Além, Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s Russian Poem

Abstract

This essay examines both the genesis of "Além" and "Bailado", by Mário de Sá-Carneiro, included in Céu em Fogo as an appendix to "Asas", and the parallel development of the fictional narrative of its genesis. Both are amply documented by the correspondence between Sá-Carneiro and Fernando Pessoa, in which the former lays out a private poetics pivoting on the idea of “transvio”. Assuming the ostensibly fragmentary nature of those texts, whose meaning would be merely suggested, rather than articulated, Sá-Carneiro presents them as an attempt to address the gap between an abstract idea of the text and its realization. This poetics will be the focus of the first part of our essay.

In the second, we will consider the fictional frame created in "Asas" to  salvage "Além" and "Bailado", and make them legible, following the criticism of Pessoa, who had pronounced them unintelligible. Both are presented as translations of texts attributed to the fictional poet Petrus Ivanovich Zagoriansky, author of a perfect Poem that vanishes once finished. These translations would be the sole remaining fragments of his work. The authorial (and linguistic) displacements entailed by the framework  would eventually translate in narrative terms Sá-Carneiro’s poetics of transvio.