galáxias

Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos’s latest book in English, galáxias, translated by Odile Cisneros, is described by the author as a “travelogue of sorts […] and a quest of origins: the origins of the world and the origins of language.” Composed of 50 fragments, each about 40 lines in length, galáxias records two different kind of journeys: one across Europe and the United States, and the other through language itself. This sense of Campos’s poems as staging a complex encounter between elements of form and meaning is echoed in the translator’s note, in which Cisneros brings up the difficulty of translating a book whose “form and content are inseparable.”

In the first poem, the lines appear to travel at a breakneck speed, the sounds and the rhythm forcing a kind of rapid, relentless jaunt. And yet, the content of the poem has to do with hesitation, ambivalence, and uncertainty: 

where to write about writing’s not writing about not writing
and so i begin to unspin the unknown unbegun and tracing
    a book
where all’s chance and perchance all a book or perchance not a
    travel 
navel-of-the-world book a travel navel-of-the-book world where
    tripping’s the book 
and its being the trip and so i begin since the trip is beguine

Campos’s poems often play with undermining a settled point of view. In one fragment, the reader is tossed between an object, a person, and an insect, each with a different view of reality: “a ciphered red-winged / butterfly that when closed is a book and when open a woman and reads herself / who notices the erosion of texts who records the quiet sea storms.” At the same time, Campos insists on the “oral nature” of the text. As Cisneros puts it, “'obscure' passages become transparent when read.” Indeed, Cisneros’s translations recast Campos’s philosophical conundrums and intricate images such that reading the English out loud extracts a vivid clearness: “arch of another arch of another arch breeds plumes of shadows and grills of / chiaroscuro the air opens up.”