Uma anedota de Vinicius de Moraes e João Cabral de Melo Neto: do coração e do cérebro

Abstract

Based on an event between Vinicius de Moraes and João Cabral de Melo Neto, the essay addresses an anecdote that, concerning a double caricature between the heart and the brain, intrinsically concerns the history of Brazilian poetry and its developments in the last decades of the 20th century, dealing with a certain paradigm of thought of Western modernity that crosses avant-garde positions: reason X heart (or: antimusical X musical; non-lyrical X lyrical; construction X spontaneity; intellectualism X sentimentality etc. etc. etc.). In addition to thematizing the meaning of what an anecdote is, the text seeks to go through oral and written narratives from which the respective anecdote was and continues to be told and constructed. It is not the intention of this essay to think or rethink the poetry of Cabral or Vinicius in a new key, much less to think of it as against the reading that the former carries out of himself and his friend, but dealing only with the anecdote in question and, consequently, with a caricature.