Contemporaneity and composition: João Cabral de Melo Neto writes Joan Miró

Abstract

This work focuses on the relation between a contemporary notion of contemporaneity and an aspect of the composition procedure of João Cabral de Melo Neto's poetry, in the light of the reading that the poet from Pernambuco made of Joan Miró in a 1949 essay. It is intended to show the way in which Cabral - far from the will to rupture of 22 Modernism, and away from both the exoticism implicit in the paradigm of the modernist journey of "Brazil's discovery" and its possible dialectic of colonization reverberations - elaborates his poetry as an anachronic power of imagination, in which events, beyond their transcendence, are written as contingent commotions that tend to multiply their origins, rather than merely recording them. Finally, the paper will reflect about the singular composition of the Cabraline poem as an assembly, or reassembly, of heterogeneous temporalities, an areal meditation or a poetry making with "things" in which simultaneity complains, rather than guarantee temporal synchrony with the present, the contemporaneity or survival of voices silenced by a catastrophic civilization.