Despite Aristotle's well-known critique of artistic genres interested in scientific matters, which the philosopher deemed as not conducive to the imitation of action, there is no doubt that science --cosmography in particular—has since remained in the sight of poets, with Dante (1265-1321), undoubtedly, as the paradigmatic example. During the Renaissance cosmography was even regarded as an essential part of the encyclopedic knowledge assumed in the higher intellects that tackled the major poetic genres.

In the 17th century, there was even a scientific poetry genre that Guillaume Colletet (1598-1659) termed "poésie naturelle." In his Traité de la Poésie Morale et Sententieuse (Treatise on Moral and Sententious Poetry, 1658), he wrote: "Nature poetry is the poetry that deals with everything in nature, celestial bodies as well as elementary and sublunar bodies." Haroldo de Campos's A Máquina do Mundo Repensada (The World Machine Reconsidered) inscribes itself in this long and fertile tradition.

A Technique Crackerjack

A Máquina is a long poem with 152 stanzas and a single-line coda, entirely composed in "terza rima," the type of tercet made famous by Dante in the Divine Comedy. As it is well-known, the poem is composed of decasyllables with an scheme aba/bcb... nxn/n rhyme scheme, whose main virtues are the continuous forward movement of rhyme –a pattern that in turn creates expectations for its conclusion in the following stanza– and the strong logical punctuation of each one. This trump is also its main risk: if the stanzaic divisions fail to correspond to such logical divisions, the tercet may lose its effect, becoming a mere graphic arrangement determined by the rhyme. In other words, "terza rima" is a highly technical form that works only in the hands of a crackerjack; and Haroldo de Campos is obviously one of them.

The title leaves no doubt that the poem is an explicit commentary on the allegory of the "world machine," as elaborated in the poems of Dante, Luís de Camões (1524/5-80), and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-87) – a commentary that is not meant as a mere interpretation of content, but rather as an appropriation of these poets' diction.

In this sense, Dante is present in the entire structure of the poem; Camões appears in numerous lines such as "royal/mandate in the frightful ocean the route" (11); "and advanced knowledge that all beings governs"(13); "in the factory and in the mill the human people"(14); "it is god but what god is no one knows"(123); Drummond also turns up in lines such as "incuriously escaped and the plainsong" (35); "dry path under the dark lead/sky " (34); and many others. These are not the only poets that breathe in this new poem by Haroldo de Campos; for those with a taste for the conceit and Spanish "conceptismo," there is Góngora in "One was lasciviousness and the other (red/of blood the eye)"(5); "before jaguar that and this"(2.1); and at least one excellent incongruous metaphor like "magical red lantern"(52) in reference to Newton's proverbial apple.

There is also, very clearly, a little of João Cabral  de Melo Neto "in this hinterland – more arduous than forest"(2) and even something of Guimarães Rosa's vocabulary in "of footpaths as if they/causing disorder"(3), "demonize"(137), apart from many other, less recurrent authors.

Emulation of the Comedy

The main design of the poem emulates the tripartite scheme of the Divine Comedy, which should be kept in mind in order to understand de Campos's poetic refashioning. At the beginning of the first part, the "Inferno," Dante placed three animals that prevented him from following the straight path and forced him into the dark dense forest: the panther (a fast animal with "gaietta pelle," or spotted skin, usually a reference to the beauty of women seen as the cause of sensuousness and lasciviousness); the lion (a typical symbol of pride and of desire for power and control); and the wolf (thin and insatiable, representing the vices of greed and covetousness). Therefore, the animals in Dante, which lead people away from Christian life, represent the vices associated with "fortune": beauty, power, and riches. In "Purgatory," while paying for his venial sins, Dante had the vision of three women: a red-haired one, a green one, and a white one, who represent the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity, respectively; they are then joined by the cardinal virtues: justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. Finally, in the third part, "Paradise," by intermediary of his beloved Beatrice, who is also his natural participation in God, he visualizes all the levels of the mystical ascent to the ecstatic "raptus," which empty words can no longer describe.

De Campos's poem mirrors this outline in its three cantos: the first, an allusion to the "Ptolemaic cycle," which contains 40 stanzas; the second, dedicated to the "account" of the evolution of physics from Galileo to Einstein, with 39 stanzas; and the third and last, which describes the "birth of the cosmos" or, more specifically, the big bang theory, takes up almost half of the poem, with 73 stanzas and a single-verse coda. Dante's three animals also appear at the beginning of the canto, forcing him to take the path of the "hinterland" ("more arduous than the forest/in its dealings").

In the third canto, however, instead of women, he sees "3 stars"(red, white, and black), which announce the "gift" or "stigma" (105) of "incurable reflection " (105); thus, it is easy to see that the theological virtues, essentially mystical, become exclusively intellectual here even though they can generate an excess such as the one that leads to an impossible search for "hair on egg" or "horn on the head/of the horse" (106).

The poem articulates a discourse about "the enigma" of the universe on the threshold of the "third millennium" " (6; 41), which at the same time constitutes the twilight of a life since the poet writes now, at the "age of 70" (5; 89), twice the age of Dante when finding himself "nel mezzo del cammin," away from the "diritta via." In contrast to Dante's fear of life after death and removed from celestial glory, the contemporary poet attempts to represent his "doubt" about the enigma of the cosmos, under the sign of "acedia" (7), understood, simultaneously as a boredom with spiritual matters and a profound melancholy or sadness.

A New Cosmophysics

Apparently confusing the enigma of the origin of the universe and the poet's personal path; the poem intends to convey a "mystification" of the "self" (6) while attempting to "unravel the dilemma" (42), without implying any specific existential or psychological interest in its development. The poet is above all criticized as a creator of eloquent analogies capable of describing the origin of the world according to a "new cosmophysics" (41) and not as someone endowed with special personality. Of his personal traits, if any, there is only a declared agnosticism and a certain desire for courage or bravery (9) vis-à-vis the common challenge of the beginning and the end. There is an explicit reference to Camões here, and it reveals that, strictly speaking,  "bravery," rather than being a personal quality, points to the elevated tone the composition aspires to. It also becomes evident that it is precisely the virtue of courage that, according to the poem, Einstain lacks when he shrinks away from indeterminacy and the uncertainty principle (72), which he himself helped to formulate, preferring instead to become a kind of "Spinoza" that repels the "insurgency" of theory against the Creator (79).

This "paradoxical" (80) point in which the creator is not sufficiently rebellious marks the middle of the poem and opens the third canto. It signals the decisive moment of separation between what is proposed simply as "prose" and the "account of losing one's way" (81) in relation to the evolution of physics and the "birth" (81) that follows. That is, while the great scientist Einstein recoils from the possibilities of his own game, the poet de Campos, on the other hand, pushes ahead and seeks to "rise to the lookout" – such as Dante in "Paradise," searching for the final levels of his mystical ascent– where he can "unveil" the "birth of the cosmos" (81). This "first nexus" is basically connected with the big bang (84) and other parts of the vocabulary – and of the collection of popular anecdotes of contemporary cosmophysics.: "God does play dice" (67; 109). From then on, to perform his unavoidable "destiny" of reflection, the poet summons a new beast: the "lynx," whose sharp eyesight aims at penetrating the most complex enigmas. In a nutshell, this could be the plot of The World Machine Reconsidered.

In a nutshell too, I think the poem raises two main issues. The first is related to the effective possibility of writing poetry in high or grave register in a de-essentialized, agnostic present, in which, therefore, there is no place for the intellectual God of Dante nor for the universal virtues of Camões's aristocracy. How can one even consider the "asceticism of agnosticism," as the poem insists (148.3)? How can one dream about an "epic" adequately corresponding to the "beyond of the beyond" (99)?

At this point, it seems appropriate to recall Carlos Drummond de Andrade, whose place in relation to the fundamental allegory of the poem is particularly useful in the attempt to explain this issue. Ultimately, what Drummond's version of the "world machine" radically confirms is the idea that in a debased, banal world, one restricted to the narrow limits of a commodity, there is no room for any form of the sublime, not even that of simple knowledge, which exists and has an effect only as the feeling of what has been irretrievably lost: "While I, reckoning what I had lost/ I walked slowly, dangling my arms". Or, in the truly faithful version of de Campos's poem: "incuriously he fled and the plainsong/of his train of living went on ruminating/along the road of mines sober ground"(35). Exactly: in a world of ruminating matter and "plainsong," how can one believe that the "epic" (99.1) or the "birth" (81; 114) is still plausible rather than farcical?

A Naïve Vision

A second issue raised by the reading of the poem is that of the meaning produced by the archaizing diction of the Dante's "terza rima" as an analogy of contemporary science. Here too the poem by Haroldo de Campos operates in the opposite direction of Dante's, which takes the old and familiar Ptolemaic space as an allegory of and a concordance to the hierarchical structure of the scholasticism of his time. De Campos's poem stands in an even starker contrast to Camões's composition, which takes what in his time was already an outdated science and transforms it into allegory through ingenuity and erotic fiction in order to demonstrate the value of the humanist poem as the final cause of heroic action.

It becomes clear, then, how in de Campos everything happens in a different way because his poem deals with recent or brand-new physics theories articulated in a distinctly archaic style. The semantic effect resulting from this peculiar intersection of times and traditions (the third millennium as seen from the perspective of the proto-Renaissance), curiously, appears rather like an old or naïve vision of science, which fantasizes or undoes the present, instead of an injection of quantum physics' ultra-post-modernity into de Campos's poetry.

A third issue emerges from these two: Contemporary cosmology, unfamiliar to lay readers, reread through the analogy of a learned literary tradition, whose refinement is equally specialized, produces a double hermeneutic restriction. If it is true that Haroldo de Campos's poem can be read as an apology for knowledge and for the contemporary world, which would grant it a certain Enlightenment qualities, on the other hand, is highly technical, coded, and allusive, so what is disclosed is not so much knowledge, as the difficulty of accessing it; not so much science, as a mystery for the initiates who are able to control it.

The above becomes particularly evident in the passage in which the poet learns about the meaning of the term "neutrino" by means of the "vivid/transfinite blue green eye" of the physicist Mário Schenberg (128; 129), who plays "malgré lui" the role of Beatrice, whose gaze, fixed on the Sun, guides the poet to follow the same route and receive the divine influx.

Chosen Characters

But since here there is no God but rather agnosticism, nor does science exist without a highly restricted access, the epic or birth, the terrible rehearsed movement of the sublime, adjusts or is reduced to a chronicle of chosen characters that nurture a friendship.

In this context, it may be said that the poem initially resembles a panegyric to the wise, to whom it is offered by their merit as an homage (136). However, in this case, I wonder, incuriously and with dangling arms, whether what the difficult enigma of the future proposes is, after all, nothing more than praise for the authority that sanctions the various areas of knowledge. Perhaps discouraged by this, which is quite realistic and very likely to happen, I select as my favorite stanza the coda – "The nexus the nexus the nexus the nexus the nex (153) – in which the sudden Latin of the last word (nex: death) unties the "knot," the ultimate meaning of the alleged mystery, in the aridity of ruins.

Alcir Pécora is Professor of Literature at Universidade Estadual de Campinas and the author, amongo others, of Teatro do Sacramento (Published by Edusp/ Unicamp) and co-diretor of Sibila.

Translated into English by Odile Cisneros