|
[@] Maria Esther Maciel Home Page |
|
|
|
CONVERSATION
WITH During the past three decades,
Octavio Paz and Haroldo de Campos have maintained an intense
critical-creative dialogue in letters, essays, and translations. In
"galactic conjunction," as Rodriguez Monegal would say, and
sharing, each in his own way, a vivid interest in Mallarmé’s work and the
movements of rupture in modernism, they have stimulated by way of poetry a
nearly non-existent intellectual exchange up to then between Mexico and
Brazil.
In this interview, Haroldo de Campos deals acutely with
various themes regarding the poetic world of Paz, elucidates theoretical
questions pertinent to the contemporary debate on poetry at this turn of the
century, revisits in the light of agoridade (nowness) the main poetic
manifestations of Latin-American modernity, and discusses his own current
aesthetic restlessness. Maria
Esther – How do you place Octavio Paz in the context of
modern Hispanic-American poetry? Haroldo
de Campos – Octavio Paz has done a great service to
Latin American poetry in the Spanish language by representing an antidote to
the rhetorical poetry in the manner of Neruda. Especially since the last
Neruda, the one of the Canto General [General Song], Spanish language poetry
has turned into a vast, tedious discourse, into a facile device. The
great Neruda, the one of Residencia en la tierra [Living on Earth], is a poet
of vigorous metaphors, who coincides with the Garcia Lorca of Poeta en Nueva
York [Poet in New York]. Really, the great innovator of the neo-baroque
metaphor, of a surreal type, associating or contrasting dissonant bands of
sensibility in an extremely powerful synthesis, was Garcia Lorca in Poeta en
Neuva York. After that, a few years later, we have the first and best
Neruda, which is, in my view, the Residencia en la Tierra. M.E. – If Paz represents an anti-Neruda tradition, how do you explain his
"indulgence" for the Chilean poet? H.C. – Neruda was Paz’s poetic idol when he was younger. I don’t know
exactly their age difference, but Neruda is to Paz what João Cabral was to my
generation. Except that João Cabral is a rigorous poet, he has a
stripped-down level, and Neruda is just the opposite. Neruda in Brazil
would be the Jorge de Lima of Invenção de Orpheu [Invention of Orpheus], an
extremely uneven, extremely prolix poet. Even though Paz’s poetry is an
antidote to Nerudian poetry, he has learned from Neruda. One of the
phases of his early poetry is metaphorical. This debate, in fact,
you can follow in our exchange of letters, which is in Transblanco, when Paz,
replying to a question of mine, justifies the metaphorical phase of his
poetry. It’s when I say that there are two general lines he takes in
his poetry which interest me: the bare, synthetic Hai Kai line, and the
line of metalinguistic poetry. But there was something else in his
poetry that responded to a more common tone of Latin American poetry, which
was the genitive metaphor. There, he was a little "burned
up," "provoked" at the comments I made. My relations
with Paz were not established around amenities but around an aesthetic
questioning. As Ezra Pound said, "a civilized person is one who
answers a serious question in a serious way." I posed a serious question
to Paz and he, an extremely civilized man, answered me in a serious
way. He felt obliged to explain to me why this metaphorical trend
existed in his poetry and what tradition it responded to. what he says
about this makes perfect sense: he shows how he tried to treat metaphor
with rigor. Rigor, in fact, is mirrored in the poem-score Blanco
[White], where metaphor attains its maximum concentration, eschewing the
merely decorative to become essential metaphor. M.E. – To what extent can Octavio Paz be considered an avant-garde poet? H.C. – There is no doubt that Paz is a modern poet. He’s extremely
modern, but not properly speaking an avant-garde poet. He was never a radical
poet nor does he have the relation with tradition that, for example, a type
of avant-garde poetry has as I understand it. Brazilian avant-garde
poetry had a specific characteristic: it not only proposed a paideuma,
a set of basic authors for the production of new poetry, but also a revision
of the past, from the synchronic point of view, based on this paideuma, which
allowed this poetry to rediscover, for example, Sousândrade, who was
practically ignored by our literary historians, and to see anew Oswald de
Andrade, who was silenced by a discrediting campaign at a time when the
university environment only talked about Mário de Andrade. It was the
work of concrete poetry that reversed this expectation. Not that one
can say that there was a campaign against Mário. Whoever says this is
being inconsistent. Just look at my own case: I have an entire
book on Mário and none on Oswald. So, concrete poetry took these
radical attitudes in relation to a program for the future, or, what would be
the new poetry and the revision of the past, including the more immediate
past, which would be the past of the modernists. M.E. – But he had strong links with the French surrealist movement. H.C. – Yes, he took part in the surrealist movement and was a surrealist
to a certain extent, but he never was a surrealist by precept like the French
who followed Breton. He is a poet who uses surrealist things, but was
not a sectarian surrealist in Mexico. He was someone who respected
Breton a lot, who has a regard for surrealism that we Brazilians do not
have. Surrealism was absolutely important for Paz and for the whole
Spanish-American world, but for us it was not of much interest. In our
poetry, surrealism had a very relative interest. Here in Brazil,
perhaps the only surrealist poet (who also was not a surrealist by precept),
has been Murilo Mendes. João Cabral absorbed some aspects of the
surrealist aesthetic in his first book, Pedra do Sono [Stone of Sleep], but
without adhering to the movement’s precepts. Paz, too, although he had
been with Breton’s group in Paris, was not entirely a surrealist: he used
surrealism as a technique of metaphor, as a way of incorporating the dream
element and the erotic element. M.E. – Octavio Paz, in his studies of poetry at this turn of the century,
speaks of the crisis of modernity and the exhaustion of the creative
potential of the avant-gardes. For him, the art that stands out, far
from enrolling in the avant-garde cult of rupture and the future, inscribes
itself in an aesthetic of "nowness." How do you see this question? H.C. – I believe that the crisis of ideologies has created a crisis of
utopia and the crisis of utopia has caused a crisis of the avant-garde.
Without utopia there is no avant-garde, for the avant-garde is a collective
project and it needs a utopian horizon. Therefore, in my most recent
reflections on poetry in our time, I prefer to use the term
"post-utopian" instead of "postmodern." I think
that we are still within the space of modernity, opened up by Mallarmé, or
the in postmodern space, if we consider Baudelaire as the modern. We
have not exhausted this space. What happened was that, at a certain
point, this space was invaded by a post-utopian moment, which put the
programming of the future in crisis. So we are living in a time of a
poetry of presentness, and in this I coincide very much with Octavio
Paz. Enough programming of the future; let’s try to think
critically the poetry of the present. I, personally, have been doing
this kind of poetry, since my book Educação dos cinco sentidos [Education of
the Five Senses].
M.E. - Paz himself, even when he declared the end of utopias,
insists, in La outra voz [The Other Voice], on the idea that poetry, a
"model of cosmic brotherhood," can transform humanity in the 21st
century. Isn’t he, with this idea, holding on to a "post-utopian
utopia" and bringing back one of the beliefs of the surrealist poets? H.C. – No one totally abdicates from the utopian residues, much less from
that critical element that is a part of utopia. It’s obvious that when
one speaks of the poetry of presentness, of post-utopian poetry, this is
placed in the circumstances in which we are living. I don’t know what is
going to happen in society after the year 2000 and I don’t care to be a
soothsayer. I can only say that, just as this post-utopian circumstance
can be prolonged for many years, nothing prevents a new utopian circumstance
from emerging. For example, just as Paz thinks of the possibility of a
new society, of new bases, you can think of what the new media will lead us
to do in poetic terms. It suffices to see what a Macintosh computer
allows a poet to do today. I, for example, say this with no problem, because
I don’t work with a computer. I am a man of the word, but my brother,
who is an inter-semiotic poet by definition, who operates the musical code,
the pictorial code, as well as the verbal code, is working directly on the Macintosh.
His new book, which is coming out by Perspective, a collection of the poems
of the last ten years, is a book he has programmed from the cover to every
single poem. The poems are in fact quite complex, very well-crafted,
and include items from the Braille alphabet, to be read by touch, to colors
and more different configurations than the new electronic media allow.
In the past, in the 1950s, there were times when one thought of luminous
letters to make a poem, but that was really utopian. Not today, for we
have already projected here in São Paulo, laser-ray poems on the buildings on
Avenida Paulista. The laboratory of computer graphics of the Escola
Politécnica of USP has already made a poem with me on a huge computer they
have, which is something marvelous. The result, my crisântempo
[Chrysanthemtime] video-poem, looks like a cosmic hole appearing on the
screen. So in this way we can even think that great future
possibilities will be in evidence in terms of language, and this can even
coincide with a moment of future planning. The fact that we say
we are living in a crisis of ideologies, in a post-utopian period, doesn’t
mean that other utopian periods can’t arise in the future and other parts of
the world. M.E. - You mentioned a little earlier the work that concretism did
in terms of a synchronic revision of the literature of the past and you
recognize that Octávio Paz was also interested in this work, when he reread
and recovered, in the light of the present, the work of Sor Juana. But
it seems to me that Paz, even adopting a synchronic vision, does not ignore
the diachronic but rather places the two in relation to one another.
How do you see this notion? H.C. - In terms of the synchronic, linguistics itself, especially
Jakobson’s, says that no one is absolutely synchronic. All synchrony
has diachronic aspects, and vice-versa. For the importance of a poet
like Sousândrade to be discovered, for example, it is necessary to make a
synchronic reference, but this reference is a part of a diachronic line of
development. When Sousândrade published his first book, Harpas selvagens
[Savage Harps], in 1857, Baudelaire published Les fleurs du mal [Flowers of
Evil], and a little while later Casimiro de Abreu published his Primaveras
[Springtimes]. So, in relation to what does Sousândrade represent a
deviation from the norm? He represents the deviation from that norm
cultivated by Casimiro de Abreu, from that sentimental, almost childish,
poetry of the heart that today seems like kitsch to us, which was the poetry
of the sensibility of the time. It was against this romantic tendency
that the poetry of Sousândrade reacted, to the extent that Sílvio Romero
thought he was an unreadable poet, thought that he was formally inept.
This is because Sousândrade made poetry that retreated from the canons of
what was understood as poetry. And what was understood as poetry was
encased within the canons of a foreign Romanticism, since in Brazil there
never was an intrinsic Romanticism of the English or German type, but there
was an extrinsic type, the type with sentimental effusions and very little
attention to language games. We didn’t have a Novalis, we had a
Casimiro de Abreu; we didn’t have here, for example, the Byron of Don
Juan, but we had the Byron of conventional Romantic biography, of
satanism; we had a Castro Alves who took up the more rhetorical side of
Victor Hugo. Our poet, the one who made the great Romantic poetry in
the language, was Sousândrade. Especially when he wrote Guesa, he led
the models of the time to total disorder and was not understood by his
contemporaries. It’s clear that if we didn’t have the standards of
modern poetry, we wouldn’t have the standards to evaluate Sousândrade and we
would be on the same footing as Sílvio Romero. People who think they
are exempt from judging a writer are mistaken. Everybody has standards
for judging. People, for example, who don’t accept the standards of modernity
use Parnassian or Romantic standards for judgment. Everybody makes a
synchronic reference, except that the synchronic reference made by many
people is the one on the horizon of Olavo Bilac or Castro Alves, whereas my
synchronic reference, which incorporates the past of Brazilian literature,
has as its standard the language of Brazilian poetry since the modernism of
1922. M.E. - Would this synchronic reference that both you and Octávio Paz
make in literature be a procedure proper to the so-called poet-critics?
Leyle Perrone, in an essay on the modern writer-critics, points to this
choice of synchrony as a feature common to them all. Do you agree? H.C. – I know Leyla’s work, which is very well structured, and she’s
probably right, although it may happen that non-poets, gifted with a profound
sense of the poetic, may make the same choice. That is the case of
Jakobsen and other linguists, including the philologists like Rodrigues
Lapa. They are sensitive to the aesthetics of language, they have a
perception of the relation between sound and sense, and they value the
meaningful form of the poem. Of course, this has happened more
systematically with poets who reflect on their own poems, but we cannot
forget, for example, a Walter Benjamin, who was neither poet nor writer of
fiction, but who had both these qualities. He translated poems,
translated Baudelaire, Proust. He is a creative essayist, his essays
are quite literary. If he hadn’t lived with expressionism in Germany
and with surrealism in France, he would not have recovered German
Baroque. Benjamin also saw the Baroque from the synchronic point of
view. So much so that he projected the problem of Baroque allegory from
the viewpoint of Baudelaire. M.E. – Speaking of Walter Benjamin, I can see that there are certain
common features shared by Benjamin’s and Paz’s theories. You yourself once
said that the analogical method, infiltrated with irony, which Paz has
adopted, would be similar to the allegorical method, permeated by the
idea of ruins, which Benjamin adopts. H.C. - I have the impression there are coincidences in the manner of
each one’s thinking. Although there are points of contact between them,
both have arrived at these formulations by different paths. It is a
theme to be looked into more deeply. Benjamin is not an author present
in the work of Octavio Paz, and he doesn’t contribute to Paz’s
development. It seems to me that Paz even has a certain reserve regarding
Benjamin, in the same way he has regarding Derrida and the deconstructionist
thinkers. Which is rather intriguing, since they have a lot in common
with Paz’s thought. I think that his aversion to Derrida owes less to
Derrida than the caricature they made of Derrida. There was a kind of
reception that has deformed the French thinker in the American universities,
so much so that deconstruction is not a tendency in French criticism but in
American criticism. Derrida has a much larger audience in the United
States than in France itself. In the USA, he has an audience that has
turned epigonal, everywhere deconstructionism is talked about. It is
perhaps this fashionableness that irritates Paz a little. M.E. – When Paz choose the analogical method, it gave analogy a special
place in his reflections on poetics and the history of modern poetry.
How do you see this? H.C. – Paz really uses analogy as a tool of critical reflection and his
poetry is very well armed in terms of analogical construction. He works
with a sort of play of ying and yang, through which contraries sometimes
coincide, sometimes are resolved and then return to oppose one another.
In fact, the structure of Blanco is very much like this. That is a
particular characteristic of Paz. His essays also display a sort of
balancing of movement which resembles that of his poetry. M.E. – But he posits analogy as the basis of poetic construction; he says
that poetry is analogical by nature. This is clear when he treats
the poem as a double of the universe, as a game of universal correspondences,
an idea that is also present in the first German and English Romantics, in
Mallarmé’s project of the Great Book, in Borges’ "Library of
Babel," and even in your Galaxies... H.C. – That is quite true. The pursuing of certain fundamental
metaphors by poets really occurs. Only that, naturally, each poet
formulates this in a different way. As we discussed it in the previous
question, what Paz calls, for example, an analogical vision, Benjamin would
call an allegorical vision. They deal with the same problem but with
nuances and some differences, which shows how the different inflections of
two autonomous thinkers may suddenly meet in conclusions that are similar up
to a point. The fact is that these questions hit on certain basic
notions of modernity. I have been very concerned, perhaps because of my
Poundian heritage, with the problem of ideogrammatic writing, of the
juxtaposition of opposites. This has been very important to me, whether
from the viewpoint of critical reflection or the making of my own poetry. M.E. – And even for your translation work, hasn’t it? H.C. – Oh yes. Both for me and Paz, translation is a work of poetic
construction and a motive for theoretical reflection. A systematic
practice. In my case, even a more systematic practice than in Paz’s
case. With him, there is quite a lot of intensity in translation but it
has not come to be theorized in such a detailed way and in light of so many
different elements as is the case in my own essays. Even because of
didactic questions, I have dedicated a large number of my essays to
translation. In the post-graduate level at PUC, I gave several courses
on the poetics of translation. And every translation I do I try to
enlarge my reflections on those poetics. In fact, I am preparing a
specific book on translation, in which I assemble essays I have published
separately. It already has a title: Da transcriação: poética e
semiótica da operação tradutora [On Transcreation: the Poetics and Semiotics
of the Translation Process]. I haven’t yet been able to bring all these
dispersed texts together from a complete lack of time. I work alone,
I’m my own typist, my own file-clerk. I don’t have an office
staff. And my wife, who could always work with me, lately has had other
work of her own that doesn’t allow me to ask her for help. I don’t even
work with a word-processor yet. I don’t really want a computer, I’m
addicted to writing long-hand and on a typewriter. I write by hand even
today. M. E. - Since we have touched on the question of translation,
I’d like to know a little about your work on translating Hebrew texts.
Where does your interest in the Jewish tradition come from? H.C.
- It has a lot to do with my friends. Since the 1960s
I have been in constant contact with important Jewish intellectuals here in
São Paulo, such as Jacó Guinsberg, the director of Perspectiva, his wife, who
was the assistant of Mário Schenberg, Mário Schenberg himself, who was my
friend, Boris Schnaiderman, Regina Schnaiderman. So I have these
friendships since the Sixties. Being around Jacó, I was exposed a lot
to aspects of Hebrew culture till I decided to translate some Biblical texts,
since along with the Homeric poems they are the great paradigm of western
literature. For this work, I spent six years studying Hebrew. In
the beginning, I had one class a week, lasting two hours, and later began to
set aside one day a week, studying on my own. Nowadays, I am practically
a lay rabbi: what I have in Bibles, books on the Bible, dictionaries... M.E. - Does this interest of yours have any connection with the
order of the sacred? H.C. – No, it doesn’t, although sometimes that order concerns me. I
have a lot of respect for it, but my work is centered above all on the
poetic. Evidently, as Novalis says, "the more poetic, the
truer." So, for one who has poetic and religious sensibility, reading a
transcreation of the Bible that preserves the scriptural values of the text
is more satisfactory than reading a banal translation, which often transforms
the Biblical text into kitsch. Hebrew has a fantastic poetry. If there
is something that justifies Jakobsen’s poetic function it is the Hebrew
Bible. Jakobsen has an essay in which he thematizes Biblical poetry,
showing the great techniques of oral poetry in the Biblical scriptures:
the play of rhymes, parallelism, combinatory techniques and
paronomasias. Orality does not mean less sophistication than the written
tradition. The Bible, before being fixed in writing, had an immense
oral tradition, such that one of the names of the Hebrew Bible is not
"scripture" but "reading." It was to be read within the
community, in the synagogues. M.E. - Taking advantage of this mention of the sacred, let me ask one more
question about Octavio Paz: do you see a mystical dimension in his
work? H.C. – It is worth noting that he has a relation to the sacred through the
tantric. There is a time for him when the erotic and the sacred are very
close. It’s not accidental that within the various Buddhist traditions
what touches the poet closest is tantric Buddhism, which is expressed in
Blanco. Also, his interest in Sor Juana involves a dimension of the
sacred. The fascination Paz has for Sor Juana, this nun who was also a
philosopher, a poet, a thinker, who lived in the repressive, macho Mexican
colonial context, includes the dimension of the sacred, since this was the
dimension of the period. Now, in his poetry, I don’t see this dimension,
except, as I’ve just said, on the erotic plane. M.E. – But in theory this link with the sacred is already clearer, when,
for example, he relates poetry and myth, when he speaks of the primordial
language, the return to origins. H.C. - Oh yes, a mythical sacred, not a religious-confessional
one. That’s true. Also, the concern with Buddhism, if one can
consider Buddhism a religion. Perhaps it is more of a philosophy, an
attitude toward the world. Paz lived a long period in India and had
contact there with mythical and mystical things. In his work, this
living contact truly shows. (Trans.
by Thomas Burns) Title in Portuguese: Sobre Octavio Paz: conversa
com Haroldo de Campos. Nossa América/Nuestra América: São Paulo: Memorial da
América Latina, n. 12, 1995. |
|
TRAJETÓRIA :: LIVROS :: POEMAS :: ENSAIOS :: ENTREVISTAS :: CRÉDITOS ::
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
