It’s four in the afternoon and I step out to walk through the streets of downtown São Paulo, looking for what is left of a city I have not actually experienced but have imagined from Roberto Piva’s books. With a sense of nostalgia, I identify mythic street corners, revamped bars, buildings, parks, and statues, but time keeps grinding on and it weighs heavily on the landscape. That boy walking through Praça República, listening to that song “Deu Onda” for the umpteenth time, looks nothing like the kids who wandered around here sixty years ago, always carrying with them a book by Lorca, Artaud, Ginsberg, or Jorge de Lima. In a final, delirious attempt, I pause on a detail of the landscape: I look up, to the top of Edifício Copan, but Polén and Luizinho, spewing all the semen in the universe, aren’t there, either. The little that remains of that nostalgic delirium borne of reading a book may perhaps be found in the place where I’m headed, the second floor of number 108 on Avenida São João: the Roberto Piva Library. There they assemble the books, manuscripts, and other traces of an important poetic oeuvre that is more widely known because of its eccentric author’s cult status than because of a systematic study of his texts.
If we try to insert him in the history of Brazilian poetry beginning in the 1960s, Piva resists, a dissonant voice. But perhaps the silencing of his work ought to be reevaluated. When we read much of the bibliography about the author, we are left with the impression that the reception following the launch of Paranoia turned out to be a fairly isolated case: first, in the 1960s, there was a moralizing silence from critics in which they agreed to read him in direct association with Surrealism. Later, in the 1970s, there was the strange inclusion of his writing in the anthology organized by Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda with twenty-five other poets. In the following decades, there was the “co-optation” of his poetry by homoerotic literature. Finally, he would come to occupy his current position with the launch of his “Collected Works” by Editora Globo, which won over a far wider public and continues to be rediscovered.
People, especially the counterculture youth, never stopped reading his poetry. In several interviews he gave, what jumps out are certain expressions that he constantly used and that ended up becoming clichés about the reception of his work. In one of these statements, in a tone that oscillated between resentment and a certain pride, he claimed that he was not an outcast but that he had been marginalized, primarily because he had not united with the academic world or with the militant Left, and had thus remained outside of the most heated debates of his time. As a result of this marginalized status to which he might have been relegated, the idea still persists that it took decades before his work received widespread critical and editorial appreciation, culminating in the re-launch of an edition of Paranoia by the Instituto Moreira Salles in 2000.
To quite a degree, it is common for an outsider writer to maintain his outsider status as a kind of badge of pride, which in the end turns out to be a strategy for self-promotion through the logic of an inversion of values. Even this outsider position, therefore, could perhaps become a little more nuanced today, because it seems to be precisely Piva’s affinities with the counterculture that ensured (and still ensures) his current recognition in the Brazilian poetry scene.
As I enter the library space, where more than five thousand books are being sorted and placed on the shelves, I get a sense of the importance of maintaining this space, of keeping the unity of the author’s collection so that it may give way to a more coherent reading of his work. When asked about the failed attempt to sell the entire library to universities, both Gustavo Benini—the rights holder and Piva’s ex-partner—and Gabriel Kolyniak, editor at Córrego—the publishing house in charge of bringing out previously unpublished manuscripts—and in charge of the space on Avenida São João, call attention to bureaucracy and to the risk of the library being diluted within larger collections. They highlight the lack of interest on the part of universities in works about shamanism, candomblé, umbanda and the occult, which are all fundamental to understanding Piva’s poetry.
Piva used to say that poetry is always a shamanic expression, and in various interviews, he adopted Octavio Paz’s definition of poetry as a perversion of the body to justify this position. Perhaps the most important element he may have taken away from the Surrealists, the Beat generation, classics such as Dante and Rimbaud, Mircea Eliade’s shamanism, the shamanic chants of the Navajos, and various unorthodox works in his library, is the ability to transmute all his readings into an immersive experience, and only thus to transfer them into the body of the poem. Referring to the long hiatus between the publication of Piazzas and Abra os olhos & diga Ah! (Open your eyes & say Ah!), twelve years during which he stated that he had not written any poetry, Piva said that, since writing was so wearying, it became necessary to “fall into life, between one book and another, to collect experiences, to be able to transform, through alchemy, raw matter into the philosopher’s stone.”[1] Piva would also say that he did not believe in experimental poets who had not lived an experimental life. The following lines, which seem to point to a total and transparent identification between the poetic and empirical subject, are brought face to face with poetry that is a presentation (and not representation) of the biographical, in which there is always interference from the outside (his literary experiences and his lived or imagined experiences) in the composition of the poem. When we read a transmutation of a singular romantic encounter, whether imagined or actually experienced by Piva, in Ganimedes 76, for example, we are faced with a constant renewal of the art of the encounter that is elicited by each new reading of his poem:
Your smile
little eyes like black daisies
my love sailing through the afternoon
peach punch reflecting in your little eyes of soot
hairs bristled like a little god in a rococo hall
strength of a fragile body like anchors
me I also liked you
tomorrow then at 7
tomorrow at 7
it all begins now in a ritual, slow & surrounded by cloth gardenias
Your mad gaze traverses the clocks the fountains the afternoon in São Paulo
Like a spectacular desire so coked up with courage
ivory of your smile fra orizzonti perduti
I want you thus: burning angel in the embrace of the Landscape
Writing seems to have been a privileged way of dizzyingly sustaining the uniqueness of his desire, of giving infinite continuity to the pleasure of seduction, thus giving the reader the possibility of somehow experiencing this encounter. It is clear in his work that Piva is serious about the power of literature. There are certainly various literary references in his poetry, but Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Andrade, Dante, Sade, Lautréamont, Rilke, and Michaux, among so many others, appear less as signs of erudition than as marks of an encounter and of self-affirmation. These authors that Piva reads jump off the page, constantly transposed to the feverish city, to collective orgies; they are seen, through an eroticization of such intense magnitude, as mirrors of an ardent imagination. We need only think of how Mário de Andrade, for instance, becomes in his works a cursed as well as fully erotic character, stripped of the veneer of nationalism, wandering through São Paulo nights. All authors, books, and readings are conjured up to act out anarchically all over the city.
It is an oeuvre that, as Eliane Robert Moraes wrote in the foreword of the second volume of his “Collected Works,” sustains a poetic discourse that addresses the needs of the collective just as much as the innumerous demands of desire and endless drifts of hallucinations: it is astoundingly contemporary. In this attempt to equate aesthetic and existential forces, his singular poetic voice goes against all lifestyles that are based on morals through transgression, through homosexual relationships that oppose the reproductive and oppressive heterosexual coupling. It is a kind of writing that obsessively insists on the subversion of moral and aesthetic rules as a unique mode of traversing the twentieth century without aging, even though we know that unfortunately, anal intercourse, as well as any other form of transgression, cannot actually topple capitalism.
It is a challenge to manage the space thought up by Gabriel Kolyniak and a committee made up of Piva’s poet friends—Claudio Willer, Roberto Bicelli, and Antonio Fernando de Franceschi—but the initiative, with all the difficulties that could potentially arise, still seems to me a fundamental alternative to the conception of the writer’s library. No matter how much a renowned institution may offer better conditions to preserve the works, the wholeness and the atmosphere tend to get lost. Enthusiastic readers or researchers who frequent the library can circulate among all of Piva’s references at ease, feeling as if they belong to a community. If truth be told, even those who are not interested in Piva’s poetry may benefit from the initiative to make Piva’s library more accessible. During the two hours I spent with Gabriel, we talked a lot about Piva, of course, but we also talked about so many other texts, from Bataille’s editions to the Surrealists, to Aleister Crowley’s books; we also walked by shelves full of philosophy, Italian literature, and religion. My impression is that no reader could walk out without feeling touched by the strong character that this library manages to preserve.
In an interview with Ademir Assumpção (published in a book in the “Encounters” series by Azougue Editorial), Piva said that Oswald de Andrade knew that when a shaman dies, so does an entire living library. The context of this statement, which, for Oswald, is connected to the importance of preserving indigenous culture, clearly clashes with what I am about to state. However, I believe that, perhaps, we can twist Oswald’s statement around and consider that when a library such as Roberto Piva’s is reborn—especially through each reader bringing his legacy to the present—a shaman is also reborn with it. It is necessary, though, to put aside the tales that surround the author of Paranoia, to effectively start reading his works, seeking to understand how the author’s discourse about his own writing may at times weaken the reading of his poetry. His unpublished works and his collection are of utmost importance to bolster the readings that are beginning to develop.
Adapted and translated from the Portuguese by Nathalie Stahelin and Maíra Mendes Galvão.
Originally published in Suplemento Pernambuco on April 26, 2017.
Photo credit to Maíra Mendes Galvão.
Juliana Bratfisch was born in 1987, in São Paulo, Brazil. An essayist and literary critic, she has published in Suplemento Pernambuco and Folha de São Paulo. She focuses on the study of contemporary poetry and working toward her doctoral research with the Department of Literary Theory and History at Unicamp-University of Campinas.
Nathalie Stahelin is a São Paulo-based translator, writer, and English teacher with a strong interest in the arts, urban culture, history, and literature. She holds a B.A. in English from Vassar College, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Journalism from the London School of Journalism, and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Translation and Interpretation from Associação Alumni, São Paulo. She has worked in event organizing, communications for NGOs, PR for artists and musicians, and documentary research and production.
Maíra Mendes Galvão is a Brazilian translator and poet, as well as Editor-at-Large, Brazil for Asymptote.
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Read more about Brazil from Asymptote:
- Translation Tuesday: Poems by Roberto Piva
- Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet and the destruction of the “I”
- Reevaluating the Urgent Political Relevance of 20th Century Brazilian Novelist Lima Barreto
[1] From the book Os dentes da memória, by Camila Hungria and Renata D’Elia. Editora Azougue, p. 94