Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) was one of Brazil’s most nationally and internationally recognized writers of the twentieth century. Campos graduated as an attorney from the University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Law in 1952 and, in the 1950s and 60s, spearheaded the concrete poetry movement alongside his brother Augusto de Campos and his friend Décio Pignatari. Starting with his first trip abroad in 1959, he made contact with prestigious foreign poets, artists, and intellectuals. On his first trip, he met Karlheinz Stockhausen, at the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio in Cologne, and Ezra Pound in Rapallo. In 1966, invited by the PEN American Center, he participated in a meeting of writers in New York chaired by Marshall McLuhan. In 1971, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was portrayed by Julio Cortázar as a character in his novel Un tal Lucas (1979). Campos’s long acquaintance with Roman Jakobson inspired Jakobson’s essay titled “Martin Codax’s Poetic Texture: A Revised Version of a Letter to Haroldo de Campos.” In 1990, he was named Professor Emeritus of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, where he taught in the graduate program from 1973 to 1989. In a text he devoted to Campos, Jacques Derrida wrote: “on the horizon of literature, and above all in the intimacy of the language of languages, each time so many languages in each language, I know that Haroldo would have had access to all that, like me, before me, better than me” (1996). Campos received an honorary doctorate from the University of Montreal (1996). He was awarded the Octavio Paz Prize in Mexico in 1999. That same year, Oxford and Yale (where he taught in 1978) organized conferences on his work in commemoration of his seventieth birthday. In 2002, the Guggenheim Museum in New York honored him with a series of roundtables and readings with the participation of Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein. Umberto Eco considered him “Dante’s greatest modern translator” (“La scomparsa di un poeta,” L’Espresso, Sept. 9, 2003). Besides the more than 30 books he published (single-authored or in collaboration), Haroldo de Campos left, between translations and essays, a great number of unpublished works that go from neo-Greek and Nahuatl poetry to writers like Júlio Ribeiro and Victor Hugo, about whom he was planning a book (Hélas, Victor Hugo!). His latest works included transcreations of Egyptian poems, a language he was studying with the help of a vast number of specialized sources he had mostly acquired  during his last trip to Berlin, where he participated in a symposium on  Alexander von Humbodt (1999).