CALL FOR PAPERS: Haroldo de Campos: "Prophetic Plagiarist". Poetry and Theory in Circulation

Guest editors: Max Hidalgo (Universitat de Barcelona / Équipe « Multilinguisme, traduction, création » (ITEM)) y Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira (ETH Zürich)

Submissions until June 15, 2024. Please ensure that submissions are sent to both editors (max.hidalgo@gmail.com and posedu@gmail.com) and uploaded simultaneously to the platform.

 

Haroldo de Campos (São Paulo, 1929-2003) was a poet, critic, translator, and tireless cultural mediator who not only transformed Brazilian poetry alongside Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari since the 1950s but also contributed to the establishment of transnational networks through which, in his own terms, Brazil should emerge as a fundamental hub for contemporary poetry and critical thought.

The Brazilian poet referred in 1955 to "the open work" (earning him the title of "prophetic plagiarist" in a friendly dedication by Umberto Eco) and to the "neo-baroque" (a theme that Sarduy would later develop in the late 1970s). Scenes like these make it possible to begin to trace a vast network of encounters and reinterpretations, within which Derrida wrote about him in a tribute text from 1996:

"Tout ce qui a pu signifier la loi, le désir aussi, l’urgence, mais l’urgence la plus aventureuse et la plus audacieuse pour moi, dans l’ordre de la pensée, de l’écriture, de la poésie – « unique source » – dans l’horizon de la littérature, et avant tout dans l’intimité de la langue des langues, chaque fois tant de langues dans toute langue, je sais que Haroldo y aura eu accès comme moi avant moi, mieux que moi. C’est-à-dire qu’il m’attendait pourtant, déjà, de l’autre côté, arrivé avant moi, le premier, sur l’autre rive"

His work, which cannot be classified as marginal in any way, is nevertheless affected by a singularity. In the Brazilian national context, he is sometimes associated with concrete poetry, ignoring his later developments. Internationally, his name tends to remain invisible or dissipate within Latin American networks. However, reconstructing his trajectory allows us to revisit not only his poetic elaborations but also his critical and theoretical developments, as well as begin to reconstruct the intellectual networks in which he participated and actively contributed to building.

Haroldo de Campos not only contributed to the introduction of authors like Umberto Eco, Max Bense, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, or Severo Sarduy to Brazil, but he did so by immersing himself in some of the networks and social spaces of these authors and by helping to create new critical and literary spaces. He did this not from a passive or subordinate position but by establishing an effective and affective intellectual dialogue with them, as evidenced by his publications and correspondence. Likewise, in the more strictly literary realm, one could see the role he played in the renewal of critical-poetic spaces in Spanish, through his contact with authors like Julián Ríos and Andrés Sánchez Robayna, with whom he collaborated. Haroldo de Campos's library – consisting of more than 20,000 volumes, spanning 36 languages and a wide range of fields and disciplines – and his translation work – including translations of Pound, Joyce, Mallarmé, Maiakovski, Octavio Paz, Dante, Goethe, classical Chinese poetry, The Bible, and Homer – attest to the enormity of his project.

On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Haroldo de Campos's death, we propose, from Theory Now (Granada), and in various languages, the publication of a special issue that explores topics related to Haroldo de Campos's theoretical elaborations and his effective constitution through historical and material processes.

 

The special issue will welcome contributions that address Haroldo de Campos's work related to the following themes:

• Circulation of literary theory: models, concepts, problems.
• Heterochronies and genre ruptures.
• Theory and practice of transcreation.
• Utopian and post-utopian politics of literature.
• Elaborations of anthropophagic reason.
• Forms of the world: Weltliteratur, World literature, world literature.
• Theory, criticism, historiography.
• Re-writings of tradition: Gregório de Matos, Sousândrade, Oswald de Andrade, Homer, The Bible.
• Haroldo de Campos's library as an archive of theory and as a creative workshop.