Cadernos de Rosa: uma lição benjaminiana sobre a arte da linguagem

Abstract

Though mainly a story-teller, Guimarães Rosa developed a very sophisticated language style to build up his narratives, combining the somewhat archaic rural speech with the solemn diction of classic tradition and with the cosmopolitan vanguard experiments. Researching his archives, one can find note-books where he registered popular rhymes, fragments of cowmen stories, fairy tales, typical rural vocabulary, quotations from the bucolic classics and information brought by nineteenth-century travelers in Brazil. A comparative reading of such manuscript notes with the published stories permits us a glimpse into Rosa’s own language theory which corresponds, as he himself used to say, to a kind of translation technique. Thus in order to try and explain this theory it is quite useful to borrow some concepts and metaphors from Walter Benjamin since one can find out an impressing likeness between the thought of the two writers.