Registros de uma correspondência: as relações luso-brasileiras e a poética das metamorfoses em Jorge de Sena e Murilo Mendes

Abstract

Jorge de Sena and Murilo Mendes, throughout the exercises of their literary and critical works, very marked by other arts, maintained an interlocution of clear differences, in which they incorporated certain procedures and explored confluent themes, elucidating instigative possibilities in the Portuguese-Brazilian comparative relations. In this aspect, the present thesis proposes an analysis of the unprecedented correspondence between the two writers. Such interlocution is composed of 13 letters that were written from Murilo to Jorge de Sena; 1 from Murilo to Mécia de Sena; 2 by Maria da Saudade Cortesão Mendes for the couple Sena; 8 from Jorge de Sena to Murilo and 1 to Maria da Saudade. The 25 missives are analyzed through the lens of affective bias, and by the political and literary panorama presented by the two authors. In the configuration of a Portuguese-Brazilian associative axis, the articles from the Estudos de Cultura e Literatura Brasileira (1988) and poems by Pedra Filosofal (1950) written by Jorge de Sena are analyzed; while in Murilo Mendes is made an analysis of poems of História do Brasil (1932) and Bumba-meu-Poeta (1933), and the prose of Janelas Verdes (1970). In a second moment, an study of the concept of metamorphoses is made from the poems of Murilo Mendes As Metamorfoses (1944), and Metamorfoses (1963) by Jorge de Sena. The subject of metamorphoses is the key theme of this encounter, from its influence, with Ovid's Metamorphoses, to the transformational ideals of the avant-garde of the twentieth century, establishing itself as a literary parameter for the poetics of both. The sparse analysis of other works of poetry and prose of the authors is inserted in the conceptual project of metamorphoses in literature. In addition, the poets made contact with important writers and artists from different areas in the countries where they pilgrimed as speakers and teachers, reinforcing the idea of poetics of culture and experience, through the transformations in contact with the others and different landscapes. Thus, the reference of the metamorphoses configures the thematic specificities and the style of writing of the two poets in relation to the luso-Brazilian and cosmopolitan poetry of the twentieth century, in which both present the same critical and poetic themes with different treatments throughout their works.