Galáxias | August 2024 | Ugly Duckling Press | Pages 246 | ISBN: 978-1-946433-76-3 | $22.95
Widely recognized as an influential progenitor of Brazil’s midcentury literary shift from mega, Modernist projects toward fragmented, postmodern representations of society and culture, prolific Brazilian poet, translator, and literary critic Haroldo de Campos established himself at this pivotal artistic fulcrum with his tour de force, Galáxias. Appearing piecemeal in literary journals between 1963 and 1976, the fifty untitled, unpaginated poems that comprise Galáxias came together in book form in 1984, and finally made their way into English forty years later via translator Odile Cisneros, with additional contributions from Suzanne Jill Levine, Charles Perrone, and Christopher Middleton.
As a whole, Galáxias circles themes of travel, (dis)location, and sensory experience. Each of the fifty poems runs forty unpunctuated lines apiece, and each entry builds its own momentum of riotous cacophony, of circuitous repetition, and wildly original noise. A note to the 1984 edition describes the undertaking as “a text imagined at the extreme limits of poetry and prose, a bioscriptural pulsion in galactic expansion between those two formants, interchangeable and changing.” Together with unconventional phrasing, newfound portmanteaus, and borderline nonsense sounds, de Campos assails readers with nigh hostile lyrics that still manage to cohere within each piece. For example, an early poem in the book introduces grungy images of decay, infestation, and effluence in its opening lines:
egg rotting in the egg and so i repeat zero with zero the merely mere
monthly menses of the paper jungle of roaches in the proper channels
where the such is such lump of booklice in the suitable redtape where the such is such sludge of snails in recurrent annals where the same is samesuch
and the banal chattel the fecal incidents the fatal precedents
metal desks reams of sheets eraser traces pencil cases machines
machine-gunning junk shredding chunks of gunk dead sea of muck
These images repeat in the poem’s closing lines, creating a messy, if recognizable, thematic arc:
where the new rots like the egg rots the daily jungle of the serfsalary in
dailydoses the selfservice of hunger on dailycredit the dailymonthlyurinal-
-estuary where river mouth is mound the fecalvary where the mound is midden such is
such such is that thatsuchlethal same to same diaryday anusannual book
monthlymenstrual sameweekly flies in the tank where i sweatsink my wages
but the stoppage the message the visage but the veering the voyage
Translating such inventive linguistic idiosyncrasies required an exceptional process. As
translator Cisneros notes, the undertaking involved “recognizing puns, rhythmic patterns,
alliterations, internal and vocalic rhymes, and producing a parallel pattern, a music, that could
echo the effects of the original.” She points to one passage in particular to illustrate these unique
challenges, where the original Portuguese, which reads as follows (with stressed syllables in
bold):
e começo aqui e meço aqui este começo e recomeço e remeço e arremesso
e aqui me meço quando se vive sob a espécie da viagem o que importa
não é a viagem mas o começo . . .
becomes the more economic
and here i begin i spin here the beguine i respin and grin to begin
to release and realize life begins not arrives at the end of a trip which is
why i begin to respin . . . (stresses marked here in boldface).
Indeed, the book’s supplemental paratexts prove exceedingly insightful. These include a prefatory essay by Cisneros; a newly translated note on the original 1984 Brazilian edition; an essay titled, “come now, you’ll say, to hear galáxias,” prepared by de Campos for the CD isto não é um livro de viagem (1992); extensive biographical information for the author; and an additional entry by Cisneros on the process of translation. Truly, these components are vital for navigating the provocative, maximalist litanies of obscenity and excess found in de Campos’s magnum opus, such as the following scatalogical characterization of Odysseus:
a solitudinary ornobody nobordinary odysseus auscults a fecal tyresias
vermisightless verminiquitous vermislithering augurs a labyrintestine
audyssey you will lose all compan tautophagic you’ll return deadsea
fecalport gondoundulating in noplace allnothing soliloquy the moonvoice
audysseus noname et devant l’laggression rétorquer plucks the
daisy’s petals ravished plastic shards cellophaning fading the cell-last
scene miss pussy barenakedblonde massaging a puffphallic unicornial polyphemic
Readers who enjoy the scaturient onslaught of soundplay and imagemaking will find pleasure in diving headfirst into de Campos’s poetic torrent. Others may benefit from a slower pace or more measured intake to absorb the lyrical delights and difficulties. So, a literary prescription from an unlicensed peddler of recommendations: try one a night for forty nights. If palatable, try wading into de Campos’s own eclectic range of translations, which include James Joyce (English), Stéphane Mallarmé (French), Dante (Italian), Goethe (German), and Octavio Paz (Spanish).
Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of Yaguareté White (UAPress, 2024). Poems and book reviews have appeared online and in print, most recently at Freeman's, The Georgia Review, and Booklist. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.