Anti-Surrealism? Augusto de Campos “Untranslates” Spanish-American Poetry

Abstract

This article focuses on translations by Augusto de Campos in which he integrates select Spanish-American poets into his Brazilian poetics and highlights the most linguistically experimental aspects of that canon. Campos applies techniques of fragmentation and negation in his intraduções as he calls his creative translations. I analyze selections he translated from Spanish-American modernista and vanguardista poets to demonstrate that these works bridge a gap between diverging poetic traditions of Latin America and invite readers to imagine a different historical trajectory for pan-Latin American experimental poetry. The alternative tradition these translations construct is more inclusive of Brazilian poetics and circumvents the surrealist moment to instead pass through early avant-garde language experimentation directly to concrete poetry.