Augusto de Campos

1931, São Paulo, Brazil. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

 

Augusto de Campos is one of the key figures of concrete poetry in Brazil, as well as an essayist, translator and literary and musical critic. His artistic creation is pervaded by experimentation with language, through the idea of unity among the various communicational resources, such as words, sound and image. His visual poems and poem-objects marked the 1960s and 1970s, definitively positioning him in the artistic vanguard in Brazil. From 1990 onward, he intensified his experiments with the new media, presenting his poems in different communication channels, such as electronic billboards, video text, neon signs, holograms, lasers, computer graphics, and in multimedia events, with which he has worked until today.

 

Active since the late 1940s, in 1952 he launched the literary magazine Noigandres, together with his brother Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari, introducing the international movement of concrete poetry in Brazil. In 1956, he participated in the Primeira Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta no Brasil, at the Museu de Arte Moderna of São Paulo. His most emblematic projects, which have been studied until today, include Viva Vaia (1949/1979) and the poem-objects in partnership with artist Julio Plaza, Poemóbiles (1974) and Caixa Preta (1975). Also in 1975, he produced Pulsar, a poem that is part of the series Stelegramas (1975–78), considered the artist’s first “poema constelação” [constellation poem] and one of his best examples of poetic construction. His poems have been gathered in the volumes Despoesia (1993), Não (2003) and Outro (2015). As a translator, he has worked with the writings of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, E.E. Cummings, Vladimir Maiakovski, Marina Tsvetaeva, Arnaut Daniel, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud and others. Augusto de Campos was recently conferred the international prizes Prêmio Ibero-Americano de Poesia Pablo Neruda, 2015, and the Grande Prêmio de Poesia Janus Pannonius, 2017.