DRUMMOND E OS AGOUROS DE MORTE:

UMA INTERPRETAÇÃO TRÁGICÔMICA DE “TARDE DE MAIO”

Abstract

In this study I tried to identify the intertextual origin of the metaphors used by the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade when he wrote the poem “Tarde de Maio”. After investigating the publicistic debates in which the poet was involved in the late 1940s, I discovered that the poem's metaphors were drawn from the editorials of Orfeu magazine, specifically the summer and autumn 1949 issues. Drummond reused metaphors that, originally, were elaborated by the editors of Orpheus in order to curse him. Such appropriation of the “enemy” discourse certainly had a comic intention, since it was customary for young poets of the 1945 generation to accuse the poet from Minas Gerais of plagiarizing them. The images of the “devastating flame” (which consumes the poet and his sowing), the “barren soil”, the “fruitless” nobility, the “burning soil” and death by incineration were all taken from the Orpheus editorial of the summer of 1949. There, the editors respond to Drummond's ironic provocations in the article entitled “Novíssimos”, published in Joaquim magazine, in October 1948. In addition to examining the origin of these metaphors, I observed how Drummond repudiated, with irony, the taste of the “novíssimos” for achievement literary soirées and performance poetry recitals in theaters and auditoriums. In the judgment of the gauche poet, those were tribal and totemic rituals that degenerated into voodoo rituals in which the “primitives” prayed to the “Tarde de Maio” for the “end of the enemy”. At that time, Drummond was considered the greatest public enemy of the leaders of the 1945 Generation. Due to such public enmity, it was common for the "novos" to cast death omens against the Claro Enigma’s author. Such omens were used by Drummond as inspiration for the elaboration of “Tarde de Maio”.