oh, come now, you’ll say, to hear galáxias

[piece prepared by haroldo de campos for the cd isto não é um livro de viagem [this is not a book of travel], 1992]

I began writing the galáxias in 1963, and I finished them in 1976. Not counting the episodic publications in the art and poetry journal Invenção, issues 4 (1964) and 5 (1966-67); the translations of a few fragments into German (1966), French (1970), Spanish (1978), and English (1976, 1981); and the first gathering of galactic texts in Xadrez de estrelas (Chess of Stars, São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1976), it was only in 1984 that I was able to see my project materialize in functionally adequate conditions, thanks to Frederico Nasser’s publishing house, Editora Ex Libris. The book was printed in a large format and had reading visibility. The verso pages were blank, working as intermittent silence or pause and completing the programmatic total of 100 pages.

An audiovideotext, videotextgame, the galaxias situate themselves on the border between poetry and prose. In this kaleidoscopic book, there’s an epic, narrative gesture—mini-stories that come together and dissolve like the “suspense” of a detective novel (Anatol Rosenfeld); but it is the image that prevails, the vision or calling of the epiphanic. In that sense, the poetic pole ends up predominating, and the result is 50 “galactic cantos,” with a total of more than 2000 verses (circa 40 per page). This permutational book has, as its semantic backbone, an always recurrent yet varied theme all along: travel as a book and the book as travel (despite the fact that—and for that very reason—it is not exactly a “travel book”…). Two formants, typeset in italics, the initial one (beginning-end: “and here I begin”) and the final one (end-beginning-new beginning), delimit the play of moveable pages, interchangeable in their reading, where each isolated fragment introduces its “difference,” but contains, in itself, like a watermark, the image of the entire book, which can be glimpsed as from an “alephic” vantagepoint, through each fragment.

The oral nature of galáxias was always implicit in my project. […] As it will be seen (as it will be heard) [in the CD that accompanied the 2004 edition published by Editora 34], this is a book meant to be read aloud, proposing a rhythm and a prosody. The “obscure” passages become transparent when read, and the words, when pronounced, can acquire a talismanic force, incite and seduce like mantras. Not accidentally, I invited the poet and musician Alberto Marsicano to accompany me on his sitar while I read the two formants (highlighted in this way): the mobility of Indian ragas, where what is random is controlled by structures of repetition, rhymed with my score-text. Furthermore, only a few referential clues are enough to clarify the galactic journey. Regarding words and phrases in other languages—always carrying a mantric, “transmental” value, even when not always apprehensible on a semantic level—those words and phrases are, as a general rule, translated or glossed in the context, thus flowing along and into the rhythm of the whole.