Mundéu and Limite
Octávio de Faria. Translated from Portuguese. Page 10 of Cine-Clube.
Two of our greatest poets, Mário de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira, have already recognized Mário Peixoto’s Mundéu as a revelation of the first order, one of the few books of verse among us that truly belongs to a “poet.”
I do not think there is anything to debate here. Nor am I interested at present in analysing the poetic merits of these poems. They stretch and unfold with incredible speed, breaking all that exists into countless images which reflect one another and unite in powerful rhythms. Unfortunately, “modernist” enthusiasms occasionally make themselves felt (in “Jongo,” for example), but far more often the poems are filled with such poetic feeling that at times they arrive at an extraordinary apprehension of nature’s innermost rhythms.
I want to recall something else: for all the book’s virtues, it was not Mundéu that “revealed” Mário Peixoto as a poet. Long before it, Limite had shown him to be a poet who expressed himself in images.
And if the poet achieved much in Mundéu, he achieved still more in Limite. The more often one sees this film, the more extraordinary it appears through its capacity to express thought in images and through its poetic power. In this respect, despite all its remarkable poems, Mundéu does not attain the same height.
In images as in verse, Mário Peixoto “feels” nature as few poets do; this is the whole meaning of both Mundéu and Limite as they stand before us. It was not by chance that Mário de Andrade, in his remarkable essay on Mundéu, saw “the earth” as one of the book’s central elements.
Yet it seems to me that this obsession with “the earth,” with nature, is far stronger in Limite. Embodied in images, it reaches a degree of anguish and tragedy attained by only a few poems in Mundéu. It is difficult to forget the intensely “pantheistic,” if one may call it that, drama evoked and absorbed by the image of the Grande Curva (“Great Bend”). Even more expressive, in my view, are the images of nature torn from the great scenes of Limite. The tragedies of Mundéu seem less significant, all its rhythms weaker, when one follows the three ruined lives in Limite: they seem to lose themselves amid a convulsed natural world in which, at times, a kind of “aesthetic mimicry” blends them with natural elements likewise seized by despair.
There can be no doubt: one who knows how to reveal nature in those moments of anguish when we seem to recognize ourselves in the cries of twisted trees and the waves of a raging sea—this “flesh” that is the very centre of human despair—is truly a “poet,” whether expressing himself in images or in verse.
Everything in the film and in the poems reveals the same poet. If Mário Peixoto’s images slowly assemble themselves into genuine poems, his poems are likewise images joining one another with extraordinary speed, as in these lines:
Salvina fugida
porteira aberta
mato amassado
malungo
e a rêde crua
grande
Salvina fled
open gate
crushed undergrowth
malungo
and the raw net
vast
Despite the “speed” of Mundéu, so unlike the slow, desperate technique of Limite, it is inevitably the film one thinks of when linking together images such as these, which have just “passed” before our eyes.
The poet is unquestionably present in both book and film. Yet it is the cinematic poet who seems greater to me: he feels more keenly the “earth” and the “mystery” of which Mário de Andrade spoke.
Translator’s Notes
- Grande Curva may be the title of one of the poems in Mundéu. Without the book’s table of contents this cannot be established conclusively, so the original and a literal translation are both given.
- Malungo is a Brazilian word of African origin meaning “companion” or “fellow traveller,” and historically also a companion aboard a slave ship. It remains untranslated in the poem because the context does not permit a single choice.
- The phrase espécie de “mimetismo” estético is rendered as “a kind of ‘aesthetic mimicry’.” The author’s quotation marks indicate that the term is provisional.