Tag: writing

Goethe, in the Conversations, regrets having allowed himself to be seduced by the design of the “great work”. He says he knows how much it has harmed him, and regrets that he has allowed himself to block his mind for its valiant spontaneous manifestations which, although they demanded attention, had to be discarded for the sake of the greater goal. Understandable… it is not hard to admit that something is lost due to this need for concentration of effort that is imperative for the creation of a “major work”, as Goethe says. But perhaps it is a fair price, as perhaps it is risky to bet all one’s chips on a fragmentary, occasionally inspired work. Much of Goethe derives from Faust, and if he lost something by creating it, well, he gained it after all! It is very difficult to fully adhere to the recommendation to avoid the “great works” when we see that the best of the great authors have come from them. If, on the one hand, it is very justly observed that they are dangerous, and that perhaps they are not indicated for the majority of artists, on the other hand, in some cases it seems extremely beneficial to channel efforts toward a single purpose.

Although I particularly appreciate rhymed verse, I would never endorse Bilac and Guimarães Passos, who maintained “that in any verse composition one must not prescind from rhyme. It is indispensable”. There are several reasons for this. But one of them deserves special mention. I do not know how the aforementioned poets composed, but it seems necessary to me, after skipping the whole process of ideation of the poem, that a draft be made of it. If I want to make rhymes, then I first sketch the poem in blank verse, to then concentrate on the rhythm, the rhymes, and the careful selection of words. I realize clearly that if I were to worry about rhymes at this point in the draft, it would only hinder my creative impulse, interrupting the flow of ideas to open a dictionary, something absolutely counterproductive. Therefore, I have to conclude that this creative impulse, in its spontaneous form, calls for manifestation in blank verse—not to say free verse. Well then: I know that not every great artistic effect is spontaneous, quite the contrary, as almost all the brilliance of a work comes from carefully thought out details. Rhyme, therefore, although an artificiality, is justified. But practice shows, time and time again, that to rhyme verses is to adulterate them, and even though one may gain in beauty by doing so, that initial naturalness is lost. Finally, I get where I want to go. There will be verses in which the poet will be so stimulated that he will feel himself emotionally pouring his soul out onto the paper; verses that will come out like an avalanche, that will express his innermost self and will spring forth with a momentum and sharpness different from what he normally creates. I am not sure how much is gained by rhyming such verses, I mean, it seems to me that the poet who deforms them to fit formalities may commit a crime against himself and insult the very singular moment in which he conceived them.

Everything indicates that I will complete a whole year of exclusive dedication to fifteen miserable poems or, more precisely, to about one thousand seven hundred verses. Laugh, Hugo, laugh! And, at the end of the process, there will be no publication, because it is necessary for the verses to rest—although it seems that this is what they have been doing in the last months. Were these notes not a very efficient way to give vent to the ideas that come and pile up, I would be faced with an impregnable mountain of annotations. I have, at the bottom, some forty perfectly idealized short stories that require no more than a day’s work to be realized on paper. Besides, I do not know how many plots for novels, plays, or whatever. Even for poems, there are excesses that could not be used in this volume. And I am left wondering how, in the past, artists who did not have secretaries would organize themselves after ten, twenty years of creative work. Without a computer, it seems to me that I would be forced to give up…