Born in Mato Grosso on December 19, 1916, Manoel Wenceslau de Leite Barros was one of the greatest names in Brazilian contemporary poetry. Author of more than twenty books, he became famous in the country between the 80s and 90s, when he was discovered by Millôr Fernandes.
He left his hometown to live in Mato Grosso do Sul, but ended up leaving the Midwest and going to live in Rio de Janeiro, where he studied in boarding school and later completed his studies in the Law course in 1941.
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In 1937, at the age of 21, he published his first book, entitled “Poemas Concebidos Sem Pecados”. However, it is possible that this was not his first work, having been lost.
He became involved with the communist movement, but would end up disillusioned with politics. So he decided to travel. First he went through Bolivia and Peru, in his words, “living like a hippie”.
Soon after, he went to New York, where he had contact with cosmopolitan life and took courses in visual arts and cinema.
He married Stella in 1947, with whom he would remain until the end of his life. As a result of the union that lasted almost 70 years, their three children, Pedro, João and Martha, were born.
Officially linked to Brazilian modernism, Barros sought a lot of themes for his works in nature, despite rejecting the stereotype of Pantanal and countryside man.
Manoel was a rather shy and reserved man, and in the mid-1960s he began to dedicate himself to raising cattle on his farm in the Pantanal region. Therefore, for a long time, his work was little known.
From the 1980s, great names such as Millôr Fernandes, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Antônio Houaiss began to talk about him and to promote his poems nationally. In 1986, Drummond even declared that Barros was “the greatest living Brazilian poet”.
Even with the late recognition, the poet won important Brazilian prizes. Twice he won the Jabuti prize and the National Prize for Literature from the Ministry of Culture, attributed to his body of work.
Books such as O Guardador de Águas, Águas, Matérias de Poesias, O Livro Sobre Nada, Fazedor do Dawn, marked his career. He also had works published in the United States and in European countries.
In October 2014, at the age of 97, Manoel de Barros was hospitalized in Campo Grande to undergo surgery to unblock his bowel. Due to his advanced age, he could not resist and died due to multiple organ failure.
I have a book about water and children.
I liked a boy better
who carried water in the sieve.
The mother said that carrying water in the sieve
was the same as stealing a wind and
run off with it to show the brothers.
Mom said it was the same
than picking up thorns in the water.
Same as raising fish in your pocket.
The boy was connected to nonsense.
I wanted to lay the foundations
of a house on dews.
The mother noticed that the boy
I liked the void more than the full.
He said that voids are bigger and even infinite.
In time that boy
that was brooding and weird,
because he liked to carry water in a sieve.
In time he discovered that
writing would be the same
to carry water in the sieve.
In writing the boy saw
that she was capable of being a novice,
monk or beggar at the same time.
The boy learned to use the words.
He saw that he could make peralts with words.
And he started doing peraltations.
He was able to modify the afternoon by putting rain on it.
The boy did wonders.
It even made a stone flower.
The mother repaired the boy tenderly.
The mother said: My son, you are going to be a poet!
You will carry water in a sieve your whole life.
You will fill the voids
with her peraltations,
and some people will love you for your nonsense!
Difficult to photograph the silence.
However, I tried. I tell:
At dawn, my village was dead.
No noise was seen or heard, no one passed between the houses.
I was leaving a party.
It was almost four in the morning.
Silence went down the street carrying a drunk.
I prepared my machine.
Was silence a charger?
I was carrying the drunk.
I photographed this charger.
I had other visions that morning.
I prepared my machine again.
She had a scent of jasmine on the eaves of the house.
I photographed the perfume.
I saw a slug nailed to existence more than to stone.
I photographed her existence.
I even saw a blue-forgiveness in a beggar's eye.
I photographed forgiveness.
I looked at an old landscape collapsing over a house.
I photographed the about.
It was difficult to photograph the about.
Finally I saw the cloud of pants.
He represented to me that she walked around the village in arms with Maiakoviski – her creator.
I photographed the cloud in pants and the poet. No other poet in the world would make an outfit
Fairest to cover your bride.
The photo turned out fine.
That man spoke to the trees and the waters
the way you fell in love.
Every day
he arranged the afternoons for the lilies to sleep.
I used an old watering can to water all the
mornings the rivers and the trees on the banks.
Said he was blessed by frogs and fur
birds.
People believed out loud.
He had once watched a snail vegetate
on the stone.
but he wasn't scared.
Because I had studied before about linguistic fossils
and in these studies he often found snails
vegetation on rocks.
It was very findable at that time.
Even stone grew a tail!
Nature was innocent.
Poetry is stored in words - that's all I know.
My fate is that of not knowing almost everything.
About nothing I have depths.
I have no connections with reality.
Mighty to me is not he who discovers gold.
For me powerful is he who discovers the insignificances (of the world and the
our).
For that little sentence they praised me as an imbecile.
I was thrilled.
I'm weak to praise.
I
To feel the intimacies of the world it is necessary to know:
a) That the splendor of the morning does not open with a knife
b) The way violets prepare the day to die
c) Why do red-banded butterflies have a devotion to tombs?
d) If the man who plays his existence in the afternoon on a bassoon, he has salvation
e) That a river flowing between 2 hyacinths carries more tenderness than a river flowing between 2 lizards
f) How to catch a fish's voice
g) Which side of the night gets wet first.
etc.
etc.
etc.
Unlearning 8 hours a day teaches the principles.
II
Uninvent objects. The comb, for example.
Give the comb non-combing functions. Until
he is available to be a begonia. Or
a tie.
Use some words that don't already have
language.
III
Repeat repeat—until it's different.
Repetition is a gift of style.
IV
In the Treatise on the Greatness of the Infinite was
written:
Poetry is when the afternoon is competent for dahlias.
And when
Next to a sparrow the day sleeps before.
When a man makes his first gecko.
That's when a clover takes over the night
And a frog swallows the auroras.
V
Loader ants enter the house on their asses.
SAW
Things that don't have a name are more pronounced by children.
VII
In the beginning was the verb.
Only later did the delirium of the verb come.
The delirium of the verb was at the beginning, there
where the child says: I hear the color of
little birds.
The child does not know that the verb to listen does not
works for color but for sound.
So if the child changes the function of a
verb, he raves.
And then.
In poetry that is a poet's voice, which is the voice
of making births —
The verb has to get delirium.
VIII
A sunflower appropriated God: it was in van gogh.
IX
To enter the tree state, you need to
from a lizard animal torpor to
3 o'clock in the afternoon, in the month of August.
In 2 years inertia and weeds will grow
in our mouth.
We'll undergo some lyrical decay until
the bush come out in the voice .
Today I draw the smell of trees.
X
The silence of the stones has no height.
I'm very full of emptiness.
My organ of dying dominates me.
I'm out of eternities.
I can no longer know when I will wake up yesterday.
The dawn is far from me.
I hear the oblique size of a leaf.
Behind the sunset the insects boil.
I stuffed what I could into a cricket mine
destiny.
These things change me to cisco.
My independence has handcuffs.
I respect the unimportant things
and the unimportant beings.
I appreciate bugs than planes.
I value the speed
of turtles more than of missiles.
I have this birth delay in me.
I was rigged
to like birds.
I have plenty to be happy about it.
My backyard is greater than the world.
Philosopher Kierkegaard taught me that culture
it is the path that man takes to know himself.
Socrates made his way of culture and to the end
he said he only knew that he didn't know anything.
He didn't have the scientific certainties. But that he learned things
di-minor with nature. He learned that the leaves
of trees serve to teach us to fall without
fuss. Said he was a vegetated snail
about stones, he would like it. he would certainly
learn the language that frogs speak with water
and he would talk to the frogs.
And I would like to teach that the greatest exuberance is found in insects
than in landscapes. His face had a side of
bird. That's why he could know all the birds
of the world through the heart of its songs. had studied
in too many books. But I learned better by seeing,
not hearing, not catching, not tasting and not smelling.
Sometimes he reached the accent of his origins.
He marveled at how a single cricket, a single small
cricket, could dismantle the silences of a night!
I lived formerly with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle —
this staff.
They spoke in class: Those who approach the origins are renewed.
Pindar told me that he used all the linguistic fossils he found to renew his poetry. Masters preached that poetic fascination comes from the roots of speech.
Socrates said that the most erotic expressions
they are maidens. And that Beauty is better explained
because there is no reason for it. What else do I know
about Socrates is that he lived an ascesis like a fly.
I use the word to compose my silences.
I don't like the words
tired of reporting.
I give more respect
those who live with their bellies on the ground
stone frog water type.
I understand the accent of the waters well
I respect the unimportant things
and the unimportant beings.
I appreciate bugs than planes.
I value the speed
of turtles more than of missiles.
I have a birth delay in me.
I was rigged
to like birds.
I have plenty to be happy about it.
My backyard is greater than the world.
I'm a waste catcher:
love the leftovers
like the good flies.
I wish my voice had a shape
corner.
Because I'm not computer science:
I'm inventive.
I only use the word to compose my silences.
I am injured in machine treatments.
I have no appetite for inventing useful things.
All my life I've only engineered
3 machines
As they are:
A little crank to fall asleep.
A maker of dawn
for uses of poets
And a platinum of manioc for the
my brother's fordeco.
I just won an industry award
auto companies for Platinado de Cassava.
I was called an idiot by most
of the authorities in the delivery of the award.
So I was a little proud.
And glory enthroned forever
in my existence.
It is easier to make a treat of foolishness than of wisdom.
Everything I don't invent is false.
There are many serious ways of not saying anything, but only poetry is true.
There's more presence in me than I lack.
The best way I found to get to know myself was by doing the opposite.
I am very prepared for conflicts.
There can be no absence of mouth in words: no one is left unattended by the being who revealed it.
My dawn will be at night.
Better than naming is alluding. Verse does not need to give a sense.
What sustains the enchantment of a verse (besides the rhythm) is the illogicality.
My inside out is more visible than a pole.
Wise is he who divines.
To be more sure I have to know myself about imperfections.
Inertia is my main act.
I don't come out of myself even to fish.
Wisdom can be like being a tree.
Style is an abnormal model of expression: it is stigma.
Pisces have no honors or horizons.
Whenever I want to tell something, I do nothing; but when I don't want to tell anything, I write poetry.
I wanted to be read by the stones.
The words hide me without care.
Where I am not, words find me.
There are stories so true that sometimes it seems they are made up.
One word opened the robe for me. She wants me to be.
Literary therapy consists of messing up language to the point where it expresses our deepest desires.
I want the word that serves in the mouth of the birds.
This task of ceasing is what pulls my sentences before me.
Atheist is a person who can scientifically prove that he is nothing. It compares only to the saints. The saints want to be the worms of God.
Best to come to nothing is to find out the truth.
The artist is nature's mistake. Beethoven was a perfect mistake.
For modesty I am impure.
White corrupts me.
I don't like used words.
My difference is always less.
Poetic word has to reach the level of a toy to be serious.
I don't need the end to arrive.
From the place where I am, I've already left.
the greatest wealth
of man
it is your incompleteness.
In this point
I'm wealthy.
Words that accept me
how I am
- I do not accept.
I can't stand being just
a guy who opens
doors, which pulls
valves, which looks at the
watch, who buys bread
at 6 pm, which goes
outside, who sharpens pencils,
who sees the grape, etc. etc.
forgive. But I
I need to be Others.
I think
renew the man
using butterflies.
