Pauliceia Desvairada – Frantic São Paulo (bilingual edition)

Pauliceia Desvairada (Frantic São Paulo) by Mário de Andrade, one of the founders of Brazilian modernism, is a landmark in Brazilian poetry and in Portuguese language, often times compared to The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, both in terms of breadth, style and importance to the formation and definition of its own time.

Mário de Andrade’s sarcastic and iconoclastic tone, ironically, and sometimes not so, idolizes the capital of São Paulo in both a sincere and disillusioned way. São Paulo is muse and anti-muse, or at least a humanized muse, whose defects are quite noticeable. And the author takes the opportunity to disseminate the end of classicism in the arts, to dismiss oligarchic classes who maintain a doubtful and certainly rancid cultural taste, and to welcome the beginning of a new Modern era, artistically based on a Brazilian roots but linked to the European avant-gardes.

Now in a fresh bilingual Portuguese-English edition, first volume of Zampieri’s Coleção de Poesia Brasileira – Brazilian Poetry, this book brings the full revised original text, accompanies several translator’s notes with references, commentaries, critic, explanations of local terms, slangs, information about original quotes and visual appendices with maps pointing out the places (districts, streets, landmarks) and photographs (postcards) of São Paulo during the 1920s mentioned throughout the poems.