CONCRETE "HAGOROMO": POEM PLAY

Abstract

Taking in consideration the ancient relation between the Japanese poetic art and the visual arts represented by painting and calligraphy, as well as the relative modernity of this use in ocidental art with the concretist movement, I analyze in the present article the application exerted by Haroldo de Campos of spacing, diagramming, and other methods of concrete poetry, as to their meaning in his transcreation of the noh play Hagoromo, by Zeami. Campos, making use of his own experience as a poet, resorted to the above-mentioned methods as compensation for the poetic effects present in the original’s calligraphy and ideographic writing; specifically, he lined up the aesthetic information of spacing with calligraphy, as well as the poetic concentrations for the translation of ideograms. I use as references the theory of Campos himself, and also writings from Darci Kusano, Paulo Warth Gick and Shuichi Kato, to point the similarity of these visual strategies and their cultural importance.