Campos, Augusto de (1931–)

Augusto de Campos has earned a place as one of Brazil's foremost poets and translators of poetry (from the French, English, and other languages) as well as literary and music critics. Born on February 14, 1931, in São Paulo, he, his brother Haroldo de Campos, and Decio Pignatari formulated the mid-century avant-garde movement of Concrete poetry in Brazil, and he is a key figure in the development of material poetry and other experimental forms. His critical writings of the late 1960s prompted recognition of the poetry and experimentation in CAP-Música CAP-Popular Brasileira (MPB), especially tropicalismo. He is also an important critic of nonconventional art music, such as that of the American composer John Cage and twelve-tone (dodecaphonic) composers.

Campos's 1984 poem "pós-tudo" ("post-everything") mocked postmodernism as fashion and sparked a discussion of vanguard aesthetics. In the mid-1990s he began performing, declaiming texts (both his own poems and translations) with musical accompaniment (notably electric guitars and synthesizers) as well as video-digital graphic projections. He has made many texts available both as Web art on the Internet and as items recorded on disc. In 2004 his volume of computer-generated poetry, Não (No), was named Brazil's National Library book of the year, and the national cultural-heritage institution organized an event and multimedia retrospective to honor his work.

See alsoCampos, Haroldo de; Literature: Brazil; MPB: Música Popular Brasileira; Tropicalismo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aguilar, Gonzalo. Poesía concreta brasileña: Las vanguardias en la encrucijada modernista. Rosario, Argentina: B. Viterbo, 2003.

Perrone, Charles A. Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry since Modernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Süssekind, Flora, and Júlio Castañón Guimarães, eds. Sobre Augusto de Campos. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa / 7 Letras, 2004.

                                      Charles A. Perrone