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Sousândrade: The Clandestine EarthquakeAugusto de Campos & Haroldo de CamposPublished online: 02 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Augusto de Campos & Haroldo de Campos (2006) Sousândrade: The ClandestineEarthquake, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 39:2, 213-221, DOI: 10.1080/08905760601015025

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Sousandrade: The ClandestineEarthquake

Augusto de Campos and Haroldo de Campos

Translated by Antonio Sergio Bessa

Augusto de Campos (b. 1931, Sao Paulo, Brazil) and Haroldo de Campos (b.

1927; d. 2004, Sao Paulo) are known worldwide for their radical work on

concrete poetry. Very little has been disseminated, however, of their incisive

critique, since the early 1950s, of the Brazilian literary tradition. Through

essays, books, and interviews, the de Campos brothers have advocated

vigorously for a revision of this tradition and the inclusion of authors

previously derided by critics and historians as mere aberrations. The

rehabilitation of the great Romantic poet Sousandrade (Maranhao, Brazil,

1833�1902) is arguably their most important and lasting contribution in

this revisionist program. The following translation is an abridged version of

‘‘Sousandrade: O terremoto clandestino,’’ published in Re-visao de

Sousandrade, 3rd edition (Sao Paulo: Perspectiva, 2002).

An eruption of seismic proportions, one that occurred during the so-

called Second Romantic generation, has been concealed within the

panorama of Brazilian literature: the work of Joaquim de Sousa Andrade,

or Sousandrade, as the poet chose to be known*brandishing a flag of

war in the very strangeness of this agglutinated and bizarrely accented

name.

This surprising poet, who was born in 1832 in the northeastern state of

Maranhao and died there in 1902, after an adventurous life of extensive

travels around the world, did not have*nor could have had*the

audience that he deserved. Simply put, his work seems to have eluded

the frequency threshold of his contemporaries’ radar, tuned as it was to

the main streams of canonical Romanticism.

A seismic vibration beyond the acoustic curve of the time, Sousan-

drade’s work, as he himself had predicted, remained on the margin:

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 73, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2006, 213�221

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN 0890-5762 print/ISSN 1743-0666 online # 2006 Augusto de Campos. Translation # 2006 Antonio Sergio Bessa.

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/08905760601015025

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‘‘Twice I heard it said that O Guesa errante [The Errant Guesa] will be

read only fifty years from now; I was saddened*the frustration of

someone who writes fifty years before his time’’ (Memorabilia , 1877*introduction to Canto VIII of the New York edition of Guesa).

This work continues to remain on the margin, concealed there*or

almost concealed. For if, on one hand, there has been increasing curiosity

about Sousandrade in recent years; on the other, the republication of his

oeuvre has not been seriously considered: instead, it has been relegated to

the status of a mere bibliographic rarity. Sousandrade awaits the revision

of this consignment to oblivion that, once the language barrier is

overcome, will situate him in international terms among the ranks of

the pioneering poets whom we accept today as contemporaneously

valid*a poet projected beyond the comprehension of his era.

The Errant Guesa

Sousandrade’s most ambitious work, O Guesa errante (published

fragmentarily in successive editions, with varying titles: Guesa errante,

New York, 1876 and 1877; O Guesa, London, 1888) is a poem composed

of thirteen cantos, of which a few remained unfinished (Cantos VI, VII,

XII, and XIII). The poet himself affirmed that this work owed nothing to

drama, lyric, or epic, but was indebted only to narrative. It is, however,

necessary to recognize the presence in some form of all these literary

threads, which in a sense bring the work much closer to a modern

conception of the long poem. In Pound’s Cantos, for example, we identify

lyric moments in counterpoint with others that are either dramatic or

purely narrative, against the timeless backdrop of history, legend, and

myth; if Pound’s poem is an epic, it is so not on the basis of a traditional

definition of the term, but only in that it includes history: it is, thus, a

‘‘plotless epic,’’ a true epic of memory without a chronological succession

of events, but one that corresponds to a collection of points of interest. In

a sense, the same structural invention had already occurred with Guesa,

when the poet rebelled against confining his poem to an orthodox

classification and opted instead for narrative (for lack of a more exact

category), albeit a narrative without a logical-linear development*which, as in Pound’s Cantos, evolves more logically out of the realm of

memory, having as its general schema the native legend of the errant

guesa.

The poem was freely sketched according to the legend’s simple and strong nature,

and also to the author’s own nature. I understood that such poetry, whether in the

hard languages of the north or the more sonorous ones of the tropics, had to be a

poetry ‘‘that resides entirely in the thought, essence of art,’’ despite its ‘‘exterior

rude, barbarian, and fluctuating forms.’’ (Memorabilia , 1874)

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The poet invests himself in the persona of the guesa, a legendary

character garnered from the solar cults of the Muıscas Indians of

Colombia. The guesa *the name means ‘‘errant, homeless’’*was a

child robbed from his parents and destined to fulfill the mystic fate of

the sun god Bochica. Educated in the temple, at the age of ten the

guesa would emulate the sun god’s pilgrimage, which culminated in a

peregrination along the Suna road and a sacrificial ritual, at fifteen: in

a circular plaza, the adolescent guesa was tied to a column (an equinox

mark), surrounded by priests (xeques), and killed by arrows; his heart

was then taken out of his chest as an offering to the sun, and his

blood collected in sacred vases. Once the ceremony was completed, a

new astrological cycle would start with the kidnapping of a new

child*the new guesa *who would succeed the immolated victim

(Sousandrade’s sources were the section ‘‘Colombie’’ of the encyclope-

dia L’Univers and Humboldt’s Vue des Cordillieres, the texts of which

appear as epigraphs in the poem’s final edition). Sousandrade identifies

his destiny as a poet and the traces of his own biography (the

incomprehension on the part of his contemporaries and his own

family, which to some degree provided the impetus for his wanderings

around the world) with the fate of a new guesa; on the historical and

social plane, he makes an analogy between this fate and that of the

native American, sacrificed by the white conqueror. The poem moves

simultaneously on at least two levels that intersect throughout its

general body. This central dramatic theme, of biographical-legendary

motivation, does not exhaust itself in subjectivist reverie or purely

marginal alienation (although the hero is in a sense a poete maudit).

On the contrary, the new guesa, hypothesizing his destiny as an

analogy to that of the aboriginal people of the Americas destroyed or

colonized by the Europeans, transfers his non-conformism into a

reforming cosmovision , which he proposes as a hierarchy of values, a

perspective of a new American civilization. Instead of isolationism and

marginality, ‘‘ele na tempestade s’envolvia/social’’ (in the tempest he

was engaged/sociably), thus producing ‘‘o corpo de delito/do seu

tempo’’ (the corpus delicti/of his era). On the one hand, Sousandrade

condemned various forms of oppression and corruption, debunking

colonialism and satirizing the ruling classes (both nobility and clergy);

on the other, he postulated a Greek-Incan republican model, garnered

from Plato’s utopian Republic and the communitarian system of the

Incas, or even from a free interpretation of Christianity’s roots. Thus in

the texture of Guesa, moments of paradise (‘‘visoes d’ıris’’ [visions of

irises]) alternate with visions of hell, heroes, and anti-heroes. The

poem celebrates, for instance, the founders of the Inca Empire (Canto

XI) and the forefathers of the American republic (Canto X), singing

the praises of the Liberators of America and flagellating the

conquerors, monarchs, and despots. But simplistic oppositions do

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not bound the poem. In it, a dialectic movement of history is

envisioned, reflecting even on the contradictions of the Republic:

Oh! Como e triste da moral primeira,

Da Republica ao seio a corrupcao.

Ao seio de pureza*se dissera

De Cristo o corpo em decomposicao!

Oh! How sad that from the primary morality

Corruption at the Republic’s heart.

The heart of purity�it has been said

In the body of Christ decomposed!

This same corruption was to be found in the very paradigm of

Sousandrade’s era, the recently formed American Republic* ‘‘o jovem

povo de vanguarda’’ (the young people of the avant-garde)*whose revolt

against the ‘‘metropolis’’ inspired colonized people in the rest of the

hemisphere. The poem discovers in the heart of the great North American

republic the cancer that is Wall Street, investing its poetics with an

ideological vision that projects the poem fully onto the central issues of

our era.

It is interesting to register another factor of the structural modernity of

Guesa: the poem was written to reflect Sousandrade’s wanderings. The

theme of traveling is always present, and gives unity to the poem. A

transcontinental voyage, with extensions to Africa and Europe, corre-

sponds to the following schema: Cantos I to III*descent from the Andes

to the source of the Amazon river; Cantos IV and V*interludes in

Maranhao; Canto VI* journey to the royal court in Rio; Canto VII*educational sojourn in Europe and a trip to Africa (this canto remained

unfinished); Canto VIII*a new interlude in Maranhao; Canto IX*the

Antilles, Central America, the Gulf of Mexico, and the United States;

Canto X*New York and several trips across the United States; Canto

XI*the Pacific Ocean, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru; Canto

XII*along the Pacific Ocean toward the south to Argentina, the Andes

cordillera , and incursions into Bolivia and Chile; Canto XIII*the return

to Maranhao.

These voyages, completed at different times, are interconnected in one

nontemporal mental journey, feeding the poem’s context with historical

and geographical references that are mixed in with the poet-errant-guesa’s

personal interventions, reminiscences, and reflections. Maranhao (the

Quinta da Vitoria, in the Ilha de Sao Luıs) is the Ithaca of this new Ulysses

and, simultaneously, the term ‘‘estrada do Suna’’ (Suna road) stands for

the poet’s long ritual pilgrimage. The poem remained unfinished: the

solitary death of the poet*misunderstood by his contemporaries and

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relatives and a target of public ridicule*provided him, on the

biographical level, with an unwritten ending parallel to the legend.

In both its pan-American theme and its baroque qualities, Sousan-

drade’s Guesa anticipates the modern experience of the epic that Pablo

Neruda’s Canto General represents.

The ‘‘Tatuturema’’ and the ‘‘Inferno de Wall Street’’

From the point of view of versification, Guesa was shaped in great part

into a homogeneous structure: decasyllabic quartets, with crossed (abab)

or entwined (abba) rhymes. But this rigid metric arrangement does not

reign supreme: Sousandrade allows the poem a few liberties and variants,

and even a few alterations, even if only in rare moments. While these brief

and transitory passages do not affect the integrity of the poem as a whole,

simply creating small zones of distension in the solemn-savage monody of

the poet’s concept, the same cannot be said of two long and strange series

of strophes that erupt unpredictably in Cantos II and X, corresponding to

the poem’s ‘‘moments of hell.’’ More than merely a contrasting device,

these series*104 and 176 stanzas long, respectively*have autonomous

stylistic qualities, constituting two cohesive and consequent blocks on

their own. Written at least fifteen years apart*Canto II in 1858 and

Canto X in 1873*these series nevertheless share a profound interde-

pendence. Their rhythmic structure is tense and quick. In general, these

are strophes of five lines, of irregular metric varying from two to six

(Canto II) or eight (Canto X) syllables. The rhyme scheme is abccb, with

the fourth line, always short (two or three syllables), functioning as

internal rhyme, like an echo, which offers excellent deforming effects,

often expressively burlesque.

It is possible that this kind of strophe was derived from limericks, like

those in Mother Goose:

Danty baby diddy

What can a mammy do wid’ee

But sit in a lap

And give ’un a pap,

Sing danty, baby, diddy?

In ‘‘Inferno de Wall Street,’’ coincidentally, one finds a cryptic allusion to

Mother Goose, and perhaps to one of its songs, ‘‘Tom, Tom, the Piper’s

Son’’:

*So o leal, nunca o Loiola

Conquista um nobre coracao:

Vulcanico monte,

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Aqueronte . . .

‘‘Water-head?’s mother-Goose Ton’’*Tao!

(X, 91)

*Just the loyal, never Loyola

A noble heart conquers:

Volcanic mound,

Acheron . . .

‘‘Water-head?’s mother-Goose Tom-Tom!’’

This hypothesis, of course, does not exclude the affinity of Sousandrade’s

strophe with certain traditional Portuguese rhythmic schema.

In their typographic aspect, these two sections also immediately

distinguish themselves from the whole of the poem. They are printed in

a font size smaller than the rest of the text, and each strophe is preceded

by lines of prose*italicized in Canto II and printed in an even smaller

size in Canto X. Italics and capitalized words are otherwise used to

interpolate foreign words and proper names. A curious usage is the

employment of a double hyphen to indicate the intervention of a second

character in the dialogue:

(Polıticos fora e dentro)

Viva, povo, a republica,

O Cabralia feliz!

�/Cadelinha querida,

Rendida,

Sou monarco-jui . . . i . . . iz. (Risadas)

(II, 63)

(Politicians inside and out)

Long live, people, the republic,

Oh happy Cabralia!

�/Dear little bitch

Surrendered

I’m monarch-ju . . . u . . . udge (Laughter)

In terms of typography, it is hard to deny that headlines and other

compositional recourses in the press had an effect on Sousandrade.

Apropos of Canto X, he wrote, ‘‘The author has kept proper names taken

for the most part from New York newspapers and selected under the

impression they produced’’ (Memorabilia, 1877). Newspapers such as The

Sun, The New York Herald, and O Novo Mundo (The New World, edited

by Jose Carlos Rodrigues, a Brazilian for whom Sousandrade worked as

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secretary) appear as interlocutors in this canto’s ‘‘Inferno de Wall Street’’

section.

But it is not only in their exterior configuration that these two parts are

distinguished from the whole. The style, as has been noted, undergoes a

radical change. These sections are connected to the poem through its

general theme, but this theme is reworked in them through unexpected

processes and tactics. Sousandrade seems to have thought of these two

episodes as separate pieces on their own, short poetic farces correspond-

ing programmatically to the two ‘‘Walpurgis Nights’’ in Goethe’s Faust*Parts I and II, taken stylistically to another level:

Romanticos vos vi, noite bailando

Do Brocken no Amazona, antigamente.

Eis classica Farsalia em dia algente

No Hudson. Para o Guesa perlustrando.

(Canto X)

Romantics, I’ve seen ye dancing in the night

From Brocken by the Amazon, in days of yore.

Here is classical Pharsalia in glacial day

By the Hudson. Guesa stands in awe.

Goethe’s witches’ Sabbath at Mount Brocken (in the first Faust) is

restaged by Sousandrade, in the first episode (Canto II) as the

‘‘Tatuturema,’’ the dance-pandemonium of decadent Amazonian natives

corrupted by the colonizer, which involves, in its infernal spinning, real

characters from both Brazilian and North American history. And instead

of Goethe’s classic Pharsalia (Faust Part II), Sousandrade’s second

Walpurgisnacht (Canto X) presents New York, Wall Street, and all the

turmoil of the American Republic in the 1870s. There converge, via the

newspapers of the time, echoes of success, international incidents, and

sensational events, such as the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress

of India, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Paris Commune. All are mixed

into one timeless masked burlesque, in which historical or mythological

characters and events alternate and superimpose themselves on each

other, free of any logical narrative process, but juxtaposed with an

analogical, synthetic-ideogramic ordering criterion. Like a seismographer

registering the social-political convulsions of the poet’s time, the poem

communicates almost telegraphically, through nervous notations that are

extremely sensitive and of an utterly modern sensibility*capable, for

instance, of merging in a flash the proletarian movements of the Paris

Commune and the North American strikes (1877 was marked by bloody

railroad strikes that paralyzed huge companies like the Erie and

Pennsylvania (see strophe X, 2); the striker Arthur also makes an

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appearance in strophe X, 8; and strophe X, 106, alludes explicitly to

railroad strikers).

The Financial Hell

The cosmic vision in Sousandrade’s ‘‘Inferno’’ presents several points in

common with one that Ezra Pound later developed in the Cantos. Setting

aside Pound’s extravagant solutions to economic problems and his

misguided political alliances, the affinities between Sousandrade’s per-

spective and the Poundian vision of a world devoured by usury and

money idolatry, ruled by a capitalist ‘‘usurocracy,’’ are irrefutable.

For the poet of Guesa, the Stock Exchange, with its macabre frenzy of

speculations, is the symbol of a society in collapse, agitated by avidity for

money:

Para o Guesa perlustrando.

Bebe a taberna as sombras da muralha,

Malsolida, talvez, de Jerico,

Defesa contra o Indio*E s’escangalha

De Wall Street ao ruir toda New York

(Canto X, Preamble to ‘‘Inferno’’)

Guesa stands in awe.

He drinks at the tavern by the wall,

Unsolid, perhaps, of Jericho,

Defense against the Indian*and loses himself

By Wall Street as New York falls down.

As in Pound’s work, Sousandrade’s ‘‘Inferno’’ stresses the nefarious power

of money. But similarities between the two poets go beyond the concept of

a financial hell. They also share stylistic characteristics that relate to

imagist technique and synthetic-ideogramic diction: the compression of

history, the montage of colloquial and literary citations or faits divers of

the time, idiomatic potpourri, critical enumerations, and the fusion of

personae, all orchestrated in an apparently unordered style, but in reality

cohering within a well-defined hierarchy of themes and archetypes.

Much of the conversational fragmentation and atemporal journalism

that later typified Pound’s Cantos was already present in Sousandrade’s

two infernal circles. Pound defined The Cantos as a ‘‘conversation between

intelligent men,’’ and Allen Tate referred to it in 1936 as a monologue for

many voices. The same can be said of both ‘‘Tatuturema’’ and ‘‘Inferno de

Wall Street.’’ The idea of a soliloquy vanishes. The characters* like the

Poundian ‘‘masks’’*initiate the discourse, and interrupt and comple-

ment each other. Everything is presented as dialogue: single or double

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hyphens, in almost every strophe, mark the lines of the various dramatis

personae. The brief texts in prose that precede each stanza* ‘‘titles,’’ in

the author’s own terminology*function as short abstracts of each act, or

like a playwright’s marks. This is kaleidoscopic minimalist theater, where

everything changes vertiginously, as if on a rotating stage.

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