De Campos

I do not guide because I do not guide because
I can not guide and don't ask me for mementos
just dwell on this moment and demand my
commandment and do not fly just defy
do not confide defile for between yes and no
I for one prefer the no in the knowing of yes
place the no in the ee of me
place the no the no will be yours to know.
-- Haroldo de Campos, tr. A. S. Bessa

The poet resists exporting; resists, that is, becoming dependent on what’s exportable. At the same time, the poet resists importing; resists, that is, developing a subsidiary relation to the powerful literatures beyond. Trancreation is a means of appropriating and remaking in one’s own right. In the process, the work made becomes refractory, opaque. It must itself be translated and yet it can’t be translated. De Campos’s translations are not subsidiary or secondary to some original but have themselves become original work. De Campos’s elaborations and extensions around a shifting center are the Baroque element of his work, with its insistence on the materiality of its languages and holding to its own specific gravity. It comes to this: de Campos’s work resists translatability through its cultural and linguistic thickness. In this way, de Campos reverses any reductive understanding of his internationalism. The work exemplifies what de Campos calls concretion, in contradistinction to "concrete": a neo-Baroque complexity that stands with its back askew to the internationally absorbable simplification represented by his best-known work, his primary export item, "Concrete Poetry." The work of de Campos is a dream of and by translation, but with no bottom language.

--Charles Bernstein

Posted over on Jerome Rothenberg's site Poems & Poetics