Galáxias – Haroldo de Campos

[Ugly Duckling Presse; 2024]

Tr. from the Portuguese by Odile Cisneros with Suzanne Jill Levine, Charles A. Perrone, Norman Potter, and Christopher Middleton

A poetry teacher once told me about the idea, held by some Jewish mystics, that words are formed by the erotic attraction between letters. Just as, the way these religious men tell it, the sexual attraction between a man and a woman is an instantiation of the universe’s desire to complete itself, so, too, do letters come together in order to make the world more whole, to repair the original rupture of creation.

I don’t know if Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos knew much about the Kabbalah. But it is clear, from reading his monumental galáxias—written between 1963 and 1984 and recently published in full in English for the first time by Ugly Duckling Presse—that he had a near-supernatural attunement to the attraction between words, to the way units of sound and sense wish to cluster on the page. It’s his magnificent ear that seems to have guided the creation of these fifty poems. All of them, minus the opener and the closer, are forty-line fragments. Campos’s primary translator, Odile Cisneros, along with contributing translators Suzanne Jill Levine, Charles A. Perrone, Norman Potter, and Christopher Middleton, have accomplished the extraordinarily feat of recreating his linguistic innovations in English: not so much a translation as, to put it in Campos’s words, a “transcreation.”

A leader of the Brazilian avant-garde who lived from 1929 to 2003, Campos took it as his task to give the “dead buriedtongue” of Brazilian Portuguese—marginalized New-World variation of a marginal European language—a place in the pantheon of world literature. It’s like Campos wanted to invent a rich local literary idiom in the style of James Joyce. But while Ulysses unfolds over one day in Dublin, galáxias takes not only São Paulo, but the entire universe in its orbit.

The book unfolds, in its broadest strokes, as a travel diary. The poems—or “galactic cantos”—are each set in a different locations: Granada, Rome, Buenos Aires, Manhattan, to name a few. Each location is described from a slant, collaging snatches of sounds, sights, and thoughts in such a manner that the reader’s eye/ear apparatus rarely finds a place to settle. This readerly bewilderment basically mimics the experience of being a foreigner in a foreign place: the delight, the overwhelm, the experience of the world unmediated by habit or preconception.

Look, for instance, at the opening of the Granada canto:

reza calla y trabaja on a wall in granada work be quiet and pray

be quiet and work and pray in granada a wall at the moorish casa del chapiz no

lazy bum will go to heaven peering down an inner wall la educación

es obra de todos the work of all ave maria in granada see en su granada and that

day the deserted casa del chapiz no arabist for the arabesques

a woman looking after a child behind a low door and praying

and working in silence knowing nothing and working unable to tell us

anything y reza and later plazuela san nicolás the white on white on

white and silence in the white on white on white quicklime swarming white

on white swarming quicklime round cobblestones on the street and white within

a white arch quiet quicklime and working white a wall of dazzling white

and beyond in the far yonder beyond the generalife and the alhambra’s crimson contour

the white plazuela self-contained containing itself like a scream of quicklime and the

generalife and the alhambra crimson amid black cypresses mudéjar faces

of granada and now priestley’s garden villa cars stopping the guardias civiles

The book begs to be quoted at length because its effects are cumulative; the poems possess an auditory logic, moving not from image to image or idea to idea but from sound to sound. Campos has pitched his tent on the far edge of experience, “yonder beyond the generalife,” where fragments of people, places, and things are arranged according to a persuasive rhythm. The style has a powerful forward thrust, as if each word foreshadows the next. Later, writing about some German-speaking place I could not identify on my own, he describes a “dagger erect frozen sharp steel dormant death-rose la vie en rose the / rose-flush detained pre-death but you know medieval figures in street-corner / kiosks mantilla-shrouded nursenuns selling bibles.” The word “rose”—a key word for Campos and for the entire Modernist project thanks to Gertrude Stein—waltzes from metaphor to song reference to color while echoing the long o’s in “frozen,” “dormant,” “know,” “corner.” The sonic affinities between the words are the engine that keeps the spaceship flying.

But the cacophony is challenging, the spell it casts not immediately felt. Some poets warmly invite readers to step into their work; others demand submission, surrender, a willingness to learn a new type of reading. Campos—trying constantly to do things with language that had never been done before—is surely in the latter camp. (I was reminded of the “Note to Potential Readers” with which his Brazilian contemporary Clarice Lispector opens her novel The Passion According to G.H.: “This is a book like any other book. But I would be happy if it were only read by people whose souls are already formed.”) What it takes to get through galáxias is humility—in the attempt to break into the poems and retrieve a hidden rational meaning, you’re liable to break your brain instead. It’s better to relax, to be led by Campos’s strong hand through a world-hopping, tongue-twisting grand tour of the universe. Galáxias is a comprehensive sensory experience to be immersed in and enjoy: music, puns, dogs, grandmas, cathedrals, mosques, strippers, plazas are all arranged to create a language-based melody whose pleasures grow increasingly addictive. “Note that in this language / thread there’s a thread of language like a rose that is a rose like a / prose is a prose,” he writes. We’re far past even art for art’s sake: Here is language for the glory of language.

Beyond the aesthetic pleasure of the book, Campos’s willingness to tempt the label of “nonsense” allows him to open up room for other languages. Already, the mother tongue is destabilized and reorganized, its words redirected away from their given purpose—to signify—and toward an exuberant musicality and an associative dream-logic that imitates the real, inarticulable haze of memory. The language as a result becomes more generous, more capacious, capable of admitting Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, Greek, and more into the original Portuguese and then into the English as we’ve received it in translation.

Once you settle into galáxias and are already experiencing the words of English as so much more than instruments of direct meaning, you hardly blink at lines like “hier liegt enthadekeite nometory parthainos nometora jungfrau virgin eighteen / years old roman catacomb in monteverde sie ruhe in frieden via cologne.” These words have their own music, too, and it’s not as if the English lines were making too much sense, either. Babel never fell, Campos seems to insist: We may not know which thing-in-the-world each foreign word corresponds to, but all of us are capable of hearing every language, relishing the rhythms and tones and articulations of every language, enjoying the textured musics of the human voice.

Really, galáxias is an attempt to cut through the knot at the heart of the poem as a form: The individual human voice reaching out indiscriminately toward the souls of strangers is constrained by the lack of a universal language. Every poem worth its salt performs a passionate, if desperate reach toward the universal, a spirit-to-spirit communion whose medium is letters. But language, in its diversity, limits the path any one soul-bound-up-in-words can take through space and time. Translation is a salve, but it isn’t perfect. Galáxias tries to hack the code: If we can’t be fluent in every tongue, then maybe it’s our own language that needs to be cracked open and made molten, chaotic, mysterious, foreign. Maybe then we can see the world beyond our world. It’s not exactly Babelian—we surely needed the translation, after all—but it’s a beautiful experiment in how it might feel hear everything, to witness it all.

Daniel Yadin is a writer, translator, bookseller, and bartender in New York.