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Imagens do Poético em Alphonsus de Guimaraens by Francine Fernandes Weiss Ricieri

2018; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/port.2018.0026

2222-4270

Rafael Mendes,

Literature, Culture, and Criticism

Reviews 121 chapters becomes in some parts — due to the difficulty of the material presented — slightly repetitive. The interweaving of Spanish and Portuguese original excerpts in the narrative is a recommendable methodological model. Together with the English translations following each Spanish or Portuguese text, however, the thread of the respective paragraph sometimes loosens up. Having worked on festivals in Minas Gerais myself, I dare to say that Lisa Voigt might have taken some secondary sources too much for granted. To give just one example: stating that the Guerra dos Emboabas in Minas Gerais was a civil war (p. 58) is not incontrovertible, judging from the literature. Furthermore, I miss a discussion of the relation between skin colour and the proximity to slavery in the Brazilian case, or a more diversified view on the issue of class. Spectacular Wealth is not only of interest to those working on colonial festivals in South America, but is a valuable source for historians, anthropologists, sociologists, theatrologists, musicologists and others working on phenomena resulting from Spanish and Portuguese colonization. Voigt has succeeded in bringing together first-hand eighteenth-century festival accounts with secondary sources and theories on diverse aspects of culture in colonial South America into a seamless narrative. Francine Fernandes Weiss Ricieri, Imagens do Poético em Alphonsus de Guimaraens (São Paulo: Editora FAP-UNIFESP/EDUSP, 2014), 264 pages. Print. Reviewed by Rafael Mendes, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro The lyrical writing of Alphonsus de Guimaraens (1870–1921) is rich in expansive possibilities: of the senses, of realities, of perceptions — of possibilities, in sum. His poetic universe is full of vague implications and subtle clarities and is governed by a complex, multifaceted subjectivity that transits between the suggestiveness of his dream-universe and the edge of insanity. Any critical study of his work requires, therefore, a painstaking effort of discursive materialization. Yet this task also requires a structure that accords with the poet’s work, in order that there be no conflict or disagreement between poetry and critique (the latter also an art). In our condition as readers, we can recognize that the talent and the astuteness of Francine F. W. Ricieri, a postdoctoral researcher in Brazilian Literature at Unicamp, succeed on both counts, giving us a work of literary criticism that is both ample and precise. A Brazilian exponent of symbolist aesthetics (together with his peer Cruz e Sousa), Alphonsus de Guimaraens is traditionally read in association with the poetry of Paul Verlaine, one of his overt influences. It is not rare for the poet to mention the loss of his fiancée, still a teenager when she died, this loss being a fundamental theme of a considerable part of his poetic production. The poet’s biography and the influence of Verlaine are part of the first problematics Ricieri presents in her study. Reviews 122 Seeking to expand the appreciation of the poet’s work, normally limited to a few select themes such as musicality, religiosity, mysticism and its confessional character, Ricieri addresses not only the poet’s verse but also his prose writings, which, she believes, reveals the ‘multiplicidade de uma escrita até então apreciada como uniforme’ [multiplicity of a writing hitherto considered uniform] (p. 19), showing, for example, a hitherto unrecognized humour. In this way Ricieri’s critique explores the epigraph from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard with which it shrewdly begins: ‘On ne fait pas de poésie au sein d’une unité: l’unique n’a pas de propriété poétique’ [We do not write poetry if we are confined to a single note, for the single note has no poetic property]. It is important to mention this French thinker because his critical method inspires Ricieri’s own work, which, following his example, explores the duplicities and ambivalences to be found in Alphonsus de Guimaraens’s writing. After a brief but dense recapitulation of the most important elements in the poet’s critical reception, the author dedicates herself to discussing, not the biographical elements already exhausted elsewhere, but the ‘dinâmica das imagens poéticas’ [dynamic of poetic images] forged by the poet (p. 41). This project constitutes the following five chapters of her work. In...