Campos, Haroldo: Galáxias

Ugly Duckling Presse, paperback

Publication Date: May 1, 2024

Translator: Odile Cisneros

Publisher Marketing: Begun in 1963 and only published in its final form in 1984, Galáxias is a sui generis work. As Haroldo de Campos himself wrote: "An audiovideotext, a videotextgame, the Galáxias situate themselves on the border between prose and poetry. In this kaleidoscopic book, there's an epic, narrative gesture—mini-stories that come together and dissolve like the 'suspense' of a detective novel…but the image remains, the vision or calling of the epiphanic." A series of 50 "galactic cantos"—in homage to both Dante and Pound—de Campos likewise follows James Joyce's cue in conceiving of Galáxias as a "defense and illustration" of the Portuguese language and its poetic possibilities. The text incorporates literary allusion, citation, and words and phrases in at least a dozen languages, making Galáxias a formidable experiment in polyglot poetry. Galáxias charts the literal and literary journeys de Campos undertook from the early 1950s on. Arguably his chief poetic accomplishment, Galáxias is also a landmark in world avant-garde poetics. Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003) played a pivotal role not only in Brazilian and Latin American culture, but also in the avant-garde at large. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Campos was barely in his twenties when he founded the concrete poetry movement alongside his brother Augusto de Campos and their friend Décio Pignatari, thus revolutionizing poetry and placing Brazil on the map of literary experimentalism for the first time. Over the years, his writing evolved in different directions, including the experimental prose of Galáxias. Parallel to his creative efforts, Campos republished long-forgotten poets, such as the Romantic Joaquim de Sousândrade and the modernist Oswald de Andrade. With Augusto and Décio, he translated modernist and world literature including Joyce, Mayakovski, Pound, medieval troubadours, Dante, Chinese classical poetry, Japanese Noh plays, Goethe, Mallarmé, Biblical texts, and Homer, among others. Campos produced a complex oeuvre of extreme global and temporal breadth gathered in more than thirty single-authored and collaborative volumes. He was admired by international figures such as Octavio Paz, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Roman Jakobson, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Derrida. Campos received numerous prestigious distinctions, including the Jabuti Prize (Brazil), the Octavio Paz Prize (México), the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France), the Prix Roger Caillois (France), and an honorary doctorate from Université de Montréal (Canada). PRAISE "The important Brazilian poet-translator-theorist Haroldo de Campos's book-length poem Galáxias (1963–84) is surely one of the great poems of the second half of the twentieth-century—a postmodern 'concrete prose' response to Campos's modernist master Ezra Pound. Its 50 'galactic' cantos, each one part lyric, part narrative, rich in allusive material and multilingual phrasing, comprise a dense network of poetic effects, even as they also tell a buried story about Haroldo's travels in unknown lands. Translating the Galáxias, with their elaborate word play and complex echo structure would seem almost impossible. But Odile Cisneros has done it and done it beautifully. She recreates Haroldo's rhythm, his assonance and rhyme effects, his etymological play, so as to allow the Anglophone reader to understand the poem's majesty. And Cisneros provides the scholarly apparatus necessary to understand the deep structure of these strange and original cantos. A brilliant translation of a brilliant work, Cisneros's Galaxias is a major literary event." —Marjorie Perloff "Haroldo de Campos's epic and epiphanic Galáxias finds the poetic in prose and the narrative in poetry, demonstrating again why he was one of the liveliest and most original poets of his generation in Brazil or elsewhere. Like 100 mini-kaleidoscopes, or travel stories, or 'videotextgames,' to echo de Campos, Galáxias anticipates the best of our current social media world but with an unmatched vision and verve." —John Keene