FOREWORD

FOREWORD

Born in São Paulo (Brazil) in 1951, Pedro José Ferreira da Sylva (his birthname) completed a degree in Library Science but did not complete his Literature degree and later became a poet, assuming the heteronym of Glauco Mattoso, a play on words emphasizing the condition of glaucoma, a congenital illness that would progressively lead to the author's blindness in the early 1990s. In the 1970s, he was an essential member of the so-called "mimeographic generation" (a term that emphasized the amateur nature of production of early marginal poets) and participated as well in the movement known as "marginal poetry", maximizing non-commercial networks of poetry, a refuge of "cultural resistance" used against the military dictatorship in power at that time. He created the fanzine JORNAL DOBRABIL (a pun on JORNAL DO BRAZIL, a daily newspaper, and the "foldable" format of a pamphlet, published as independent sheets). He collaborated in various venues of the alternative press, such as LAMPEÃO, a gay tabloid, and PASQUIM, a humorous tabloid. Glauco's work has always been centered within elements of underground culture and connected to themes of transgression, such as bizarre sex, S&M, torture, violence in tribal rock scene, and, especially, the taboo side of poetry, emphasizing its most scatological and satirical aspects. With the loss of his sight, the author has subsequently abandoned creative visual work (such as his former production of concrete poetry and comic stories) in order to dedicate himself to the composition of musical lyrics and to the production of records, in his capacity as member of an independent recording company. Working in collaboration with Dr. Jorge Schwartz, Professor, the University of São Paulo, he has translated the original poems of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, the best blind author in the twentieth century. Glauco's works of poetry have remained predominantly unpublished or sparsely published in books that have since gone out-of-print, literary supplements (to newspapers) or fanzines.

Mattoso's poetry may be chronologically and formally divided into two distinct phases: the first may be called the VISUAL PHASE, characterized by the poet's experimental parodies of various contemporary tendencies, from Brazilian modernism to "underground" motifs, influenced primarily by Concretism, which esteemed the graphic/visual character of the poem. The author's second phase may be termed the BLIND(NESS) PHASE, as his complete visual impairment leads him to abandon processes such as dactylographic concretism, and he begins to compose classical sonnets, where rigor in metric, rhyme, and rhythm functions as a mnemonic device allowing the poet to perform a re-working of old Glauquian themes (ugliness, dirtiness, wickedness, vices, trauma, stigma), reappropriating concretist techniques (paronomasia, alliteration, euphony and cacophony of verbal configurations), while incorporating slang and colloquialism, elements which have always been hallmarks of the hybrid style of the author. The VISUAL PHASE runs from the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, while the BLIND(NESS) PHASE begins in 1999, with the publication of his first books of sonnets. According to Dr. Steven Butterman, {In significant ways, Glauco Mattoso is a direct inheritor of the lineage of satirical sonnets composed by Gregorio de Mattos. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder if the similarities in initials and orthography of the last name (including the archaic double consonant "tt") may be linked, to some extent, to the construction of the pseudonym, "Glauco Mattoso." Indeed, if "Mattos" is the original phenomenon and is regarded gramatically as a pronoun, then perhaps "Mattoso" is the corresponding adjective that may serve to identify the nature or type of the work that Mattoso is appropriating and re-working. In fact, using the terminology of grammar, it is indeed true that the adjective "mattoso" as a semantic unit functions to MODIFY -- one may say both grammatically and thematically -- a noun form of "Mattos." Whether or not this paronomastic link is coincidental, there is an undeniable thematic and structural similarity when comparing Gregorio de Mattos' sonnets to those of Glauco

Mattoso. The postmodern incarnation of the "Bocca do Inferno" is a well-deserved title for the simultaneously cynical, critical, and humorous verses which predominate in Glauco Mattoso's works. [...] Future studies of Glauco Mattoso's most recent work may explore the "punk" music scene as a venue for transgressive expression as well as the final two books of his trilogy of sonnets initiated by the 1999 CENTOPÉA: SONNETTOS NOJENTOS & QUEJANDOS and finished in the final months of the same year: PAULYSSÉA ILHADA: SONNETTOS TOPICOS, a compilation of 114 sonnets which primarily develops themes of postmodern urbanity and "paulistano" multi-cultural identities; and GELÉA DE ROCOCÓ: SONNETTOS BARROCOS, which contains 111 sonnets devoted to examining human caricatures and behaviors, both fictional and real.}

The following sonnets were selected and translated by Akira Nishimura, Mattoso's partner, who lived for four years in Japan and five in Canada, where he received his BA degree (English language and literature). The translation is not lexically poetic but semantically analogous. The sonnets are mostly autobiographical. Other translators are James Pautz [JP], Juliet Attwater [JA], Douglas Victor Smith [DVS], Ayrton Mugnaini [AM], Pedro Reis [PR], and Rodrigo Bravo [RB].

The notes to each sonnet are excerpts from Butterman's work, PERVERSIONS ON PARADE (San Diego, Hyperbole Books / San Diego State University Press, 2005), based on his PhD thesis, BRAZILIAN LITERATURE OF TRANSGRESSION AND POSTMODERN ANTIAESTHETICS IN GLAUCO MATTOSO (Madison, University of Wisconsin, 2000).

In Butterman's words, "Mattoso picks up where Bocage left off," and "Mattoso's preoccupations begin where Oswald's end: if the anthropophagist has eaten somebody, our cannibal will undoubtedly experience a bowel movement."