Signature, erasure, poeture: deserratum for Augusto de Campos

Abstract

The choice of a “dead language” and the idiosyncratic spelling in one’s own mother tongue, overwritten in the image of two indeterminate figures (something and someone), make the Greek title (οὔτις) and the Portuguese text (NO ONE) “unreadable” in the first instance, proposing the poem as a kind of trobar clus, a “dark” or “closed” (occluded) work, as the shadows in the background suggest. However, the poem is almost translucent: oútis means “nothing” and “nobody”, literally translated in the text and photography, in an indexical (Peirce) and constatative (Austin) form. How is this performative contradiction explained? In what sense will this strange text be called (or not) “literature”? What can this poem tell us about the poetry of Augusto de Campos in general?

Keywords: visual poetry; painting; mimesis; performance; translation