Poetamenos by Augusto de Campos: an intersemiotic transcreation of Anton Von Webern's Klangfarbenmelodie

Abstract

Poetamenos, the main precursor of concretism in Brazil, is an intersemiotic transcreation of Anton Webern’s Klangfarbenmelodie. It is a series of six poems written by Augusto de Campos between 1952 and 1953. The transcreation of the serial music technique is related to the end of the historical cycle of the verse and provides a rigorous and creative method to the “evolutionary line” indicated by the concretists. According to our arguments, Poetamenos reveals (i) a dialectical understanding of the sound-silence tension through the fragmentation, dispersion and accumulation of letters, syllables, and lexical structures; (ii) the formal and methodological rigor developed by Webern; (iii) the effects of Webernian serialism in the 1950s, which entered Brazil thanks to Hans-Joachim Koellreutter. We also conclude that the use of graphic-spatial, plurilingual and polychromatic procedures does not have a precise correspondence with compositional components of serialism, nor with any of Webern's works in particular, as many authors claim.

Keywords:
Poetamenos ; Augusto de Campos; Anton Webern; Klangfarbenmelodie ; intersemiotic transcreation