“A máquina do mundo” in 3D

Drummond, reader of W.H. Auden

Abstract

Critics interpret the poem “A Máquina do Mundo,” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in regard to its use of intertextuality, as a poem marked by a subliminal dialogue with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and with Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas. In contrast to this repeated interpretation of the poem, I will try to demonstrate the hypothesis that the scenario of “A Máquina do Mundo” was built and imagined from a re-reading of the scenario of the poem “As I Walked Out One Evening,” by Wystan Hugh Auden. Drummond made a scenographic adaptation of the poem by W. H. Auden. The similarities between the scenarios are evident by use of the following devices: (a) the opening setting of Auden’s poem (in which a wanderer walks along a street and is faced with a mechanical and epiphanic vision) is reused by Drummond; (b) the dark and almost nocturnal atmosphere of Vespers, accompanied by the ringing of church bells or the chiming of clocks, is common to both poems; (c) the dialogical structure of the machines that speak and reveal mysteries is common to both texts; (d) the eschatological narrative at the denouement of the poems is also very similar. I conclude that the similarity between the scenarios of the two poems makes evident the differences between the Christian perspective of W.H. Auden’s poem and the absurdist perspective of Drummond’s poem.