3.3 Augusto de Campos, Pignatari, Pound: more lessons in poetic re-creation
3.3 Augusto de Campos, Pignatari, Pound: more lessons in poetic re-creation
To continue our discussion on the poetic aspects of language, we shall now present some of the knowledge in this field that we have acquired from Augusto de Campos (recalling a lesson from Emerson), Décio Pignatari, and Ezra Pound and how they relate to Whitman. Emerson, like Whitman, being a poet, philosopher and critic, practiced the metalinguistic and poetic function of language to a high degree. He received tribute from the concrete poets for his masterful articulation on both levels of language, especially the metalinguistic. Whitman himself and the poets in Brazil echoed his idea of every day language as “fossil poetry.” For instance, Augusto de Campos[1] (1986, p.101) reminds us of this by quoting Emerson, when he finds solutions for a re-creation of an Omar Khayyám’s “rubai”[2] from English to Portuguese. Augusto de Campos used Edward Fitzgerald’s English translation of the Rubaiyat as his source. So, while digging up the language to find new meanings for old words, or hidden meanings in these words, like a philologist excavating “linguistic mines” in search of “fossil poetry”, he remembered Emerson’s comment on language, which is why he mentions the American poet in his book. In another section of his book O Anticrítico (The Anticritic, 1986, p.41), he presents one of his philological findings, the anagram SCIENS / NESCIS: “knowing” / “not knowing”, which indicates that one word is in the other. This pair of words was repeatedly used in the “Mandate Sermon”, inserted in Latin sentences, by Father Antonio Vieira (1608-1697), a Portuguese / Brazilian Jesuit, writer and pulpit-orator. This fact had never been noticed by anybody before.
