Serafim ao cubo, uma transcriação intersemiótica

Abstract

One of Oswald de Andrade's main and most radical books, Serafim Ponte Grande, was published in 1933 and only republished in 1971, having remained little read and investigated for many decades. Serafim is a paradigmatic case of Brazilian modernist literature in which the radicality of the “invention novel” can be seen when leafing through the book. A composite book due to the variety of writing styles and references to “a world of authors” in the construction of the book. This characteristic caused Seraphim to be compared to aesthetic procedures in cinema, visual arts, and even dance. The hypothesis we explore here is that Serafim Ponte Grande can be considered an intersemiotic transcreation of certain aesthetic patterns, or semiotic habits, from the synthetic phase of visual cubism. The analysis of this intermedial phenomenon in Serafim occurs through the concept of intersemiotic transcreation. However, our approach is not restricted to a verbal system translated into a non-verbal one, but the understanding that translation can happen in language systems of any nature. We use the notion of transcreation, by Haroldo de Campos, to analyze this process, since the approach focuses on a phenomenon attentive to the "materiality", or "physicality", of the translator/translated sign. In this way, we suggest that Seraphim is the result of the process of transcreating the physicality of synthetic cubism into literature.