Poetry
Invenção de Orfeu
Not translated into English
Jorge de Lima · 1952
Synopsis
A long poem in ten cantos, which its author subtitled “epic biography”, in which an invented Orpheus speaks, a late and Christian one, who serves him as a mask. The first canto establishes a poetic space, a homeland dreamed of as a prodigious island; embarked as on a drunken boat, the poet mingles in it childhood, the biblical deserts, the maritime adventure of Camões and the inquiry of Dante, in the quest for a spiritual fulfilment and for an essential and inaccessible island.
Context
The poem appeared in 1952, illustrated by Fayga Ostrower according to the English-language encyclopaedia, and is regarded as the most important of its author's books. Its current publisher sees in it a mixture of the popular and learned, classical and surrealist, mythological and Catholic registers, attentive to inequality and social injustice. Mirella Márcia Longo, in Estudos Avançados, recalls the readings of Murilo Mendes, João Gaspar Simões and Mário Faustino and stresses a fragmented, cyclical text without linear progression. The 2013 edition brings together the poem, these critical texts and a letter from Ezra Pound.
Who it is for
A long poem, divided into cantos, with no continuous narrative thread, which returns to its motifs and calls for slow reading.
Prizes and reception
Margaret Anne Clarke sees in it the great Brazilian epic of the twentieth century; translated into Italian in 1982, it was reissued in 2013.
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