Galáxias by Haroldo de Campos, translated by Odile Cisneros (Ugly Duckling Presse, May 2024)

Despite an international reputation, admirers including Octavio Paz, Umberto Eco and Jacques Derrida, and an enduring influence on popular music in Brazil and beyond, the poet Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003) is still mostly unknown to readers outside Brazil. This should not be the case. The behemoths of the Latin American vanguard writing in Spanish — from Borges to Vallejo to Neruda and Mistral, Cabrera Infante and Cortazar to Bolaño and Piglia, Schweblin and Zambra — are names of literary repute that, if not well-known in general, are at least familiar among the cognoscenti and half-wise casual. That’s not the case for the luminaries of Brazilian literature, of which de Campos is a modern exemplar, and it’s a shame. Bursting onto the scene in his early 20s and at work until the day he died, Haroldo de Campos both rebelled against and furthered a modern Brazilian poetry vital as blood and distinct from the neighboring Hispanophone Modernisms that developed elsewhere on the continent. You need to listen closely if you want to hear, because in de Campos is the subtle music of the beginning of a universe.

Haroldo Eurico Browne de Campos was born in São Paulo, Brazil — the city he would call home for the rest of his life — on August 19, 1929. His brother and literary partner Augusto was born two years later on February 14, 1931, and after receiving a law degree from the University of São Paulo in 1952, Haroldo quickly gave up the law and gave his life over to literature. He was still young when he became a star: in 1953, the de Campos brothers, along with their confrère Décio Pignatari, formed the Noigandres group, a trio of enfants terribles that took its moniker from a nonce word that is the topic of a sort of dialogue between Ezra Pound and philologist Emil Lévy in one of Pound’s Cantos — a word no one on hearing can understand or explain: a word that must be read.

Noigandres wasn’t just a byword for poetic obscurantism. Taking their cue from Pound, the de Campos brothers and Pignatari tried to “make it new” again, this time in Brazil. As Mary Ellen Solt has written, “[t]he name noigandres was both related to the world heritage of poems and impossible for the literary experts to define.” (Marjorie Perloff discusses this more in-depth in her book Original Genius: Pound knew Lévy had deciphered the word, finding that noigandres was a Provençal compound from enoi — ennui — and gandir — to ward off or to remove — that probably referred to a flower that could drive away ennui, but Pound left the philologist stumped in Canto 20’s anecdote.) Noigandres, then, was a perfect name for a group of young poets in their time and place: Brazil — Terra nova — in the middle of the twentieth century.

With manifestos and poems declaring what Odile Cisneros calls “the closure of the historical cycle of verse,” the Noigandres poets ascended into the Brazilian cultural imagination over the 1950s. As in the United States and Western Europe, the decade of the 1950s was a post-war cultural modernization project for Brazil: bossa nova was emerging from Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana neighborhood and storming the airwaves, and after the suicide of former dictator and elected president Getúlio Vargas in August 1954, postwar economic and baby booms nonetheless created a sense of good times. The decade’s advances culminated in a concrete symbol of the change: in 1960, the capital was moved from ancient and baroque Rio de Janeiro to the planned city of Brasilia in the country’s central highlands, full of wide boulevards, parks and plazas and the stark modern architecture of Oscar Niemeyer. Brazil, not for the last time, had announced its arrival on the scene.

It was in this decade of modernization that the Noigandres poets published their manifesto, “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” outlining the principles of a new kind of poetry: concretismo. As articulated in the “Pilot Plan,” concretismo emphasized the “verbicovisual” (i.e., verbal, vocal, and visual) aspects of poetry, where the layout and typographical arrangement of words on the page were as significant as the semantic content of the text. These poems were meant to be heard, yes, but also seen and otherwise sensed. They argued for a kind of poetry that was radically objective and non-discursive, leaning into the physical aspects of language — its sounds, letters and visual form — rather than relying on semantic meaning alone. Concrete kinds of poetry of course predated concretismo, which the Noigandres poets actively acknowledged in electing to find a lineage in Mallarmé, Pound, and Joyce (not to mention composers like Webern and Stockhausen and painters like Mondrian). But the emergence of concretismo changed Brazilian letters, joining its most eminent makers to the international avant-garde movements undertaking similar projects. Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari were not just important in Brazil: de Campos had established himself as a world force in literature. Over the next decades, his reputation was cemented. His biography was included in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1997, and in 1999, institutions like Yale and Oxford were organizing conferences about his work in honor of his 70th birthday.

But if de Campos is known at all abroad for concretismo, it’s important to recognize that was one facet of the man’s career. As Beckett was both a High Modernist and an alleged Postmodernist, moving between movements like an arc through a circle, de Campos was both Concrete and Post-Concrete. He was voluminous, compendious: a poet, translator, reformer, educator, but never an arbiter of a sect or school. De Campos had one church, and it was art.

After a 1960s trip to the northeast of Brazil impelled the poet to rediscover and reclaim what he called Brazil’s “mutidevouring baroque-ism,” the minimalist style of de Campos’ concrete phase soon developed into its contrary, a lapidary maximalism rooted in the baroque tendencies latent in the Brazilian poetic tradition and the man himself. (One of his great works of rediscovery was the anthology/recovery of poems by the 19th-century Brazilian Gregorio de Matos in Sequestration of the Baroque). This swerve from one formal extreme to another was not abrupt or reactionary. It was a natural evolution for de Campos the poet because of de Campos the translator.

Key to the development of de Campos poetic universe is his theory of translation. The first thing to understand is that de Campos didn’t believe in just translation: he believed in transcreation (“transcreação”). Of course Robert Frost said poetry is “what is lost in translation,” and that’s true: there is so much beauty lost when a relic is carried from one language to another. But for de Campos, translation wasn’t mere loss; it was possibility for rebirth, renewal and renovation. As Roland Greene wrote, “translation became an increasingly transgressive exercise for de Campos, one that allowed him access to new languages and historical periods.”

This was outlined by de Campos himself in a text originally written in 1962, “Translation as Creation and Criticism.” He has a vision of translation as a collaborative, critical and above all creative act. “Once we admit, in principle,” de Campos wrote, “the thesis of the impossibility of translating ‘creative texts,’ it seems that we may also admit, in principle, the corollary of this thesis, the possibility of re-creating the texts. The texts may exist, then […] in two languages and as two bodies of autonomous aesthetic information[.]” Later, he writes: “[w]e may say, then, that every translation of a creative text will always be a ‘re-creation,’ a parallel and autonomous, although reciprocal, translation — ‘transcreation.’” This word and what it represented — translation + creation = transcreation — would be the lodestar for de Campos and his brother, guiding them as they brought over from Europe and the Far East many key texts into Portuguese, and within their own language, recovered forgotten or forgone poets like Gregório de Matos and Sousândrade. The de Campos brothers like a tugboat hauled the large, abandoned hulk of European culture to the New World, straight to Brazil.

At the same time, Haroldo was beginning a new and perhaps related kind of writing that would take him the next twenty years to complete. This new form would begin to appear in 1963: e aqui começo, de Campos wrote: and here I begin. This was the beginning of his Galáxias, a work that, completed in 1976 and only published as a whole in 1983, fulfills de Campos’ dreams of what Odile Cisneros calls “a global literature that is ludic, combinatory, multilingual, and hybrid.”

Part poem, part travelogue, part vision and entirely original in scope and execution, the Galáxias is both singular and polyvalent, full of voices and languages and metalingual wordplay that cohere into something that would not seem possible had it not been written. Amassing forms of information, lexical and historical and otherwise, from many languages over many years, de Campos had prepared himself to create a singular literary artefact, and he did. Galáxias is a work that is indelibly his; his genius, made of many, is omnipresent but not determinative, guiding without pushing. With de Campos always there in the writing, it’s a tricky business to channel his sui generis voice. The book does not just resist translation but refutes and refuses it, which makes it even more unbelievable that Odile Cisneros has written an English Galáxias for our times.

Cisneros succeeds in this because she does not repel the presence of de Campos in the writing but invites him into English and collaborates with him in an act of transcreation. Deftly navigating the poles of bootlicking homage and heedless invention, Cisneros conserves the original’s polysemous nature in a form that signifies to global English-speaking audiences. And American English, the clattering hypertongue of the twenty-first century, is a good vehicle to explore the limits of de Campos’ art.

To do this, Cisneros told me, it wasn’t just a matter of fidelity to either the semantics or the sound, but of a middle path to find what music English could make of the Galáxias. Cisneros is playing with the sound of the target language to mimic or see what effect the text has on the target audience without reproducing, or attempting to reproduce, the same thing.

You can see how Cisneros’s English parallels and re-creates the Portuguese of de Campos from the start. e começo aqui e meço aqui este começo e recomeço e remeço e arremesso, de Campos wrote. Like a good epic (and like Ezra Pound’s Cantos), de Campos’s begins in media res with the word “and.” From the beginning, then, there is conjunction. It echoes in the Portuguese, too, which can be seen just by looking at the line: there are five instances of the word “and,” and that slight Portuguese vowel inaugurates a forward momentum — a narrating echo — that is at the heart of the Galáxias.

Cisneros catches the tone there and through the line: “and here I begin I spin here the beguine I respin and begin.” Here Cisneros weaves meaning from a tradition of sound unique to English. Going back a thousand-odd years to Beowulf and the bards of Old English, a certain rugged assonance has been the heritage and heart of English verse, the energy that propels the poem. For as much as the nasalized -in ending is repeated in Cisneros’ English (literalizing a sort of inwardness to the book), it mirrors and parallels de Campos’s use of the -ço first person present ending of the Portuguese verbs. Wisely, Cisneros does not try to reproduce the same sounds. Instead, she consistently finds the just Anglo-Saxon analogue for the Portuguese original. Sometimes it’s just a phrase or word, as when she renders na minima unha, “the smallest [finger]nail,” as the suitably echoic “incey wince.” Sometimes it’s the sound of an entire line: where de Campos repeats the word and five times in that first line, Cisneros omits the conjunction and substitutes “I” to create a parallel sense of recursion. And sometimes it’s in the cultural references of the sounds: she alludes to the 1935 Cole Porter classic “Begin the Beguine” when she inserts the name of the dance in the first line, an allusion to the walls between high and low culture that de Campos was breaking in his poems. The tone is wry, world-weary and world-loving. It’s all baroque but somehow light.

Tone, in turn, must mean music, and whether the Galáxias is prose or poetry, neither or both, the book is suffused with a music for which Cisneros readily discovers an English twin. Music, in the end, is what poetry is, and that is the universe where we can find the Galáxias. Robert Alter has observed that “poetry is quintessentially the mode of expression in which the surface is the depth.” Surface mattered to de Campos during Concretismo, and there’s a throughline from the reverence for vision in those early world-making days to the way that the Galáxias can communicate before it’s understood. There’s no punctuation, but that surface ambiguity is an invitation for the reader to find herself in the poem. And it must be a poem, or something like it: Cisneros argues that the work is poetry, and she points to both the left-justified layout of the lines and the heavy enjambment of the line breaks as two clues supporting that. And truly there is a vital energy in the punctuated lines of the Galáxias that pulls the word and the reader (or listener) forward through the poem.

But then, the mere appearance of the blocks of text in the book also implies a kind of continuity that most readers will recognize as the bailiwick of prose. The narrative energy and absence of a singular style or meter, along with the necessary stop-and-start that comes with glossing multiple languages brushing up against each other, point towards prose. There is a narrative, too, to this polyphonic travelogue, and you can look past the wordplay and find that story in the book.

Maybe the question of form is missing the point: a galaxy, of course, assumes a recognizable form only from a certain human perspective, and is otherwise beyond our fathoming. The same can be said of de Campos’ work, which, in this book and beyond, points towards a reality too rich to countenance. He had seen the radiance, perhaps, and that luminous writing at the heart of the Galáxias testifies to the writer’s inward light.

acts of translation: Makings of Americans: the Galaxies of Haroldo de Campos was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.