galáxias

Haroldo de Campos (trans. Odile Cisneros)

Begun in 1963 and only published in its final form in 1984, galáxias is a sui generis work. As Haroldo de Campos himself wrote: “An audiovideotext, a videotextgame, the galáxias situate themselves on the border between prose and poetry. In this kaleidoscopic book, there’s an epic, narrative gesture—mini-stories that come together and dissolve like the ‘suspense’ of a detective novel … but the image remains, the vision or calling of the epiphanic.” A series of 50 “galactic cantos”—in homage to both Dante and Pound—de Campos likewise follows James Joyce’s cue in conceiving of galáxias as a “defense and illustration” of the Portuguese language and its poetic possibilities. The text incorporates literary allusion, citation, and words and phrases in at least a dozen languages, making galáxias a formidable experiment in polyglot poetry. galáxias charts the literal and literary journeys de Campos undertook from the early 1950s on. Arguably his chief poetic accomplishment, galáxias is also a landmark in world avant-garde poetics.

'Haroldo de Campos’s epic and epiphanic galáxias finds the poetic in prose and the narrative in poetry, demonstrating again why he was one of the liveliest and most original poets of his generation in Brazil or elsewhere. Like 100 mini-kaleidoscopes, or travel stories, or “videotextgames,” to echo de Campos, galáxias anticipates the best of our current social media world but with an unmatched vision and verve.' – John Keene