Some notes towards the reading of “Manucure” by Mário de Sá-Carneiro

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2016v21n2p30

“Manucure”, by Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916), is one of the most important vanguardist poems of in Portuguese literature, alongside with the Fernando Pessoa-Álvaro de Campos’ odes and the manifest-poems by Almada Negreiros. This article aims at not only discuss this long poem in the context of that vanguard, but also to place it in Sá Carneiro’s oeuvre, which was decisively influenced by the friendship, in the last four years of his short life, with Fernando Pessoa, of what an extensive and valuable correspondence is proof of. Therefore, we'll not only speak about the typographic elements of the poem, its purpose and meaning in the text, we will also do a close reading o the poetic and stylistic aspects of this author, his contact and contamination with other European vanguards. We also hope to demonstrate with these notes towards the reading of the poem (firstly published in the second issue of Orpheu) the extreme importance of literary magazines while creative support and source of dissemination of the biggest names of our literature, especially at this early moment of Portuguese Modernism.