Time, memory and trauma in poems by Ferreira Gullar and Manuel Alegre

Abstract

The article establishes a comparative reading of the poems Espelho do guardaroupa, by Ferreira Gullar, and O Cristo, by Manuel Alegre, focusing on time, memory and trauma. The problem addressed is the “tell-sing” crisis, the traumatic memory with its “anomalous” time. In both poems, the poetic language seeks in its formal constitution mechanisms to deal with the difficulty of representing the “real”. We intend to demonstrate in this work that the confrontation of the crisis between the impossibility of “saying” and the traumatic demand for “remembering” is presented as its transposition and aesthetic transfiguration in the poem itself. The theoretical and critical grounding focuses on studies by Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Giorgio Agamben, Ecléa Bosi and Hugo Friedrich.

Keywords

• lírica
• testemunho
• trauma
• manuel alegre
• ferreira gullar.