Baudelaire transposed by Eduardo Guimaraens

Abstract

Mentioned by Antonio Candido at the beginning of the essay “The first Baudelaireans” as an author who emerged immediately after the height of Baudelaire's influence in Brazil, Eduardo Guimaraens (1892-1928) was an obsessed reader and an astute researcher of the French poet's principles. Attentive to the notion of rhythm at different levels, Guimaraens achieved an intense path with the original forms and rhythms when translating 83 poems from Les Fleurs du mal into Portuguese, maintaining many alexandrines and the equivalence of low and high rhymes. Inspired by the architectural duality of Les Fleurs du mal, according to Lawler (1997), Guimaraens chose this alternation as the basis for structuring his book of poems Divina Quimera (1916). Furthermore, in seven prose poems published in the magazine “Fon-Fon!” in 1914, still little known today, he employed strategies similar to Baudelaire's in Petits poèmes en prose, such as repetitions, pauses, assonances and variations in sentence length, projecting something of the resonance of poetry onto the prose sequence. By adopting this last form of composition, Guimaraens – like Baudelaire – assumed interpretative instability as a literary project, pushing suspension and tension to an even more uncertain level than that produced by the alternation of themes, rhythms and approaches in the arrangement of the poems in a book. This article therefore analyzes these three ways in which Eduardo incorporated Baudelaire's work – translation, structuring the book of poems and producing poems in prose – and discusses how they intertwine.