Um assumido barroco”: Una vuelta a Medusario desde Brasil y Portugal

Abstract

Almost thirty years after the publication of Medusario (1996), a fundamental anthology of Latin American neo-baroque poetry, this article re-examines its legacy with a focus on the relevance and participation of Brazilian and Portuguese movements around the concept of neo-baroque. Based on the inclusion of Brazilian poets in this collection, the text problematises the scant attention that Latin American criticism has paid to baroque and neo-baroque traditions in the Portuguese language. It proposes that the recuperations of the baroque undertaken by Brazilian concretists and Portuguese experimental poets in the second half of the twentieth century shed light on aspects often neglected in the Hispanic American reception of the neo-baroque, such as visuality, combinatory play and the transgression of semiotic codes. In dialogue with authors such as Haroldo de Campos, Ana Hatherly and E. M. de Melo e Castro, it is argued that Portuguese experimental poetry offers an early response to objections raised in the critical apparatus of Medusario regarding syntactic suppression in concretism. Finally, the article argues that a broader neo-baroque genealogy —one that includes the Lusophone traditions— allows us to complexify the very notion of Latin American neo-baroque and to question its geo-cultural and linguistic limits.