Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 11-18, 1999

Volume 28, Number 8

Haroldo de Campos

Symposium pays tribute to noted
Brazilian writer Haroldo de Campos

Renowned poets and literary scholars will pay tribute to Haroldo de Campos, one of Latin America's most distinguished poets and writers, in a symposium dedicated to mark his 70th year.

The symposium is being hosted by Yale in cooperation with the Centre for Brazilian Studies at the University of Oxford (England). Titled "On Transcreation: Literary Invention, Translation, and Poetics," it will take place Sunday-Tuesday, Oct. 17-19, at the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), 53 Wall St. The public is welcome to attend free of charge.

Campos will speak at the symposium on Sunday at 4:15 p.m. in Rm. 203 of the WHC. His talk is titled "The Ex-Centric Viewpoint: Tradition, Transcreation, Transculturation."

Campos, who was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1929, is a prize-winning poet, essayist and translator whose works are internationally known. A founder of the movement called "Concrete Poetry" in São Paulo in the 1950s, Campos has also been a leader in experimental poetry for over three decades, working in many different languages.

This year he was awarded the first Octavio Paz prize for his poetry as well as the Roger Caillois prize in France for the translation of his great prose work "Galaxias' ("Galaxies"). Reflecting the epics and oral sagas of the pre-classical world, "Galaxias" recounts the wanderings and adventures of the poet through lands, texts and language.

The prolific career of Campos, nicknamed "the locomotive of São Paulo" by German semiotician Max Bense, includes some 12 books of poetry, 18 literary studies and 14 translations, as well as projects for the theatre, cinema and plastic arts. Turning increasingly to translation, he has published new Portuguese versions of the Biblical books of Genesis and Ecclesiastes, classical Chinese poetry and the first two cantos of "The Iliad."

Campos refers to the translation of texts as "transcreating" because he draws on creative Brazilian language in order to "reimagine" the tests of Western tradition. His earlier "transcreations" include the works of Pound, Joyce, e.e. cummings, Mallarme and other modern writers into Portuguese.

"One of Haroldo de Campos's most enduring influences has been in Concrete poetry -- which combines graphic image and spatial design with poetry and now is more or less a tradition among poets in one form or another," says K. David Jackson, professor of Portuguese, who is organizing the symposium with Leslie Bethell of Oxford. "But he is also highly respected for his translations of modern classics, his theory of translation, his work with semiotics and his essays on Brazilian literature, among other contributions."

Along with a degree in law, Campos has a doctorate in literature from the University of São Paulo. He was a visiting professor in 1978 at Yale. Campos is currently an emeritus professor of semiotics at the Catholic University of São Paulo.

The Yale symposium dedicated to Campos will include panel discussions, talks and readings (with translations). Participants include Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University; Leyla Perrone-Moisés, Universidade de São Paulo; Jacques Roubaud, University of Paris; Charles Bernstein, SUNY-Buffalo; Else R. P. Vieira, Center for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford; and faculty from numerous other universities. Yale participants are Paulo Valesio, Ernesto Grosman, Roberto González Echevarría, Josefina Ludmer and Lidia Santos.

Conference sponsors are Yale's Edmund J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund and Program, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, the Council on Latin American Studies, the Whitney Humanities Center, the department of Spanish and Portuguese's Malcolm Batchelor Fund and the departments of comparative literature and Italian, in cooperation with Oxford's Centre for Brazilian Studies.

Library exhibit

In conjunction with the symposium, there will be an exhibit of materials related to Campos in two first-floor display cases at the Sterling Memorial Library, 120 High St. The exhibit will be on view Oct. 11-22 and will feature Campos' translations of Ezra Pound, some of the early journals of the Concrete poetry movement and autographed manuscripts, among other items.

For a complete schedule of symposium events, call (203) 432-1150.

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