Luciano Duarte

For a long time, I got used to staring at the unpleasant wall in front of my house from the window. There it all is: vandalism, uniform chromaticity, fear materialized in sharp fences… And I, obsessive, would be able to represent it, by hand, at an impressive level of detail. Above, the electrical pollution; in the background, the broken window… Every day I look, and every day, for years, I find the same landscape. And then I discover that, as I look up, there is a different view…

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Read more:

• History of Western Literature, by Otto Maria Carpeaux
• ABC of Reading, by Ezra Pound
• The Philosophy of Composition, by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Best of All Times

The letters historically play the role of preventing life from being completely swept away from the Earth when the matter is reached by death. Works, records: by them something, and perhaps most important, is preserved from being punished by fate. I think of this 21st century. There has been, among many other things, an enormous widening in the options of means for the transmission of knowledge and the recording of existence. The ease of access and operation of these means has reached unimaginable levels and has certainly solved problems. However, it is a task that seems almost impossible to pinpoint what there is of value amid tons of waste produced and published daily. How to filter? How to identify and establish a reasonable judgment on what will overcome the barriers of time? It seems unfeasible and it seems, above all, that an unprecedented number of valuable works will be lost forever.

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Read more:

• Victor Hugo’s Lesson
• Slaves of Praise
• The Traditional Melodic and Rhythmic Elements of Poetry
• Some Say There Is Poetry Without Rhythm…

When the monument that constitutes the work of Otto Maria Carpeaux and the rest of Brazilian literary criticism are flanked, it is impossible not to be surprised that there is not a single biographical study worthy of the great intellectual who gave Brazilian critics the only work of universal value that they have. Silence. I think what would happen if Carpeaux, instead of settling in Brazil, had chosen the United States and did, in English, what he did in Portuguese. The smile is automatic. But why Brazil? Why, at the age of forty, break away from his language and dedicate himself to learning and writing in a language unknown until then? And the very difficult, not to say impossible, was erected: the sterile national literary criticism won an immortal colossus as a gift. What did it do with the gift? Nothing, absolutely nothing.

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Read more:

• History of Western Literature, by Otto Maria Carpeaux
• História de Dom Pedro II, by Heitor Lyra [2]
• Endless Injustices
• The Repression of the Subconscious