Poetics of “República de Curitiba”, “sour orange”,“sterile corncob”, “eternal shame”: Sixty-Eight Dalton Trevisan

Abstract

Beginning with the expression “República de Curitiba”, carved out by Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, who was arrested last april in the city of Curitiba and who figures as a character of this essay, I propose a reflection about the relation between literature and politics from the writer Dalton Trevisan’s works, who in 1968 published two books in one (Desastres do Amor and Mistérios de Curitiba) by Civilização Brasileira editor Ênio Silveira. Taking as its main object the text in a biblical profane mood dedicated to the destruction of the city that opens the second book, “Lamentações de Curitiba”, a relation is postulated between the unsheathed swords in the “Lamentações” and during the movement students rallies fifty years ago in Rio de Janeiro, with a high engagement of the intellectual class, that provoked the hardening of the militar regime in power since 1964. Dalton Trevisan’s tales are seen in the perspective of Blanchot’s writing of the disaster and according to Bataille’s notion of poetry as life-death together with the prose and poetry fusion read in Waldman’s and Agamben’s works.