Faço vaginação com palavras até meu retrato aparecer: os desenhos de Bernardo da Mata feitos pelo poeta Manoel de Barros

Abstract

Attentive to chance, the average and the despicable. This is how the aesthetic project of the Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros (1916-2014) is sculpted, following the crooked lines of his small print and his drawings. At the confluence of these two key signs – the word (poetry) and the image (drawings) – we identify in his lyrical voice, ex-pressed by the figure of his confessed alter-ego Bernardo da Mata, autobiographical traits marked by the return to his childhood memories in Pantanal Mato-grossense and for his intense desire to recognize himself in others – more specifically in the beings of nature commonly socially despised. In this sense, in the book Portrait of the Artist When Thing (2011), Barros declares “I can now love flies as myself [...] Frogs want to be me [...] Forgive me/ But I need to be Others”. More than just praise, the writer identifies with and shares a feeling of the same place in the world, because he sees himself in such beings and merges with them. This border relationship, marked by the exercise of otherness, is evident not only in his poetry, but also in the author's draw-ings, cataloged in the book Celebration of things – Dolls and Poems by Manoel de Bar-ros (2006), published by Pedro Spindola and also in his book The waters keeper (1989). In them, Manoel draws (or self-portraits) the supposed image of his alter-ego, Bernar-do da Mata. Given the above, we aim to understand how the self-portrait – a work of a visual nature – is configured within a poetic thought of a verbal nature in Manoel de Barros. The central question of this research is the relationship between word and im-age within Manoel's own work. We propose a theoretical-methodological articulation in which the concept of intersemiotic translation, coined by Roman Jakobson, and discussed by authors such as Julio Plaza, Haroldo de Campos and Lúcia Santaella, en-courages us to think about translation beyond the limits of language. We are also in-terested in the concepts of semiosphere, border and alterity explored by the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics. The drawings analyzed here are in the works Celebration of things – Dools and Poems by Manoel de Barros (2006) and The waters keeper (1989).