A Poetics of Ignorance: António Ramos Rosa and Wallace Stevens

Abstract

I was probably the first person to write about António Ramos Rosa (1924–) in English (in Portugal or elsewhere). In the late 1970s, I started writing brief reviews of contemporary Portuguese literature for World Literature Today. The first of these reviews came out in the winter issue of 1979. The book reviewed was A palavra e o lugar (The Word and the Place), a selection of Ramos Rosa’s poetry from books published between 1960 and 1977. In those days, newly returned to Portugal after a PhD earned at Yale with a dissertation on Wallace Stevens under the supervision of Harold Bloom, I kept hearing echoes of Stevens in every contemporary poet that impressed me. Ramos Rosa was no exception. My wording in that first review, woven from scraps of my own translations of lines, or fragments of lines, of Ramos Rosa’s poetry, reverberated with Stevens’ images, concepts and figurations. Ramos Rosa’s poetry struck me both as a poetry of words and a poetry of ideas, and it was peopled with what immediately appeared to me as Stevensian rocks, green leaves, lamps, fires, houses, spaces, places-not-our-own and places-made-ours by the poet’s words, poverty, whiteness, deserts, absences, repetitions, wide waters, fertile barrenness, the speech of the mortal tongue and the innocence of fresh beginnings. Above all, the inconceivable, perceivable truth of the sun, so powerful in Stevens’ poetry and poetics, kept overflowing from Ramos Rosa’s poems as well.

You must become an ignorant man again

Wallace Stevens

… que os poetas podem compreender o mundo sem conceitos

(… that poets can understand the world without concepts)

Manoel de Barros

Estão na moda os círculos ignorantes

que só aceitam membros

com certificado de ignorância

(Ignorant circles are in style only members holding a certificate of ignorance are accepted)

Boaventura de Sousa Santos