By SERAPHIM PIETROFORTE*
Since literature is made through language, it is essential to know grammar, linguistics, semiotics, and, in short, metalanguage.
Once, in response to my statements that poetry goes beyond the balance of everyday frustrations and emotional damage, and identifies itself emotionally with the work with language, someone, in vehemently disagreeing, cited Florbela Espanca as an example of literary spontaneity. Now, in this situation, it remains to be explained how a sonnet writer, who specializes in composing sonnets close to the classics, can be spontaneous; to counter this, here is a sonnet by Florbela Espanca in which there is everything but simplicity and literary spontaneity:
I climbed high, to my slender Tower,
Made of smoke, mist and moonlight,
And I began, moved, to talk
With the dead poets, all day long.
I told them my dreams, the joy
From the verses that are mine, from my dreams,
And all the poets, crying,
They then answered me: “What fantasy,
Crazy and believing child! So are we
We had illusions, like no one else,
And everything escaped us, everything died!…”
The poets fell silent, sadly…
And it is since then that I cry bitterly
In my slender Tower close to the Sky!…
In the face of such naive and mistaken ideas, not to say overly simplistic, from which, I believe, every sensible poet should distance himself, it is worth presenting some examples of work with the language of two excellent Brazilian poets, namely, Claudio Manuel da Costa, another sonneteer, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who, certainly, is among the best modern poets of the Portuguese language.
As for the Arcadian poet, in the analyses made by the Brazilian linguist Edward Lopes in the book Metamorphoses, dedicated to the work of Claudio Manuel da Costa, there are numerous examples of literary ingenuity; among them, three cases are cited: (i) in the stanza “A cada momento, Amor, a cada momento, / No mar dubioso de meu cuidado, / De novo Sinto um mal, e fainting / I surrender to the winds the wandering hope”, the key words “Amor, mar de meu mal” are formed through the repetition of the same phonological sequence – or rather: [(consonant /m/) + (vowel) + (semivowel or liquid consonant)] –, a true synthesis of the poem’s contents; (ii) the verses “Saying something I don’t know / That is not understood” are phonologically mirrored – di, en , não, que, que, não, en, di –; (iii) in the verse “Na tarde clara de calmoso estio”, while, in terms of content, the evening ends in night, in terms of phonological expression, correlatively, the open vowel /a/, present in the word “clara”, transforms into the closed vowels /o/, /u/, /e/ and /i/, present in the words “calmoso” and “estio”.
Such correspondences between the content described or narrated in the verses and the prosodic-phonological arrangements are frequent in ingenious poets; to elucidate this procedure, we recap the analysis of the poem The pulverized mountain, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, carried out in the text “Brief introduction to semiotics”, published previously:
I get to the balcony and see my mountain,
the mountains of my father and grandfather,
of all the Andrades that passed
and they will pass, the mountain that does not pass.
It was an Indian thing and we took it
to adorn and preside over life
in this dark valley where wealth
greater is your view and behold it.
From afar, he reveals his serious profile to us.
Every turn of the path points
a form of being, in iron, eternal,
and breathes eternity in fluency.
This morning I wake up and
I can't find it.
Crushed into billions of splinters
sliding on conveyor belt
clogging 150 wagons
on the 5-locomotive monster train
– the biggest train in the world, take note –
my saw runs away, go
leaving on my body and on the landscape
measly iron dust, and it doesn't pass.
The verses tell the story of the scene in which the poet-speaker opens the window and reflects on the mountain range, its history and destruction by the locomotive, a metonym for industrial exploitation. Thus, continuing in degrees of abstraction, this discourse is constructed through the relationships between the values of nature, that is, the poet and the mountain range, developed in the first three stanzas, and the conflicts with the locomotive, which in turn represents the values of civilization, exposed predominantly in the last stanza. In short, this is the realization of the semantic category nature vs. civilization as the basis of the discourse enunciated in the poem.
These considerations are evidently restricted to the meanings of the text. However, when we look at the prosodic-phonological expression, we can see that in the first three stanzas, when nature is represented in the content plane, there are decasyllabic verses in the expression plane, showing that, in the poem, in its own way, the stability of nature, sung in the first three stanzas, is correlated with metrical stability.
In the fourth stanza, differently, when nature is denied – in the verse it says “this morning I wake up and / I don’t find her” –, the decasyllabic verse is broken down into two verses, the first, of seven syllables – “this morning I wake up and” –, and the second, of three syllables – “I don’t find her” –, suggesting that the dismantling of nature coincides with the disarticulation of prosodic stability.
Finally, the fifth stanza is made up of eight verses without metrical stability, thus configuring a stanza formed by free verses, which ends up correlated, in terms of content, to the changes resulting from civilization, when the locomotive and the consequent destruction of nature are described. Schematically, the composition of the poem is represented as follows: (decasyllabic verses / nature) → (disjointed decasyllabic verse / denial of nature) → (free verses / civilization).
Now, if for the development of the art of poetry it is recommended that the poet distance himself from naïve considerations regarding literary simplicity, he should, on the contrary, become aware of the complexity of the literary text, exemplified in the previous poems, seeking to explore, to the maximum, the potential of the language. To this end, the poet is advised to delve deeper into literature, reading as much as possible, approaching the classics and literature from all eras and cultures; for those who write in Portuguese, there is a need to prioritize literature expressed in that language and, for us, Brazilians, Brazilian literature from the Baroque to Post-Modernism.
Finally, since Antonio Candido's statement that literature is not only made by authors, but also by critics and readers, is true, no poet should disregard knowledge of literary theory, especially treatises on versification; since literature is made through language, it is essential to know grammar, linguistics, semiotics, and, in short, metalanguage.
*Seraphim Pietroforte is a full professor of semiotics at the University of São Paulo (USP). Author of, among other books, Visual semiotics: the paths of the gaze (Context). [https://amzn.to/4g05uWM]
REFERENCES
CANDIDO, Antonio (1981). The formation of Brazilian literature. (Vols. 1-2). Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia.
LOPES, Edward (1997). Metamorphoses. São Paulo: Unesp.
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