawn from Oswald de Andrade's 1928 "Cannibal Manifesto". Brazil as a center of cultural and literary production, rather than a periphery of passive receptors, is a tenet of Campos's influential essay, "Europe under the Sign of Devoration". He has also contributed essays on Concretist aesthetics, the theory of translation as criticism, the production of poetry in underdeveloped societies, creative and experimental writers in Brazilian and Spanish American literatures (Murilo Mendes, João Guimarães Rosa, Octavio Paz, and others), and compative literature. The national literary and cultural influence of the "Campos brothers", as they are known in Brazil, has been enormous, perhaps incalculable. Singer Caetano Veloso alludes to them in his songs, the TROPICALIA movement circulated their works to an entire generation of youths, and the writing of poetry in Brazil universally reflects Concrete techniques and materials which they promoted. Haroldo de Campos' essays, published in literary supplements of large circulation newspapers, shaped public critical debate on literary and cultural themes. At the same time, much of his poetry and essays has been translated into the major western languages and published internationally. This homage to Haroldo de Campos in England and United States recognizes his multi-lingual work, uniting many national literatures, and his devotion over fifty years as a writer to the international and comparative dimensions of Brazilian literature and Portuguese language poetry.

Suplementary Informations

Bibliografia Geral (brasileira e internacional) do movimento de poesia concreta: Kathleen McCullough. Concrete Poetry / An Annotated International Bibliography, with an index of poets and poems, The Whitston Publishing Company, Troy, New York, 1989, 1010 pp. (ISN 0-87875-332-X).

Biography included in the Marquis Who's Who in the World, 18th Edition, 2001.