Galáxias

Traveling in Haroldo de Campos's Galáxias:

A Guide and Notes for the Reader

Yale University

Homage to the presence of Haroldo de Campos at Yale

and other North-American universities, 1968-1999

Long Distance Calls by Cellular Prose

Haroldo de Campos remained full of projects and of the creative energy, always so positive and exuberant as was his characteristic, up until his last moments. When in hospital, in August 2003, he proposed to his brother Augusto a joint translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with the striking suggestion that they could do it by telephone. That would have been another successful encounter of technology with philology for Haroldo, the synthesis of a syncretic and a temporal vision of literature in its most creative moments, across time, with the vanguardist techniques of our own age. That galactic-technical vision was always Haroldo’s specialty, from the “panaroma” of Finnegans Wake to the “transhelenization” of the Iliad, the final monument of his long literary career. This is the same Haroldo of the "Scribblevaganza," the title he gave to a conference that he and I organized at the University of Texas in Austin in 1981, an event in which the act of writing was meant to accelerate to galactic speeds. He dedicated the same energy to the Yale Symphosophia in 1995, where an international group of with ties to his work, poets, writers, and critics from Italy to Japan, collaborated to produce a book of commentaries on the concrete aesthetic based on their active participation (Experimental--Visual--Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since 1960, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1996). In 1999 Haroldo again read polemical texts and poetry, even in poor health, at the consecutive symposia organized at Oxford and Yale in honor of his 70 years (Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet, Oxford, 2005). Haroldo's classicism, rooted philologically in the great epic poems, in Homer, Virgil, Dante and Goethe, always found its modern expression in the theme of the voyage, where a contemporary Ulysses strolls among the cities of the world, in the guise of a Westerner whose phantasmagorical prototype can be found in Cesário Verde's poem "Sentimento de um Ocidental." As Finismundo attests, one of Haroldo's last poems, Ulysses continues his voyage until he arrives at the Brazilian coast, thus the theme of the voyage becomes one unified theme over time, from its classical origin in Homer to the spaceships, from Greek islands to contemporary cities. It is as if baroque opera were sung with concrete poetry to announce the final arrival of Ulysses at the land and literature of Brazil.

The voyage is also philological, another characteristic of Haroldo, who always worked in close contact with many different languages and literatures -- Japanese, German, English-American, French, Italian, Spanish, Spanish American, Greek, Hebrew – applying his techniques of transcreation to the greatest philological challenges: pois um livro é viagem (frag. 8). Deeply rooted in Brazil, his imagination allowed no borders between languages or literary genres. His work on the Galáxias from 1963 to 1976 (São Paulo, Ex Libris, 1984; 2^nd ed. São Paulo, 34 letras, 2004) was located, as he said, at the extreme limits of prose and poetry (“à l’extrême des limites de la poésie et de la prose”, Galaxies, La Souterraine, 1998). In the Galáxias it is the poet who travels through a gigantic phantasmagorical world, in a Dantesque and Faustian stroll, going from city to city, as in Dante's circles. In the style of James Joyce, Haroldo returns us to a geographical-linguistic-mythical sea of classical proportions, weaving new literary metamorphoses into his "verbivocovisual," or phono-morpho-syntactical net. His prime materials are the basic fables of human imagination, conceived as voyages or as metamorphoses. In the 50 fragments of Galáxias, the narrator is a Haroldo-Ulysses confronting his own dangerous journey, his world discourse, narrating a mythical autobiography by a contemporary navigator, via Ulysses and Camões. The Galáxias are a new voyage by the Ulysses-narrator, without geographical borders, where the philology of language fables meets the technology of a Brazilian traveler molto perpetuo, in paradisiacal and infernal wanderings on the Earth, through cities of God and the devil. Following the technical terms that Haroldo proposed to his brother, the Galáxias are fifty long-distance calls by cellular prose.

From the Odyssey to Brazilian Seas: "Routes, Routes, Routes, Routes"

One of the essential references for a reading of Galáxias in the context of the historical vanguards is Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922). The Joycean novel narrates the live of Dublin's citizens, with multiple allusions to the city in all its vitality and disorder for a symbolic period of 24 hours. It is structured in episodes, narrated by interior monologues, soliloquies coming from the subconscious often in a stream of consciousness. There is a diurnal/nocturnal rhythm that oscillates between esthetic emotion (stasis) and a putrid realism (kinesis), each episode carrying the marks of a certain hour of the day, scene, organ of the body, art, symbol and, above all, corresponding to an episode of the Odyssey. Joyce's scheme, today universally known thanks to Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses (New York, Vintage, 1955), was meant to help the reader perceive the novel's larger organizational units, revealing in its composition a discipline that the critic compares to Greek drama, or to the symmetry of any living organism. In his chart, Gilbert distinguishes 18 episodes, divided into three sections (3-12-3), corresponding to the morning, or Dedalus and Bloom's leaving home, to their wanderings around the city, and to their return home, now in the early morning hours. In this scheme each episode is numbered and assigned a title, taken from the corresponding episode of the Odyssey, according to the scene or place, the hour, an organ of the body, an art, a color, symbol and technique: “1. Telemachus/The Tower/8 a.m./Theology/White, Gold/Hair/Narrative (young).”

Possessing a structure reminiscent of Ulysses, the Galáxias accompany the narrator's voyage, in a subconscious open monologue, through multiple cities in an allegory of human destiny, in his mythical search for esthetic emotion and structure (stasis), in a material world governed by worthlessness and nothingness (kinesis). Traveling through microcosms toward the macrocosm, following the Joycean expression "all space in a not-shall," each fragment of Galáxias returns the reader to a larger mythical structure, originating not only in the Odyssey but in the allegorical nature of speech itself, of an occult world of symbols. By reinventing stories in the fashion of the thousand and one nights, both enchanting and fatal, the monologue in Galáxias both affirms and negates, alternately, reproducing an organic rhythm. The hero seems condemned to wander eternally among the world's cities, waiting for a utopian-esthetic liberation or for an epiphany or illumination: “…une insinuation épique se résolvant en une épiphanie.” Galaxies, 1998). In these wanderings through a purgatory of the real, the narrator finds a referential unity, parallel to the basic skeleton of the novel Ulysses, unlocked by Gilbert. To aid the reading of Galáxias, I propose a schematic design parallel to the one that Gilbert designed for Ulysses, so that the reader of Haroldo's greatest work of prose and poetry can better accompany and understand its themes and profound rhythm. The initial scheme outlays a sequence of cities and of literary references that makes up the basic material of the voyage of the narrator-poet through a world of plural signifiers. These notes are the result of seminars on the Galáxias in Brazil in 1991 at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Florianópolis) and Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Norte (Natal), under the Fulbright program, in addition to interviews with the author in São Paulo and in the U.S.

Guide to the 50 fragments of Galáxias

TITLE AREA/SPACE LITERARY-AESTHETIC REFERENCES

1. e começo aqui fable Divine Comedy

2. reza calla y trabaja Granada Lorca, António Machado on Lorca

3. multitudinous seas sea Pound, Borges, Macbeth.

4. no jornalário newspaper Dante, Paradiso

5. mire usted Córdoba Arabist

6. augenblick Stuttgart art gallery

7. sazamegoto Prague Haiku. Bashô, Buson (1716-84)

8. isto não é um livro Geneva story by Cortázar

9. açafrão Rome post card

10. ach lass sie quatschen Germany Sinagogue

11. amorini Italy Pompei

12. um avo de estória Spain San Sebastián

Roman mosaic of Cologne

13. esta é uma álealenda Paris Artaud

14. ma non dove Ravvisano, Italy text by Carducci. Sousândrade.

15. circuladô de fulô Brazil

16. um depois um Germany group of drunks at the Cologne station

17. uma volta inteira Karlsbücke, Prague Baudelaire

18. cheiro velho Rome August holiday. Cassiano Ricardo.

19. como quem escreve Lithuania bad faith

20. não tiravam o chapéu Madrid bullfight, newsmen

21. e brancusi Stuttgart Brancusi's egg

22. hier liegt Cologne Exposition. Lorca.

23. neckarstrasse Tübingen Schiller, Goethe, Sophocles, Hölderlin, Bloch

24. a liberdade Manhattan Sapho, Mondrian, Lorca, Vozniessienski,

Sousândrade

25. aquele como se chamava N. York/Mexico,D.F. Mexican roads

26. apsara Boston Kenholz painting

27. sob o chapéu San Francisco William Carlos Williams, Ferlinghetti.

28. ou uma borboleta New York Tchuang-se

29. poeta sem lira Los Angeles Ode by Píndaro, Hölderlin, Novalis, Henry Miller,

Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Bashô.

30. pulverulenda Argentina tangos of Buenos Aires, Orson Welles

31. o que mais vejo aqui fable

32. na coroa de arestas Andalucia Triptic

33. mármore ístrio Venice, Rapolla, Pound

34. calças cor de abóbora Washington, D.C. black power

35. principiava a encadear-se Washington, D.C. Galdós, Goya

36. eu sei que este papel New York Barbarella.

37. cheiro de urina Salvador, Bahia

38. o ó a palavra ó Mariana, Minas Gerais N. S. de Ó

39. circulado de violeta France Monet in Paris.

40. como quem está num navio Cluny Woman in a café, Raphael

41. tudo isto tem que ver writing Joyce

42. a criatura de outro fable Sanscrit

43. vista dall’interno Italy

44. cadavrescrito fable Rabelais

45. mais uma vez sea Joyce, polypho

46. esta mulher-livro paper Galatea

47. passatempos e matatempos fable Macunaíma and Propp

48. nudez New York Circe in New York. Rilke.

49. a dream that hath no bottom Blumenau, Desterro, Dr. Fritz Müller, Darwin, Agassiz, Pound, Oswald,

Santa Catarina Volpi, Faustus, Don Juan

50. fecho encerro fable Pasárgada. Sobolos rios. Dante. Snow White.

A Neo-Baroque Drama: Reversible mirrors

The 50 fragments of Galáxias can be read in the form of a neo-baroque drama, controlled by the technique of mirroring and of reversible forms: esta é uma álealenda ler e reler retroler como girar regirar retrogirar (frag. 13). The principles that Walter Benjamin distinguished in German drama apply to art and to the concepts in Galáxias (Ursprung des deutschen trauerspiels, Berlin, E. Rowohlt, 1928). More than contrasts, or meeting of opposites, there is a play of images and or words that return or repeat constantly, in which each affirmative/positive contains its own negative pole. Such is the respiratory rhythm that runs throughout the work in all its plural levels of meaning. As in neo-baroque drama, the libretto is the writing itself, while the fragments suggest excerpts from an endless legendary narrative or chant. As if on stage, a narrator, heard but not seen, walks through the world's cities looking for his art and his muse. The scene is allegorical and Faustian, representing a narrator navigating through an occult sea of language, always searching for a key that will open forms and end his exile, that will allow him to reach a supreme consciousness of the celestial city for which he searches, in terms that parallel Camões's mannerism in the celebrated poem of exile "Babel e Sião," through artistic means: a mente quase-íris se emparadisa neste multilivro e della doppia danza (frag. 50).

The main esthetic building blocks of the "galactic" neo-baroque drama can be represented schematically, following the same categories that Gilbert applied to Ulysses: rhythm, technique, scene, and symbol:

RHYTHM TECHNIQUE SCENE SYMBOL

1. e começo aqui

Alternating rhythm fable,

Divine Comedy

simultaneism

2. reza calla y trabaja

Allternating textual rhythm Melopea 1959, Granada

memory/experience; from Homeric Greek

silence/speech; Laitn Shakespeare

white/writing;

paradise/anti-paradise;

birth/death

Spanish landscapes.

3. multitudinous seas

Rhythm: systole, diastole dimension Red Sea The sea

memory-reading in blood,

textual Homeric sea. .

sounding, polysonorous sea

history

as movement,

covert memory

into experience

4. no jornalário

descent into inferno, satanic daily life, Newspaper

the voyage vision of paradise at the end

5. mire usted

short notes 1959, Córdoba

6. augenblick

group of old women Stuttgart

art works

art gallery almost

mythic nudity

of paintings

7. sazamegoto

whispering, Haiku, Prague stork

seduction Japonese woman with poet

literature in a train carriage

“The rains of Spring!

Dear lady driving with me here

Your whispering!”

8. isto não é um livro

News in a paper, ambiguity Geneva prostitute

between space João Pessoa underdeveloped

and time S. Francisco churches and ingenuous

9. açafrão

counterpoint eroticism Rome; post card for which

of language, Vilagiorio there cannot be

of referents museum; reproduced

sale of stolen

watches

10. ach lass sie quatschen

lace arabesque Stuttgart names of the

dead,

synagogue, tragic beauty

manuscript with names

of the dead

11. amorini

tragic-erotic Priapic Pompei evil eye;

daily trivia licentious cadavers in the

costumes museum in the

position in which

they died

12. um avo de estória

basic speech mosaic Spain green eyes of a

Roman mosaic woman-panther:

of Cologne jaguarfulguros

13. esta é uma álealenda

perfect equilibrium painting Paris French woman with

cafetan,

miscegenation miniturized biological

in a box recolonization

14. ma non dove

reflexive structures notes Ravvisano headlines of TIME,

that form “nympholveros…”

a macrostrutcure Sousândrade, old

poet and the stones

15. circuladô de fulô

Brazil

16. um depois um

moment of inferno labyrinth Cologne station group of drunks

17. uma volta inteira

reflection artificial paradises Karlsbrüke, Prague Czech film,

on socialism Congonhas “once there was a”

cat"

18. cheiro velho

youth confronting infernal images Rome Cassiano Ricardo

satisfied old person

19. como quem escreve

real/imaginary confraternization Lithuania woman with children

with the enemy; dead in the war

bad faith and young lover

20. não tiravam o chapéu

stylization description trouvé Madrid bull fights

21. e brancusi

others Parody of Stuttgart Brancusi's "Egg"

Generals in Paris/ “Famíly", old ladies of &n