“Morrerás de novo” : morte e memória em "Mundos paralelos" de Joaqui m Cardozo

Abstract

Recognized mainly for his work as an engineer, Joaquim Cardozo (1897 1978) from Pernambuco published his first work, Poems (1947), only at the age of 50. Although acclaimed by names s uch as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto and Antônio Houaiss, the poetry of the “bissexto habitualz”, as his fellow countryman Manuel Bandeira classified him, still lacks substantial studies. Among the works on poetic production, those t hat have Mundos Paralelos (1970) as an object of investigation are even rarer. Composed of 33 poems, distributed in five parts, Mundos Paralelos is a Cardozian work of diverse character, with very heterogeneous themes and aesthetic options. However, in a g eneral observation, it is possible to note that, with emphasis on the first part of the work, called “Requiem for an unnecessary life”, two themes permeate all its parts: death and memory. In view of this, this research established as a corpus the six poem s that are part of “Requiem for an unnecessary life”, with the aim of understanding the processes of materialization of death and memory and their possible effects of meaning. To this end, the work is divided into three chapters. Initially, in the first ch apter, there is a biographical discussion, with emphasis on his training as an engineer, his work as a mathematician alongside the architect Oscar Niemeyer and the admiration of great names in national literature for his poetry, ending with a survey of his critical fortune. The second chapter is dedicated to a theoretical reflection on death and memory, using the liturgy of the Requiem as a prism. Th e main support is the studies of Henri Bergson (1999) and Maurice Halbwachs (2013). Finally, in the last chap ter, based on the discussions established in the previous chapters, an analysis was carried out of the six poems that make up “Requiem for an unnecessary life”, understanding death and memory taking shape in these verses and concluding that they bring a li ttle of the ritual of the requiem, some of its sections as liturgy or employment in art to assert a lyrical self that confronts not only its mortal ity but also the lack of intrinsic meaning in its own life, a sense of helplessness and isolation resonates t hroughout the analyses, suggesting a frustrated search for an unattainable meaning.