A pedregosa luz da poesia ou a estética da ruína em Carlos de Oliveira

Abstract

Carlos de Oliveira made the landscape of his childhood, the Portuguese Gândara, his literary universe, writing it, describing, and repopulating it incessantly in his work. Faced with a landscape in constant ruin, memory, and symbol of a country, one perceives, from the release of Cantata (1960), a radical mirroring of this landscape in his work. Starting from Michel Collot’s ideas about the landscape and its interaction with the lyrical subject and the concepts of aesthetics of ruin in Sophie Lacroix, I intend to analyze two poems by the portuguese poet — “Soneto” from Cantata (1960) and “Casa” from Sobre o Lado Esquerdo (1968). I will try to emphasize, mainly, the  dialectic function of fire and light as builders and destroyers of realities, in addition to the close approximation of these elements with the language carried out by the author. In a process of “subject spacing”, Oliveira understands the end of the world that occurs every day in Gândara and in its houses as a primordial language to understand reality in its multiple possibilities, mainly in the absence, and promotes an “aesthetics of the fragment” in his literature, proposing formal fractures and diluting contours between subject, landscape, and poetry.