Transpoetic Exchange: Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Other Multiversal Dialogues

Transpoetic Exchange

Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Series editor: Aníbal González, Yale University

Dealing with far-reaching questions of history and modernity, language and selfhood, and power and ethics, Latin American literature sheds light on the many-faceted nature of Latin American life, as well as on the human condition as a whole. This highly successful series has published some of the best recent criticism on Latin American literature. Acknowledging the historical links and cultural affinities between Latin American and Iberian literatures, the series productively combines scholarship with theory and welcomes consideration of Spanish and Portuguese texts and topics, while also providing a space of convergence for scholars working in Romance studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and literary theory.

Selected Titles in the Series

Rebecca E. Biron, Elena Garro and Mexico’s Modern Dreams

Persephone Brahman, From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America

Jason Cortés, Macho Ethics: Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative

Tara Daly, Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes

Earl E. Fitz, Machado de Assis and Female Characterization: The Novels

Earl E. Fitz, Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels

Naida García-Crespo, Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building: National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897–1940

Thomas S. Harrington, Public Intellectuals and Nation Building in the Iberian Peninsula, 1900–1925: The Alchemy of Identity

David Kelman, Counterfeit Politics: Secret Plots and Conspiracy Narratives in the Americas

Brendan Lanctot, Beyond Civilization and Barbarism: Culture and Politics in Postrevolutionary Argentina

Marília Librandi, Jamille Pinheiro Dias, and Tom Winterbottom, eds., Transpoetic Exchange: Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Other Multiversal Dialogues

Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims

Andrew R. Reynolds, The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality, and Material Culture

Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones: Illuminating Gender and Nation

Mary Beth Tierney-Tello, Mining Memory: Reimagining Self and Nation through Narratives of Childhood in Peru

Transpoetic Exchange

Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Other Multiversal Dialogues

EDITED BY MARÍLIA LIBRANDI, JAMILLE PINHEIRO DIAS, AND TOM WINTERBOTTOM

Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rocha, Marília Librandi, editor. | Pinheiro Dias, Jamille, editor. | Winterbottom, Tom, editor.

Title: Transpoetic exchange : Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and other multiversal dialogues / edited by Marília Librandi, Jamille Pinheiro Dias, Tom Winterbottom.

Description: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press, 2020. | Series: Bucknell studies in Latin American literature and theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019035843 | ISBN 9781684482177 (hardback) | ISBN 9781684482160 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684482184 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Campos, Haroldo de—Criticism and interpretation. | Paz, Octavio, 1914–1998—Criticism and interpretation. | Poetry—Translating.

Classification: LCC PQ9697.C2448 Z877 2020 | DDC 861/.62—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035843

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2020 by Bucknell University Press

Individual chapters copyright © 2020 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.bucknell.edu/UniversityPress

Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

Uma arte—não q apresente—mas q presentifique

—Olho por olho a nu (Manifesto), Haroldo de Campos

Contents

Introduction: A Multiversal Experiment

MARÍLIA LIBRANDI, JAMILLE PINHEIRO DIAS, AND TOM WINTERBOTTOM

Part I Essays

1 On the Presence of Absence: Octavio Paz’s Blanco

ENRICO MARIO SANTÍ

2 Blanco and Transblanco: Modern and Post-Utopian

JOÃO ADOLFO HANSEN

3 Refiguring the Poundian Ideogram: From Octavio Paz’s Blanco/Branco to Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias

MARJORIE PERLOFF

4 Poetry Makes Nothing Happen

MARÍLIA LIBRANDI

5 Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and the Experience of the Avant-Garde

ANTONIO CICERO

6 Blanco: A Version of Mallarmé’s Heritage

LUIZ COSTA LIMA

7 Translation and Radical Poetics: The Case of Octavio Paz and the Noigandres

ODILE CISNEROS

Part II Remembrances

8 Pages, Pageants, Portraits, Prospects: An Austin-atious Remembrance of Haroldo de Campos

CHARLES A. PERRONE

9 Logopéia via Goethe via Christopher Middleton: An Unknown Recording of Haroldo de Campos (Austin, 1981)

KENNETH DAVID JACKSON

10 Meeting in Austin

BENEDITO NUNES

Part III Poems

11 Three Variations on Octavio Paz’s Blanco and Fifteen Antiphonals for Haroldo de Campos, with a Note on Translation, Transcreation, and Othering

JEROME ROTHENBERG

12 Poems

ANTONIO CICERO

13 Waves of Absence

KEIJIRO SUGA

14 Hexaemeron: The Six Faces of Haphazard

ANDRÉ VALLIAS

15 Amberianum (Philosophical Fragments of Caudio Amberian)

CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

Transpoetic Exchange

Introduction

A Multiversal Experiment

MARÍLIA LIBRANDI, JAMILLE PINHEIRO DIAS, AND TOM WINTERBOTTOM

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) wrote Blanco (1966) while serving as the Mexican ambassador to India. It is a poem of audacious scope, a venture that dialogues with Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dès (1898) and the eighth-century A.D. Hevajra Tantra, an Indo-Tibetan Tantric Buddhist philosophy based on the mandala’s meditation to attain sunyata. In the resulting work, Paz creates an eroticized poem that points to a supreme state of being in nothingness or of being present while disappearing, much like light emanating from dying stars or the reverberation of silence.

Blanco. The word already creates a sense of intrigue. In English, it translates as three things: white, blank, and target. The poem is a Mexican and Spanish American take on two distinct Eastern and Western traditions: a Latin American incorporation of French Symbolist poetry and the philosophy of Tantric Buddhism. That was not the end of it, however. With the publication of Transblanco (1986), the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003)—himself a central figure of world literature from Latin America, an innovative twentieth-century Brazilian poet—produced a volume that incorporated a translation of Paz’s work as well as correspondence between Paz and Campos from 1968 to 1981 and essays by literary critics and writers such as Julio Ortega and Paulo Leminski. Since its publication, Transblanco has become a model of what poetic pluri-dialogues can achieve through translation understood as transcreation, as Haroldo de Campos called it.

The link between Paz and Campos goes beyond just this particular (and important) translation, and it extends to a sustained friendship and ongoing intellectual exchange. In editing the present book, we take Paz and Campos’s friendship to foreground the relational aspects of poetry and translation, and so we have brought together an international network of contemporary literary critics, poets, and visual artists who have been influenced or impacted by their intellectual and personal relationship. The choice of prefix—trans-—in Campos’s book title has a double function: first, it refers to transversal cultural interactions and existences; and second (albeit inexorably linked to the first), it refers to the transformations that take place in the course of these relationships and processes. The trans- aspect is often sidelined when it comes to discussions of originality and authorship, when in fact the case of Paz and Campos exemplifies this type of exchange that operates trans-linguistically, trans-culturally, and trans-continentally.

The works that inspired this project include not only Blanco and Transblanco but also Campos’s Galáxias, which he began in 1963 and finished in 1976. This work again conveys an instance of this artistic exchange: it is a collection that defies conventional categories of prose and poetry. In Campos’s words, this kaleidoscopic book is an audiovideotext, videotextogram, uniting narrative gestures with epiphanic moments, written to be read aloud with words carrying a mantric, ‘transmental’ value.¹ Those prerogatives have a clear resonance with Paz’s intentions.

At least three related aspects unite Paz and Campos as poet-thinkers beyond the specific personal and creative textual correspondences. In the first place, poetry is at the core of their action and their worlds, and they consider everything—existence, transcendence, language—under the gaze of and in the light of poetry. In the second place, they integrate the world tradition of poetic self-reflection through the image of light and mutual illuminations (oftentimes expressed as blanks and the white spaces on a page), as is the case in Blanco and Transblanco. Finally, both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, which is understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back again as a Babel re-enacted. These intellectual and artistic affinities, as manifested particularly in Blanco, Transblanco, and Galáxias, were the main axes around which we organized an international colloquium and poetic performance at Stanford University in January 2010. This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of that event.

The present volume brings together scholars and artists to rethink and discuss Paz and Campos’s poetic friendship as centered on the aforementioned triad of books from a perspective that privileges transcultural dialogues. The texts serve as a point of departure, rather than arrival, in a quest to produce contemporary movements in thinking and poetics that move in various directions and as inspired by the spirit of the various writers, critics, and artists brought together here. In this sense, comparisons were made to amplify these three source texts (even though they themselves, of course, have multiple sources) in time and in space to bring them into focus again in the twenty-first century. We have brought together essays of an academic as well as personal nature, as well as artistic expressions that follow the works’ intense and condensed capacity to produce an immediate synthesis of the multiple in their essence and motivation. Though we take the specific case of Paz and Campos and their interactions as the central topic, part of our aim is to promote conversations at large around the idea of poetry and translation as a relational and interactive site.

We have divided the present volume into three parts. The first part, Essays, unites seven texts by scholars who focus on the relationship between the two authors and the three texts, their antecedents, their impact and influence, and their cultural resonance. The second part, Remembrances, focuses on the images reflected in the remembrance of intellectual interactions with Campos. The third part, Poems, includes poems by contemporary authors from Brazil, Japan, and the United States who share their art as creations inspired in large measure by the influence and impact of Paz and Campos.

According to Alfred Gell, ambassadors are real persons; however, they are also ‘fictions.’ ² A Chinese ambassador, for example, does not look like China, but in London, China looks like him.³ Paz’s political and cultural posting in India was profoundly important for his work as a poet, and it was here that his fictional existence as an ambassador brought into clear relief the transcontinental and transcultural aspects of his creative being. He was appointed ambassador to India in 1962, and he held this position until 1968, when he resigned from the Mexican foreign service in protest against the massacre of Tlatelolco. It was during this time that he would write Blanco, a title on which he later expanded: "Blanco: white; blank; an unmarked space, emptiness; the white mark in the center of a target."⁴

For Campos to take on his transcreation of Blanco was not an unexpected surprise but rather the marking of an intellectual resonance that was part of a broader Latin American literary and cultural debate. Campos, for his part, had been working at the same time on his own supernova in the form of Galáxias, the stellar explosion of light and nothingness represented by words and space on the page. As a central figure in Brazilian concretist poetry and the founder of the Noigandres group and magazine, Campos enjoyed an open creative dialogue with Paz, and this would later find itself transformed into actual correspondence. With Campos’s Transblanco, however, we have an example not only of a Brazilian-Mexican dialogue but of a broader concern: the volume’s preface is signed by the Uruguayan literary critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who, at that time, was professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. The section Em torno a Blanco includes essays by other literary critics, among them the Peruvian Julio Ortega, who was professor at the University of Texas, Austin, where both Paz (1969) and Campos (1981) had visited for scholarly positions and intellectual missions. It was during Campos’s time in Texas as a visiting scholar that he decided to translate Blanco. Transblanco is, then, not only the result of a Latin American poetic partnership but one that was reinforced in the United States, adding an Anglo-American component to this Luso-Hispanic configuration that could be claimed as a model for a comparatist work that stretches beyond the papal line of Tordesillas/Tordesilhas and into a trans-American realm.

To borrow the title of Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s book on nineteenth-century U.S. Latino writers, we argue that Paz and Campos acted as twentieth-century Latin American ambassadors of culture.⁵ Their work, and specifically these comings-together, has poetry and poetics at its heart, and these serve as the foundation for their political, historical, and sociological thought. When Campos identifies translation as the pathway for what he understands as post-utopian poetry, he is referring not only to the translation of a poem from one language to another (which in itself is significant) but to translation as the source of the poem’s (re)creation, its transcreation. It is an invention that is intrinsically invaded by voices other than the author’s, an effect that is achieved by evoking or alluding to an external and foreign tradition, a vision that is similar to what Paz proposes in La otra voz (1990).⁶ In that vision, the images of light, transparency, space, blankness, and mutual illuminations play a fundamental role in the expression on the page, and it is with this in mind that we turn to the edition in hand.

The first contribution to the Essays section comes from Enrico Mario Santí, who offers an exploration of the presence of absence in Blanco. João Adolfo Hansen then analyzes the modern and post-utopic at work between Blanco and Transblanco, before Marjorie Perloff examines the impact of Ezra Pound’s translation techniques on Paz and Campos, incorporating the latter’s Galáxias in her analysis. Marília Librandi then considers the transparency, blankness, and white space of Paz’s and Campos’s poetry as the image (or absence of image) that both use in their defense of poetry. After this, Antonio Cicero traces the presence of the modern and the avant-garde in post-utopian poetry, after which Luiz Costa Lima examines what Blanco derived from the impact and reach of Stéphane Mallarmé, and particularly his Un coup de dés. In the final essay, Odile Cisneros examines the poetics and translational practices of the Noigandres group and Octavio Paz and their interactions.

The second section, Remembrances, collects three experiences of interaction with Campos in the process of transcreating Blanco and working on Transblanco and Galáxias. Charles A. Perrone remembers the fruitful academic connection that Campos maintained with his Austineia Desvairada after the latter’s first visit as a visiting professor in 1971 and his 1981 return, when Perrone met him. Next, Kenneth David Jackson remembers his extended relationship with Campos—from thesis advice in São Paulo to the invitation to Austin—and the creative impulse that Campos drew from his time in Texas. Finally, Benedito Nunes recollects his meeting with Campos at the University of Texas in 1981, recalling the proximity between poetry and philosophy for which Campos argued. In the third section, Poems, poets of international standing and renown—Charles Bernstein, Antonio Cicero, Jerome Rothenberg, Keijiro Suga, and André Vallias—share their creations.

Between these two artists, and this conjunction of scholars and artists, we have Campos de Paz: fields of peace that are nourished by multiversal dialogue. In addition to relaying intimate and creative reflections on the authors’ works, the present collection contributes to and expands on existing scholarship on the subject. Ignacio Infante’s 2013 book After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic provides an important foundation for our study for its focus on the ways in which the circulation of modern poetry and poetics is articulated by the translation of various poetic traditions and forms across the diverse spatiotemporal realm of meditation constituted by the Atlantic Ocean, and we add Paz and Campos to this important intuition while also expanding its reach to other realms and channels across the Americas and beyond.⁷ The wide-ranging 2014 collection edited by Roberto Cantú, The Willow and the Spiral: Essays on Octavio Paz and the Poetic Imagination, provides vital perspectives on Paz and the internationality of his poetic reach, while not addressing Blanco in detail; to this we also add a comparative dimension by incorporating Campos.⁸ In putting together this collection, we are also indebted to the essays collected by Lisa Block de Behar (2009) and the collection organized by Leda Tenório da Motta (2005), both on Haroldo de Campos.⁹ Several other articles on Blanco inspired our perspectives on Paz’s work, including those by Victoria Carpenter, Juan Malpartida, and Clara Román-Odio.¹⁰ Additionally, Rodolfo Mata Sandoval has important articles, interviews, and translations that bring together Paz and Campos in dialogue, providing an intellectual backdrop that nourished the present volume, as does the aptly titled article América Latina Reinventada, by Maria Esther Maciel.¹¹

With these inspirations and references in mind, our proposal is not only to interpret but also to relate; it is to see how these texts move us and how we can move them to understand their intense and condensed capacity to produce an immediate synthesis of the multiple. Our aim is to experiment with these texts and their origins to see how they inspire engagement and reflection that is itself a journey across multiple worlds in how the authors here collected have chosen to understand and relate the impact of the spirit of transcreation on their own creative beings. In this spirit, we have welcomed and encouraged comparisons that amplify Campos’s and Paz’s work vertically in time or horizontally in space, or a combination of the two.