Ruins of Brazilian history in a poem by António Botto

Abstract

Based on the landscape and monuments of Largo da Liberdade in São Paulo, such as the Santa Cruz das Almas dos Enforcados Church and the statue of Regent Diogo António Feijó, António Botto reflects on Brazilian history, highlighting the violence and injustices that were inscribed in that public space. Thus, the three versions of the same poem, rewritten during the first half of the 1950s, published first in the press, and finally in the final version in Fátima - Poema do Mundo (1955), with the title “Cântico da Alma Brasileira” (Song of the Brazilian Soul), refer to Brazil’s past, as well as pointing to ways of understanding the present and the optimistic and ufanistic possibility of the country’s future. It’s important to note that the different versions of the poem indicate the recent literary interests that the writer had been trying to add to his poetic production since the previous decade, above all social, political and religious interests, interwoven in the three texts in an exemplary way, as in a considerable part of his later production. Thus, in accordance with the notion of “places of memory” by the French historian Pierre Nora (1993), we seek to analyze how Botto, through his gaze as a foreign poet, evaluates some of the processes of constructing Brazil’s collective social memory, by seeking to represent some historical events relegated to oblivion.