The hymn to mathematics in the songs of maldoror, by Lautréamont

• Autor(a) principal: Fontes, Joaquim Brasil
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Zetetiké (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/zetetike/article/view/8646554
• topic: Hymn to mathematics; The Songs of Maldoror; Lautréamont; Modern poetry; Education; Math; Music; Os cantos de Maldoror; Lautréamont; Poesia moderna; Hino às matemática(s); Educação; Matemática e Artes

Printed in 1869, in Brussels, The Songs of Maldoror would not come into circulation during the author’s lifetime, who was born in Montevideo and died when he was twenty--four years old, in Paris, which was under siege by the Prussian army: they would be read and commented during the belle époque, only by small groups of Belgian symbolists and of French decadents. Rediscovered by the surrealists during the Second World War, the Songs, however, would be quickly transformed into one of the keys to understanding our modernity and are nowadays considered one of the most radical accomplishments of the literature of cruelty, after Sade and before Artaud.Written in poetic prose, this book contains six songs divided into an irregular number of stanzas, permeated with speeches derived from conflicting horizons, but mixed up in a great “verbal magma”: narrative, drama, lyricism with voices from 19th century Science often echoing in this, we might say, “literary” text, by means of radiant images and extraordinary scenes, such as a girl’s rape transformed into a macabre “anatomy lesson” by the author, albeit situated in the framework of traditional locus, that of the locus amoenus, or pleasant place, well known since Homer and Virgil. This article presents a commented and contextualized Portuguese translation of the “Hymn to (the) mathematics”, included in the second song of The Songs of Maldoror, by Lautréamont: a segment of serenity, knowledge and grace unexpectedly emerging in the heart of a violent, ferocious and incandescent verbal universe.