Harsiese -

Harsiese

04/11/2023

Culture • Literature • Books

By EDUARDO SINKEVISQUE*

Considerations about the book by Jacyntho Lins Brandão

The mummy burned by the fire at the Quinta da Boa Vista National Museum is reborn as a phoenix in the poetry of Jacyntho Lins Brandão, who neither replaces it nor recreates it in his most recent book of poems, winner of the Alphonsus de Guimaraens Prize from the National Library Foundation.

Em Harsiese, Jacyntho Lins Brandão makes the phoenix fly, moves it from places, which are Ouro Preto, Belo Horizonte, among other Orients and horizons.

In her recently released book of poems, Jacyntho Brandão makes the mummy talk.

the poetry of Harsiese it comes from a non-place or the place-of-death and is drawn to the reader’s (internal) eyes and ears. It is wonder, astonishment, precipice, memory, ruin, siege, Babylon, Carthage, Persia. It's poetry enargeia, evident. History, excavation.

I want to say that I read the poems that make up Harsiasis following its arrangement of parts. I read them as a reader who was not obedient, but adherent to the choices the poet made. In other words, I read “Brancor” and his poems sequentially; “Dyslexic Dialectic” and his poems; “Ouro Preto: Raízes”, and its poems and “Errancias” and its poems. And I read them slowly. And I read them postponing the end.

In “Brancor” I saw a melancholic tone, sometimes a remnant of Carlos Drummond in “Casa dos Lodi”. And I felt the beautiful rhythm of the poem. I wrote it down: wonderful! Wonderful!!! And I saw the poet ask rhetorical questions that require no answers. I saw grace in “Delira, Marília”, that lady sung since the XNUMXth century, but which carries with it so many ancient places of women, so many layers of lyricism. I heard the song, the song with a chorus by Jacyntho in this poem-modinha.

And I also heard the song “I balance myself on a tense string”, the musicality of the poem, the grace, the lightness. I laughed at the epigraph of “Nada Dizer”, I saw the esteemed Luciano in “Ilha da utopia”. I had fun in “Ode ao futuro”, meeting Drummond once again in Jacyntho Brandão in “Palavra em point de bullet”. I saw emulation. I saw Jacyntho beat the (supposed) model.

In “Dyslexic Dialectic”, I will not dwell on the sharpness that names this part of Harsiese, I started by writing an exclamation as soon as I read the epigraph.

In fact, the book's epigraphs are all great and tasty, composing a parallel reading in addition to fulfilling their function of complementing and illustrating the texts in some way. In fact, epigraphs can function as lapidary inscriptions, tombstones.

If my reading hypothesis, that the poet makes the dead speak, makes the ruin speak, the epigraphs of Harsiese They are tombstones.

But returning to “Dyslexic Dialectic”, I recognized in Jacyntho Lins Brandão a man of his time, of many times, of all times.

I underlined many verses, drew many exclamations, poured affections over the proposed affections.

“Ouro Preto: Raízes” was the part in which I was least moved, the part that moved me least. I understand it as a kind of songbook, kind of like Cecília Meirelles. A golden songbook, which I imagine in honor of the city, one of Jacyntho Brandão's loves.

Even so, I wrote exclamations indicating that I had been struck by one or another poem in the series, which I wrote down beautifully. I saw in this particle of Harsiasis motto/gloss of himself in the years, as in the 1955 poem (p. 69), the elocutionary variations.

In “Errancias”, to be “brief and light”, and not to be amplifying, I condense the comment by saying that I saw Drummond again. I saw an emulation of Drummond in “There are no more trams for your legs”.

Harsíese ends in Ithaca. As it only could. It begins with the “trace that corrupts” and ends the journey, the diegesis, in Ithaca!

Jacyntho's poetry in this book is placed under the aegis of Harsíese, a high-ranking Egyptian official who Brazilian fascism made and left to burn.

This is the poetry of dissolution. It may as a rhyme be just a solution, but no. Having (and sometimes there is) or not rhyming is more than a solution, a big hiccup. It is great poetry, which is under dissolution.

*Eduardo Sinkevisque is a postdoctoral fellow in literary theory at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL) at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp).

Reference

Jacyntho Lins Brandão. Harsiese. São Paulo, Patuá, 2023. [https://amzn.to/3R4bP82]