Reproduction, adventure and invention in Pau brasil, by Oswald de Andrade

Abstract

This essay focuses on Pau Brasil (1925) to investigate the relation of Oswald de Andrade with a debate concerning the crisis of verse as a condition to the birth of poem in modern literature. This discussion takes into account critical essays by Andrade, published in the 1940s, as well as criticism on that poet by Manuel Bandeira, Augusto de Campos e Haroldo de Campos, in order to retrace a genealogy of this Brazilian poet, to which also belongs Stéphane Mallarmé and baroque style. Such succession draws on bonds between word and image, also on reproduction as a creative strategy. At last, this text considers the affinities among journey, copy and invention in Andrade, by analyzing the fragment PERO VAZ CAMINHA, published on Pau Brasil, in dialogue with similar interpretations of colonial tradition by modernist literature and contemporary art. That poem brings to light the proximity of beginning and end of poem, according to an understanding of origin by Walter Benjamin, which displaces the usual interpretation of Andrade’s book in relation to modernist nationalism.