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Haroldo de Campos (19 August 1929, São Paulo – 16 August 2003, São Paulo) was a Brazilian poet, critic, and translator. He did his secondary education at the College of St. Benedict, where he learned the first foreign language, like Latin, English, Spanish and French. He and his brother Augusto de Campos, together with Décio Pignatari, formed the poetic group Noigandres that published the experimental journal of the same name, which would launch the Brazilian movement of poesia concreta (concrete poetry). Harold received his doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of USP, under the guidance of A
Haroldo de Campos (19 August 1929, São Paulo – 16 August 2003, São Paulo) was a Brazilian poet, critic, and translator. He did his secondary education at the College of St. Benedict, where he learned the first foreign language, like Latin, English, Spanish and French. He and his brother Augusto de Campos, together with Décio Pignatari, formed the poetic group Noigandres that published the experimental journal of the same name, which would launch the Brazilian movement of poesia concreta (concrete poetry). Harold received his doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of USP, under the guidance of Antonio Candido, having been a professor at PUC-SP, as well as the University of Texas at Austin. His biography was included in the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1997 and was the winner of the Premio Octavio Paz de Poesia y Ensayo, Mexico, in 1999.
Brazilian writer Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna, talking about Haroldo and his brother, said: "The Campos brothers are wonderful people, but they have such an overwhelming erudition—they know Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Latin—that a young poet, the poor thing, coming to them with barely half a dozen thoughts, has nothing to say. One ends up merely listening, because after all their theorization is very fascinating… I find them very good poets… What I don’t like about the attitude of the Concretes [i.e. Concretist poets, the Campos] is that for them there is only 1956: the Concretism. They crossed out the dissident concretists, they’re not aware of neoconcretism (1956), the Praxis does not exist for them, the process-poem has no meaning. And don't even talk about "Violão de rua". They only got interested in Tendência (1957) because they had to join the bandwagon of the tumultuous period of Joao Goulart… The Campos have severely reduced their area of activity—they’re entitled to do this, of course—they programmed everything, when they reached a degree of international [exposure], for economic reasons, they reduced domestic contact. It’s a matter of personal choice."
He translated some of the most important literature of the Western tradition into Portuguese, such as Homer's Iliad, prose by James Joyce and poetry by Mallarmé. When he died he left unfinished a translation of Dante's Comedia, a manuscript that Umberto Eco had a chance to read, which compelled him to say that "Haroldo de Campos is the best Dante translator in the world".The translation, according to Haroldo de Campos, is much more than move text from one language to another. Elements of the structure of the poem, like the rhythm and sound combinations (rhyme, assonance, etc.) are often more important than the semantics of words.His translations include poetry, Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Hebrew texts.He translated, big names of world literature, as Goethe (German), Ezra Pound, James Joyce (English), Mayakovsky (Russian), Mallarmé (French), Dante (Italian) and Octavio Paz (Spanish) .
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Tags: Brilliant (1), Great (1), Writer (1), Genius (1), Brazilian (1), Deceased (1), Poet (1), Translator (1), Grand (1), Winner Of The Jabuti (1), Concretist (1), Born In 1929 (1)
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