SIbilA – AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POETRY
THE LEAF LEAF The most significant recent anthologies of Brazilian poetry in English translation have been An Anthology of Twentieth Brazilian Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Bishop and Emnauel Brasil (Wesleyan University Press, 1972) and Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: 20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets, edited by Michael Palmer, Régis Bonvicino, and Nelson Ascher (Sun & Moon Press, 1997). The first anthology presents Brazilian modernism up to but not including the concetist movement of the 1950s. The second features poets such as Torquato Neto, Paulo Leminsky, and Duda Machado whose production began, for the most part, after 1970. Together, they show the vitality and variety of Brazilian poetry since roughly 1922, the year in which modernism arrived in Brazil. This new selection be Régis Bonvicino, gathered at the invitation of New American Writing, contains the best features of both collections. Beginning with long sections from three great figures of Brazilian modernism, Murilio Mendes, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, it includes the transitional generation of Paulo Leminsky and Mário Faustino, younger poets such as Horácio Costa and Josely Vianna Baptista who were born between 1951 and 1963, and even younger poets such as Antonio Moura and Tarso M. de Melo (b. 1976). The translations were done for the most part by the team of Jennifer Frota, Scott Bentley, and Marta Bentley. The beginning lines of Drummond's "This is That" reveal the complexities faced by the translator: "the facile the fossil / the missle the fissle."
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The Wall Street Inferno Written in New York in the 1870s, Canto X of the monumental verse epic O Guesa errante (Wandering Guesa) by the Brazilian poet Joaquim de Sousândrade (1833-1902), an episode also known as "The Wall Street Inferno," presents a Dantesque vision of the Gilded Age of American capitalism. Before his 14-year New York sojourn, Sousândrade, a native of Maranhão (Northeastern Brazil), had studied in Paris and traveled widely in France, Portugal, and England. Like fellow exiled Romantic poets from the previous generation, such as Gonçalves Dias, Sousândrade too addressed the question of national affirmation in his poetry, entering into a dialogue with European Romanticism. At the time, Brazil's quest for independence fueled a reaction against the Portuguese metropolis, resulting in a political transition from a monarchy to republic. The search for development models suitable for a country in the throes of modernization led Brazilians to consider, among other things, the American political and economic system, which Sousândrade came to know first-hand and critically portrayed in the "Wall Street" episode of his Guesa. The entire epic, a 350+-page poem partly inspired by Humboldt's travel writings, charts the wanderings of Guesa ("the errant one"), a mythological figure in the tradition of the Muisca Indians of Nueva Granada (Colombia). According to Muisca belief, Guesa, a young boy, is taken away from the custody of his parents and raised until age ten in the temple dedicated to Bochica, a sun divinity. From that age until 15, he roams the continent touring all the locations visited by Bochica, before being taken to his final destination, to be ritually sacrificed by the sun priests or xeques.
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THE RENAISSANCE OF 1910
— REFLECTIONS ON GUY DAVENPORT'S POETICS Again and again, in the essays collected in The Geography of the Imagination (1981), Guy Davenport refers to a “renaissance” taking place “around 1910". The clearest statement comes in the essay called "Narrative Tone and Form", reprinted from the Guy Davenport-Ronald Johnson issue (1976) of Vort, that remarkable journal founded and edited by Barry Alpert. Davenport writes: Our age is unlike any other in that its greatest works of art were constructed in one spirit and received in another. There was a Renaissance around 1910 in which the nature of all the arts changed. By 1916 this springtime was blighted by the World War, the tragic effects of which cannot be overestimated. Nor can any understanding be achieved of twentieth-century art if the work under consideration is not kept against the background of the war which extinguished European culture. . . . Accuracy in such matters being impossible, we can say nevertheless that the brilliant experimental period in twentieth-century art was stopped short in 1916. Charles Ives had written his best music by then; Picasso had become Picasso; Pound, Pound; Joyce, Joyce. Except for individual talents, already in development before 1916, moving on to full maturity, the century was over in its sixteenth year. Because of this collapse (which may yet prove to be a long interruption), the architectonic masters of our time have suffered critical neglect or abuse, and if admired are admired for anything but the structural innovations of their work.
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THREE POEMS BY CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE POEM OF SEVEN FACES When I was born, a twisted angel, The houses spy on men The streetcar passes by full of legs: The man behind the mustache My Lord, why did you abandon me World, world, vast world, I shouldn't tell you
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Poetry and Contingency: Within a Timeless Moment of Barbaric Thought Kant thought he was honoring art when among the predicates of beauty he emphasized and gave prominence to those which established the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universality. This is not the place to inquire whether this was essentially a mistake; all I wish to underline is that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the “spectator,” and unconsciously introduced the “spectator” into the concept “beautiful.” It would not have been so bad if this “spectator” had at least been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of beauty - namely as a great personal fact and experience, as an abundance of vivid authentic experiences, desires, surprises, and delights in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear that the reverse has always been the case; and so they have offered us, from the beginning, definitions in which, as in Kant’s famous definition of the beautiful, a lack of any refined first-hand experience reposes in the shape of a fat worm of error. “That is beautiful,” said Kant, “which gives us pleasure without interest.” Without interest! Compare with this definition one framed by a genuine “spectator” and artist - Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. At any rate he rejected and repudiated the one point about the aesthetic condition which Kant had stressed: le désinteressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?
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Anthropophagous [Anthropophagic] Manifesto Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. ________________ The world’s one and only law. Masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. ________________ Tupi, or not Tupi that is the question. ________________ Against all catechizations. And against the mother of the Gracchi. ________________ I am only interested in what is not mine. Law of man. Law of the anthropophagus.
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In the Middle of the Way
In the Middle of the Way In the middle of the way was a stone Translation: Charles Bernstein
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BURN THE DOLLARS FOK THE BUSH
But THE BUSH aggression against democracy, the American people, the peoples of the world and the environment started even before the son, with the father. In 1991 we were jailed along with many others in San Francisco for protesting, for voicing our outrage at Bush Sr.’s ‘Gulf War’ excuse to steal petroleum for his family and cohorts. We took to the streets in thousands: Not in Our Name—No Blood For Oil! Nonetheless we were jailed. Crimes against humanity and the environment for the sake of profit is, apparently, a Bush family value.
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Poetic Tales for Nunca’s Gazes Francisco Rodrigues da Silva, 24, who invented for himself the artistic nickname Nunca [“Never”], started producing graffiti in Itaquera, a poor neighborhood of São Paulo, over a decade ago. He was raised by an aunt from age six until 12, because his mother, Ms. Rubenita, lived in Italy for six years, where she worked as housemaid for an Italian family. He only met his father in the beginning of the 90’s. In 1997, Nunca moved to Cambuci, the middle-class district of São Paulo where he lived and kept his studio. He took part in group exhibits at Triângulo Gallery in 2005, at Fortes Vilaça in 2006 (alongside Adriana Varejão and Ernesto Neto, among others), at the AfroBrasil Museum, and in Greece. He also had an individual show at the Modern Art Museum of São Paulo as part of the Projeto Parede [“Wall Project”] in 2006.
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The Mystic Big Bang: on Haroldo de Campos’s A MÁquina do Mundo Repensada 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.
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WORLD MAP OF PORTUGUESE
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We are in exile. The fascist dictatorship, THE BUSH, of the United States has forced us to into exile. In the year 2000 it was the first time in the history of the U.S. that a person assumed power of the nation AGAINST THE WILL OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. When a person assumes power against the will of its people, this is defined as a dictatorship. In that election, the majority voted for the other candidate. I tell my ESL students this. They are confused by the Electoral College—it doesn’t seem very democratic to them. Where they live, in Brazil, each person has a vote that weighs equally to the vote of his neighbor. One person, one vote. This power of the people—this respect for their will is the basis of democracy. My children know this. My students know this. It is not difficult to understand. 
