(Literatures of The Americas) Adam Morris, Bruno Carvalho - Essays On Hilda Hilst-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS
Series Editor: Norma E. Cantú
ESSAYS ON HILDA
HILST
Between Brazil and

World Literature
Edited by
Adam Morris
Bruno Carvalho
Literatures of the Americas
Series Editor
Norma E. Cantú
Trinity University
San Antonio, TX, USA
“Essays on Hilda Hilst is an excellent – and badly needed – book about one of
modern Brazilian literature’s most brilliant and challenging writers. Provocative
and enigmatic, Hilst has challenged readers in Brazil for a long time. Now, largely
through translations of her work that have started to appear, she is fast gaining
a global reputation. Yet she and her complex, multifaceted work have resisted
explication. This book will help change all that. Edited and with an insightful
introduction by two scholars eminently familiar with Hilst’s work, Adam Morris
and Bruno Carvalho, Hilda Hilst and Brazilian Literature offers a series of essays
that examine all aspects of the Brazilian writer’s art, her (in)famous poetry, her
work in the theater, her explorations of obscenity as Art, the politics of human
sexuality, the nature of her existence in translation, and her importance both as a
Brazilian writer and as a rising star in world literature.”
—Earl E. Fitz, Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature,
Vanderbildt University, USA
“Essentially unknown outside her native Brazil, Hilda Hilst is regarded in

her own country as one of the most important and polemical voices in Brazilian
contemporary literature.
As the first volume of critical studies on Hilda Hilst to appear in English, this
collection gathers an impressive array of scholars who offer incisive and astute
insights into Hilda Hilst’s multi-faceted literary production: from her poetry, to
her unconventional, philosophical and generically fluid prose, and her sophisti-
cated, politically-inflected drama. Its value and significance both for those who
are well acquainted with Hilst’s literary production as well as those who are new
to her work is certain to endure.”
—Luís Madureira, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and African Cultural
Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within
a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin
America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in lit-
erature in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical
boundaries and also include work on the specific Latina/o realities in the
United States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contem-
porary issues of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is
rooted in traditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include
cutting-edge scholarship using theories from postcolonial, critical race,
and ecofeminist approaches.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14819
Adam Morris · Bruno Carvalho
Editors
Essays on Hilda Hilst

Between Brazil and World Literature
Editors
Adam Morris Bruno Carvalho
San Francisco, CA, USA Brooklyn, NY, USA
Literatures of the Americas

ISBN 978-3-319-56317-6 ISBN 978-3-319-56318-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56318-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937914
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
Introduction: Who’s Afraid of Hilda Hilst? An Author

Between Brazil and “World Literature.” 1
Adam Morris and Bruno Carvalho
Part I Hilst on Stage
A Brazilian Teorema: Queering the Family in Hilda Hilst’s

O Visitante (The Visitor) 19
David William Foster
Is the Word Alive? An Inquiry into Poetics and

Theater in As Aves da Noite (Nightbirds) by Hilda Hilst 33
Tatiana Franca Rodrigues Zanirato
Part II Obscenity and the Human Condition
Figurations of Eros in Hilda Hilst 59

Eliane Robert Moraes
Hilda Hilst, Metaphysician 75

Adam Morris
v
vi Contents
Part III Hilst in National and Global Context
A Nation on the Ground Floor: The Face of Brazil,

Drawn with Hilda Hilst’s Political Pen 95
Deneval Siqueira de Azevedo Filho
When “the Life of Sentiments Is Extremely Bourgeois”:

Ideal Love and Nonconformism in the Love Poems
of Hilda Hilst 115
Alva Martínez Teixeiro
Part IV Hilst in Translation
Translating Brazil’s Marquise de Sade 135

John Keene
Derelict of Duty 151

Nathanaël
Hilst on Hilst: Excerpts from Interviews with the Author,

1952–2003 159
Hilda Hilst
Index 175
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Adam Morris is a writer, translator, and scholar. He has translated

Hilda Hilst, João Gilberto Noll, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Nuno
Ramos, Vivian Abenshushan, and others. His essays and criticism have
appeared in The Luso-Brazilian Review, CR: The New Centennial Review,
parallax, Criticism, The Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles
Review of Books, The Point, The Believer, BOMB, Music & Literature,
Public Books, Cabinet, and elsewhere. His book American Messiahs is
forthcoming from Liveright/W.W. Norton. He was a postdoctoral fellow
at the University of Rochester Humanities Center in 2016.
Bruno Carvalho’s research and teaching interests range from the early
modern period to the present, and include literature, culture, and the
built environment in Latin American and Iberian contexts, with empha-
sis on Brazil. He has published widely on a variety of topics, and is the
author of the award-winning Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de
Janeiro (2013), as well as co-editor of O livro de tiradentes: Transmissão
atlântica de ideias políticas no século XVIII (2013), and of Occupy All
Streets: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro
(2016). He is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and
Portuguese at Princeton University, and associated faculty in the
Department of Comparative Literature, the Princeton Environmental
vii
viii Editors and Contributors
Institute, the Programs in Latin American Studies and Urban Studies,

and the School of Architecture. A Rio de Janeiro native, Bruno Carvalho
received his Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard
University.
Contributors
Deneval Siqueira de Azevedo Filho Universidade Federal Do Espírito

Santo, Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil
David William Foster Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
John Keene Rutgers University, Newark, US
Eliane Robert Moraes Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Nathanaël School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA
Alva Martínez Teixeiro Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
Tatiana Franca Rodrigues Zanirato Universidade Federal de Goiás,
Jataí, Brazil
Hilda Hilst Campinas, Brazil
Introduction: Who’s Afraid of Hilda Hilst?
An Author Between Brazil and “World
Literature.”
Adam Morris and Bruno Carvalho
Abstract  Among Brazilian writers, scholars, and critics, Hilda Hilst

(1930–2004) is certainly not a well-kept secret. Her work received
numerous prizes, generated a significant critical bibliography, and
inspired a legion of devoted readers. Although her reach outside Brazil
does not match that of better-known authors such as Machado de Assis
and Clarice Lispector, her versatility remains unparalleled. Not only do
her dozens of works span poetry, fiction, and drama; they also encom-
pass a variety of styles and registers from across classical, medieval, and
early modern lyrical traditions, and prose styles associated with both high
modernism and postmodern literature. Yet her writing is often unmis-
takable and seldom derivative. In spite of her growing prestige, Hilda
Hilst remains controversial among readers of Portuguese. Frequently
A. Morris (*) 
University of Rochester, Rochester, USA
e-mail: ajmorris@stanford.edu
B. Carvalho 
Princeton University, Princeton, USA
e-mail: bcarvalh@princeton.edu
© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Morris and B. Carvalho (eds.), Essays on Hilda Hilst,
Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56318-3_1
2 A. Morris and B. Carvalho
provocative and sometimes hermetic, her literature elicits a constant ten-

sion between a desire for recognition and communication, and an aver-
sion to banality. Hilda Hilst’s texts never fail to push the boundaries of
readers’ expectations.
Keywords  Modernism · Theater · Brazil · Poetry · Obscene

Avant-garde
Although Hilst’s extraordinary erudition and uncommon d evotion to lit-

erary craft made her a formidable presence in twentieth-century Brazilian
letters, her work remained unavailable in English until recently. Since
2012, full-length translations have finally begun to appear in English, at
last making her work available to Anglophone readers and critics, who
have been quick to recognize what many in Brazil have long cherished:
an astonishing and unique voice in the panorama of world literature.
This volume of essays on Hilda Hilst, the first such collection to appear
in English, offers insight from scholars with a wide range of critical per-
spectives. The volume includes contributions from scholars based in the
United States, Brazil, and Europe; it also includes texts from three of
Hilst’s English translators. Collectively, they help us to demystify her
occasionally intimidating appeal by situating her work within particu-
lar historical, political, or aesthetic contexts, while also recognizing the
extent to which her work transcends the confines of national literature.
Hilda Hilst was born on April 21, 1930 in Jaú, in the state of São
Paulo. She was the daughter of Bedecilda Vaz Cardoso, whose parents
were Portuguese immigrants, and Apolônio de Almeida Prado Hilst, a
Brazilian coffee planter and occasional poet connected to a prominent
family. Her mother separated from Apolônio two years after Hilda’s
birth, taking Hilda with her to Santos, São Paulo. Not long after, her
father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and committed to a
sanatorium at the age of 35. The specter of madness would loom over
Hilda’s career for her entire life, inflecting her work and contributing to
the perception of Hilst as an eccentric and somewhat unhinged writer.
After primary and secondary schooling in São Paulo, Hilst began
studying law at the University of São Paulo in 1948. Her first book of
INTRODUCTION: WHO’S AFRAID OF HILDA HILST? AN AUTHOR … 3
poems, Presságio (Presage), was published in 1950. Another volume of

poetry, Balada de Alzira (Alzira’s Ballad), followed the next year. After
graduating in 1952, Hilda practiced law for only a few months in 1953–
1954. Following a trip to Chile and Argentina, she returned to São
Paulo and published another book of poems, Balada do festival (Festival
Ballad), in 1955. Hilst went to Europe in 1957, living for six months in
Paris and traveling to Rome, Athens, and Crete during her time abroad.
In Europe she briefly dated Dean Martin and impersonated a journalist
to gain access, unsuccessfully, to Marlon Brando.1
Four books of poems followed Hilst’s return from Europe: Roteiro
do silêncio (Script for Silence, 1959), Trovas de muito amor para um
amado senhor (Ballads of Much Love for a Beloved Gentleman, 1960),
Ode fragmentária (Fragmentary Ode, 1961), and Sete cantos do poeta
para o anjo (Seven Songs from the Poet to the Angel, 1962), the last of
which won the PEN Club of São Paulo Prize. During this period, Hilst
resided in the Sumaré neighborhood of São Paulo and was frequently
in the company of artists and intellectuals. She lived unconvention-
ally as a single woman in “high society,” conducting affairs with various
businessmen and artists.
At age 30 she read Report from Greco by Nikos Kazantzakis, a writer
she would always hold in the highest esteem. She attributed to this book
the decision to remove herself from the hustle and bustle of the São Paulo
scene in 1963 to devote her life more fully to literary creation. Hilst went
to live at the Fazenda São José, an estate owned by her mother on the
outskirts of Campinas (about 60 miles from São Paulo). In 1965, the year
after a coup installed a military dictatorship in Brazil, Hilst began con-
struction on the Casa do Sol (House of the Sun), on the grounds of the
estate. She took up residence there a year later. The Casa do Sol had nei-
ther telephone nor electricity during the initial years of Hilst’s residence,
circumstances that emphasized the radical nature of her relative seclu-
sion—a decision that was remarked on by peers and in the press.2
At the Casa do Sol, Hilst began writing theater, completing A empresa
(A possessa) (The Business (the Possessed)) and O rato no muro (Rat in
the Wall) in 1967, along with another volume of poetry, Poesia (1959–
1967). In 1968, Hilst was prolific as a dramaturge, finishing O visitante
(The Visitor), Auto da barca de Camiri (Act for Camiri’s Ship), O novo
sistema (The New System), and As aves da noite (Nightbirds) in the span
of a year. She married sculptor Dante Casarini the same year; the cou-
ple would later divorce in 1985. In 1969, she built a second home on
the coast, the Casa da Lua (House of the Moon). With the exception of
invited artists and intellectuals, who visited or lived periodically at her
estate, Hilst maintained her distance from São Paulo’s social spheres for
the rest of her life.
Hilst’s theater was first performed in São Paulo in 1968, with produc-
tions of O visitante and O rato no muro at the Teatro Anchieta. Periodic
stagings of Hilst’s drama continued, albeit infrequently, throughout her
career; several of her prose fictions would also be adapted to the theater.
She completed A morte do patriarca (Death of the Patriarch) and O ver-
dugo (The Executioner), her final plays, in 1969. The latter was pub-
lished after being awarded that year’s Anchieta Prize. Like the majority
of Hilst’s theater, her other plays remained unpublished until they were
collected into a single volume published as part of her collected works,
almost 40 years later.
Hilst resumed her work with poetry in 1969 with Ode descontínua e
remota para flauta e oboé (Discontinuous Ode for Flute and Oboe), pub-
lished later in Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão (Jubilation, Memory,
an Apprenticeship in Passion, 1974). The year 1969 also marked a key
development in Hilst’s career: a turn to prose fiction. She published the
short fiction O unicórnio (The Unicorn), which was later included in the
collection Fluxo-floema (Phloem Flux), Hilst’s first book of fiction, pub-
lished in 1970. Her second book of prose fiction, Qadós (in later edi-
tions, Kadosh), was published in 1973. These two volumes, together
with new work, were republished as Ficções (Fictions) in 1977, a volume
that was awarded a prize for Best Book of the Year from the São Paulo
Association of Art Critics (APCA). Her fourth book of fiction, Tu não
moves de ti (You Move Not From Yourself), and two volumes of poetry,
Poesia (1959/1979) and Da morte: Odes mínimas (On Death: Minimal
Odes), were published in 1980.
Hilst’s work garnered further critical acclaim in the 1980s. She was
awarded the Critics’ Grand Prize in 1981 by the APCA, an honor that
recognizes a writer’s career achievements. The following year her novella
A obscena senhora D (The Obscene Madame D) was published, and Hilst
began participating as an artistic resident at Unicamp, the University of
Campinas, a prestigious public institution. Two more volumes of poetry
followed, Cantares de perda e predileção (Songs of Loss and Predilection,
1983) and Poemas malditos, gozosos e devotos (Damned, Joyful, and
Devout Poems, 1984). The former was awarded what is arguably Brazil’s
most prestigious literary honor in 1984, the Prêmio Jabuti, as well as the
Prêmio Cassiano Ricardo from the São Paulo Poetry Club.
In 1986 Hilst published a book of poems, Sobre tua grande face (Upon
Your Great Visage), and another of prose fiction, Com os meus olhos de cão
e outras novelas (With My Dog-Eyes and Other Novellas). She continued
her steady output of poetry with Amavisse (To Have Loved) in 1989 and
Alcoólicas (Alcoholic) in 1990. The latter year also marked the release
of O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby (Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook)
and Contos d’escárnio: Textos grotescos (Tales of Derision: Grotesque
Texts), part of a tetralogy of what she deemed “brilliant pornography,”
or “porno chic.” The tetralogy was completed with Cartas de um sedutor
(Letters from a Seducer), in 1991, and Bufólicas (Bufolics) in 1993. Hilst
published her 18th volume of poetry that year, Do desejo (On Desire).
In 1994 she received a second Prêmio Jabuti for Rútilo nada (Glittering
Nothing), a book of fiction published in 1993. Several other books
appeared in the late 1990s: Cantares do sem nome e de partidas (Songs for
the Nameless and Departed, poetry, 1995), Estar sendo, ter sido (To Be
Being, to Have Been, fiction, 1997), Cascos e carícias (Shells and Caresses,
chronicles compiled from newspaper columns, 1998), Do amor (On Love,
poetry, 1999), and Teatro reunido (Collected Theater, 2000).
In 2001 the high-profile Editora Globo took responsibility for reissues of
Hilst’s publications, beginning a series of her complete works. In 2002 Hilst
won the Moinho Santista Prize from the Bunge Foundation and another
Critics’ Grand Prize from the APCA, in recognition of her collected works.
Hilst died in Campinas on February 4, 2004, at the age of 73.
**
Notwithstanding her remarkable literary achievement, Hilst remained

an outsider of sorts within her native country and language: she was a
writer’s writer, a formidable master that few, it seemed, took the trou-
ble to read. Unlike other Latin American poets of her generation, Hilst
was not identified with collective yearnings, or with the exploration of
national identities. This stemmed in part from her self-inscription in a
largely European modernist tradition that averted the more localized
imaginary of her contemporaries. It was also due to the enigmatic and
arcane voice in which she wrote much of her verse. The perceived inac-
cessibility of her work vexed Hilst—or so she claimed—and restricted her
readership to a small community of enthusiasts.
Hilst’s numerous awards testify to the fact that she was not ignored.
In interviews, however, she almost never failed to suggest that even the
editors or critics who praised her did not understand her work. Over
time, financial troubles, which her modest sales did little to alleviate,
compounded her mounting frustration over this incomprehension. This
compelled Hilst to take a different tack in her later prose. The tetralogy
of “pornographic” publications from the 1990s putatively aimed to reach
a wider public. Hilst said she wanted to create something “absolutely
repugnant” that would finally capture the attention of Brazilian readers.
Lori Lamby, she quipped, was intended as “pornography for children,”
while Contos d’escárnio: Textos grotescos, the second book in the series,
was for adults. “I hope,” she added, “to become an excellent pornogra-
pher.”3 Satirizing the disconnect between her work and readers in Brazil,
she joked that her porno chic projects had been only a partial success, as
“they said my pornography was extremely difficult.”4
Hilst explained that Lori Lamby was “an act of aggression” toward the
literary market. “For forty years I worked seriously,” she recalled, “I was
excessively serious and lucid—and nothing came of it.” Her provocation
was an attempt, she warned, to “awaken” Brazilian readers lulled into
complacence by a mass-market literary culture. The tetralogy, in fact, fol-
lowed a period of intense experimentation in Brazilian literature, after
the country emerged from a military dictatorship (1964–1985) and writ-
ers no longer had to contend with strict government censorship. As a
project, it juxtaposes Hilst’s seriousness of purpose as a writer with her
irreverent public persona. With these forays into the aesthetics of the
“obscene,” Hilst’s lifelong experiments with alterity break new ground.
She pushes the limits of what Susan Sontag called “pornographic imagi
nation,” and amplifies the fringes of human sexual desire.5 Yet, in her
writing, even amid pornography, we always find poetry. And among
clamors of the flesh, there are palpitations of spirituality.
Although she claimed to be making concessions to market demands
in the pornographic works, Hilst’s writing remained as ambitious as ever.
Brazil, she complained, was a country where, “You can think in German
or English, and people accept it. In Portuguese, thinking is considered
something awful, and the editors hate it, they spit in your face. That’s
what they did to me for forty years.” Editors, she maintained, prefer
trash.6 One of the few editors who appreciated her work over the dec-
ades, Hilst believed, was Massao Ohno. An advantage of publishing
with his independent press was that it enabled Hilst to include her own
drawings as illustrations, as well as artwork by her friend José Luis Mora
Fuentes. But although she considered Massao Ohno a great designer,
she joked that he liked the artisanal editions he produced of her work so
much that he kept them all to himself.7
In Hilst’s own estimation, she belonged in the company of other out-

casts of modernity who nevertheless came to represent its highest cul-
tural expression. Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, and Henry Miller were
among those she considered as forebears. Asked to account for the
“wall” or “disconnect” between her work and a wider public, Hilst sim-
ply replied:
I can’t explain it. What I do know, for example, is that even Joyce’s own
wife, Nora Barnacle, didn’t read his work. […] Interest in that kind of
work can delay by some 50 years. When you create a revolution, it takes
time; acceptance can be delayed by half a century or more.8
Hilst might have judged herself comparable to James Joyce or Samuel

Beckett in terms of literary invention, but her relative obscurity among
contemporaries, she was keenly aware, resulted from the additional
marginalization brought about by the language in which she wrote. In
a late interview, Hilst offered the following advice to aspiring writers:
“To the young, it’s what I always say: ‘Write in English. Nobody knows
Portuguese’.”9 Whether facetious or embittered, Hilst’s assertion contra-
dicts an enduring devotion to craft that should lead her readers to take
more seriously an earlier declaration: “I have great love for language, for
my own language, which I find very beautiful.”10
Hilst’s references to Brazil, especially in later life, tended to be
antagonistic or even agonized. She would refer, for instance, to her
poetry as having “made a revolution within Brazilian literature,” which
despite years of labor to create it, “received no response.”11 Indeed,
her literary production did not often engage directly in debates around
“Brazilianness,” Brazilian literature, or national identity. Some of the
essays in this book will suggest ways in which Brazil is in fact a crucial—if
latent—presence in her work. More frequently, and perhaps unsurpris-
ingly, the critical approaches in this book highlight her literature’s ability
to travel, forging dialogues with authors far and wide, and reflecting on
shared or “universal” aspects of the human condition.
Hilst can be understood as having possessed what Mariano Siskind
calls a “desire for the world,” and in her work, one might read “the dif-
ferential affirmation of a cosmopolitan and disruptive aesthetic identity
not in terms of a particularistic cultural politics but as a strategic literary
practice that forces its way into the realm of universality, d
enouncing both
the hegemonic structures of Eurocentric forms of exclusion and national-
istic patterns of self-marginalization.”12 A prosaic example reveals how in
Hilst, a differential desire supersedes a deferential attitude. In 1986 she

boasted that the French editor of Gallimard came all the way to Brazil
only to meet her, and that when A obscena senhora D was published in
France, reviews compared her to Bataille, a comparison she found favora-
ble. But Hilst complained that even French critics, who referred to her
as “the hysteric pig,” did not really understand her work.13 Following
Siskind’s argument, her cosmopolitan desires, resistance to national
debates, and assertions of radical subjectivities should be understood as
part of an effort “to undo the antagonistic structures of a world liter-
ary field organized around the notions of cultural difference that Latin
American cosmopolitan writers perceive to be the source of their margin-
ality, in order to stake a claim on Literature with a capital L.”14
As an author in Brazil, peripheral in the order of global modernity, Hilst
renders the world from a perspective in which the blind spots of knowledge,
the impossibilities of literary pursuits, and the limits of development seem
more central. Limits are more legible, as they tend to be at the margins.
There is no explicit “local color” in her lament that “man today is capable
of destroying the entire planet,” to which she adds a plea for a “science of
limits”15— it evokes a planetary consciousness rather than deforestation in
the Amazon. In a different interview, in a passage reproduced in full on the
“Hilst on Hilst” section of this book, she draws a comparison between her
own detached attitude toward others “throwing away” her literature, and
“the power of loss” among Amerindians. This is followed by a cosmopoli-
tan reference to G.K. Chesterton, quoting a phrase from his book Orthodoxy
(1908): “A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another.”
The original alludes to disparities within the same body. Hilst misreads the
line, perhaps deliberately, and interprets it as implying that an individual
might be perceived differently in one place versus another. She takes this
as a metaphor for the singularity of her own literature, “thin for some, but
fat for others.” It is not clear in what language Hilst read Chesterton; this
minor slippage could be attributed to a poor translation, or brushed aside as
a distorted reading of an English original by a marginal Brazilian writer. But
more interestingly, by turning Chesterton’s image into a metaphor about
the relativity of norms, it is Hilst who emerges as the more worldly (in both
senses) and cosmopolitan author.
***
Despite Hilst’s constant remonstrations, her talents would indeed

be recognized in her lifetime and since, earning comparisons to more
unanimously acclaimed Brazilian contemporaries such as Clarice

Lispector and João Guimarães Rosa. Her books have been beloved
among artists and poets at least since the 1960s, and have fueled her
reputation as a hermit-master of both poetry and prose. As a bohemian
retreat, the Casa do Sol became a site of literary pilgrimage for aspir-
ing young poets and acclaimed writers from across Brazil, including Caio
Fernando Abreu, who resided there during a period of literary appren-
ticeship with Hilst. Gathered with her dozens of dogs, a rotating cadre
of friends and lovers kept Hilst company, fortified her self-assurance,
studied in her personal library, and shared in the artistic patronage of her
semiaristocratic inheritance.
Critics began to catch up. By the end of the twentieth century, seven
masters or doctoral theses had been written on her work, and numerous
articles had appeared in scholarly books and journals. But more ample
and sustained critical attention was to come. In 2000, when Hilst was
nearing death and had ceased writing after nearly 50 years of constant
production, the Editora Globo began to reissue her collected works.
These were accompanied by a critical introduction by the prestigious lit-
erary critic Alcir Pécora, and shortly thereafter, by a trio of essays titled
Por que ler Hilda Hilst (Why Read Hilda Hilst, 2010). With these reis-
sues by a major publisher, Hilst’s body of work at last appeared in book-
stores across Brazil, in its entirety. Her plays, which were seldom if ever
performed during her life, began to be restaged.16 When she died in
2004, numerous additional theses and dissertations on her work were
underway in Portugal, Brazil, and beyond.17
Although a handful of Hilst’s texts had appeared in German, French,
and Italian, her literature was mostly untranslated at the time of her
death, which is unsurprising given the relatively minor place of Brazilian
literature in the global translation market. Her breakthrough into
English translation began in 2012 with the publication of The Obscene
Madame D (Nightboat Books, trans. Nathanaël and Rachel Gontijo
Araújo), which was greeted with enthusiastic praise in the Anglophone
literary community. Madame D was followed by Letters from a Seducer
(Nightboat 2014; trans. John Keene). A third novel in translation, With
My Dog-Eyes (Melville House 2014; trans. Adam Morris), appeared in
2014, and more translations of Hilst’s work are forthcoming, including
her seminal prose collection Fluxo-floema (Phloem Flux, Nightboat),
translated by Alexandra Forman.
As Hilst continues to capture the attention of a broader international

audience, this book addresses the lack of English-language critical stud-
ies on her work.18 The first two chapters focus on Hilst the dramatist.
Although she principally worked as a poet throughout the 1950s and
1960s, Hilst took an active interest in the theater following the 1964
military coup d’état in Brazil. Her plays are allegories of political repres-
sion and subjugation, and question the flattened, moralizing notions of
right and wrong, friend and foe, and good and evil that often character-
ize societies living under repressive authoritarian regimes. David William
Foster leads off the volume with an essay on the political power of Hilst’s
theater, locating her play O visitante (1968) in queer political context
and in dialogue with her contemporary, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Foster’s
intervention is followed by an essay on Hilst’s unique poetic approach to
dramaturgy, by Tatiana Franca Rodrigues Zanirato. As she explains, Hilst
infused her theater with poetic interruptions that indicate a rupture in
the signifying order of discourse, occasioned by the experience of politi
cal events that cannot be fully circumscribed or expressed by language.
In the third essay, Eliane Robert Moraes offers a theorization of
Hilst’s use of the erotic and her signature aesthetic of obscenity, a cate-
gory that dominated Hilst’s experimental prose production in the 1980s
and 1990s, including her so-called pornographic work. Moraes identifies
the obscene with a dual linguistic register that slips between humor and
the abject. Coeditor Adam Morris follows this intervention with a look
into Hilst’s metaphysical aspirations. Hilst read for eight hours daily and
produced densely allusive work that signaled her familiarity with such
disparate domains of knowledge as theoretical physics and Iberian mys-
ticism. Morris reads Hilst’s book of poems Amavisse alongside her novel
With My Dog-Eyes to demonstrate how Hilst, who believed in a divine
gnostic unity, articulated the interconnection of these different realms
through her own personal metaphysics in these later-career texts.
In the next two chapters, a literary critic based in Europe and
another in Brazil situate Hilst in national and global contexts. Alva
Martínez Teixeiro offers a theory of the unity and continuity of Hilst’s
love poems and her adaptations of European lyric love poetry to the
twentieth-century experience of womanhood, love, and desire. Deneval
Siqueira de Azevedo Filho describes how Hilst appropriated the
topos of the poéte maudit to achieve a critique of Brazilian bourgeois
nationalism.
In the final pair of essays, two of Hilst’s translators, John

Keene and Nathanaël, provide a scholarly and lyric-poetic account,
respectively, of translating Hilst’s intricate, allusive, poetic, and phil-
osophically-inflected prose. Keene, the translator of one of Hilst’s
“obscene” books, Letters from a Seducer, places Hilst in dialogue
with the Marquis de Sade and describes the difficulties of translating
obscenity. Nathanaël offers an essay which takes its cues from Hilst,
spilling over the boundaries of criticism, poetry, and confession.
With the recent and forthcoming translations of Hilst’s work to
English and other languages, this strange and compelling author, of unu-
sual talent and ambition, enters the fray of world literature. These essays
offer, for the first time in English, a critical introduction to a writer who
has long entranced and confounded Brazil.
****
Notes
1. “Do Tempo” (Timeline). Cadernos de literatura brasileira. No. 8, “Hilda
Hilst.”, p. 9.
2. An article on Hilst from 1969 reports on her ascetic lifestyle at the Casa
do Sol, where she awoke at 6:30 a.m. each day and read in the evening by
the light of a kerosene lamp. Regina Helena, “Hilda Hilst: suas peças vão
acontecer.” Correio Popular, Campinas, 1969. Reproduced in Fico besta
quando me entendem: Entrevistas com Hilda Hilst, ed. Cristiano Diniz.
(São Paulo: Biblioteca Azul, 2013).
3. Hilst made this remark in a 1990 interview with TV Cultura on the occa-
sion of the publication of O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby. Portions of the
raw footage from the interview are online: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=5yeFhO4G2OQ. Segments of the interview also appear in a
Câmara Doc documentary, also online: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=3wJwJHmH2I4.
4. TV Cultura.
5. In “The Pornographic Imagination,” Susan Sontag writes: “If within
the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be
invested with an unprecedented stature—the nearest thing to a sacramen-
tal human activity acknowledged by secular society—it is because one of
the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions
on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a
person) and reporting back what’s there.” Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical
Will. New York: Picador, 2002, p. 45.
6. TV Cultura.
7. TV Cultura.
8. Cadernos de literatura brasileira. no. 8, “Hilda Hilst.”, p. 29.
9. Cadernos de literatura brasileira, no. 8, “Das sombras – entrevista,”
reproduced in Fico Besta Quando Me Entendem, p. 214.
10. Sônia de Amorim Mascaro, “Hilda Hilst, uma conversa emocionada sobre
a vida, a morte, o amor e o ato de escrever,” O Estado de S. Paulo, June
21, 1986. Reproduced in Fico Besta Quando Me Entendem, p. 90.
11. Hussein Rimi, “Palavras abaixo da cintura,” Interview, n. 136, 1991.
Reproduced in Fico Besta Quando Me Entendem, pp. 139–140.
12. Mariano Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World
Literature in Latin America, 1994, p. 6.
13. Sônia de Amorim Mascaro, “Hilda Hilst, uma conversa emocionada sobre
a vida, a morte, o amor e o ato de escrever,” O Estado de S. Paulo, June
21, 1986. Reproduced in Fico Besta Quando Me Entendem, p. 90.
14. Siskind, p. 6.
15. An excerpt from this 1989 interview, containing the quotes given here,
can be found in the “Hilst on Hilst” section of this book.
16. O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby was adapted for the stage in 1999, directed
by Beto Coelho. A obscena senhora D was adapted for the stage by
German Mello and Suzan Damasceno and staged at SESC São Paulo by
Donizeti Mazonas and Rosi Campos in 2013. It was restaged, along with
an adaptation of Osmo, by SESC Campinas in 2015. Donizeti Mazonas’s
adaptation of Floema debuted on May 9, 2016 in São Paulo.
17. The Instituto Hilda Hilst maintains a bibliography and archive of these
critical works. See http://www.hildahilst.com.br/instituto-hilda-hilst/
banco-de-teses.
18. To date, only a handful of articles in English mention Hilst or her writ-
ing. The literary magazine Music & Literature published a special round-
table on Hilst’s work to acknowledge her sudden surge on the world
stage. See http://www.musicandliterature.org/features/2014/4/10/
the-hilda-hilst-roundtable.
For example, see Fred M. Clark, “Structures of Power and Enclosure
in the Theater of Hilst: ‘O Rato no Muro’” Confluencia 17:2 (Spring
2002), pp. 5–11; Justin Read, “Eulalia in Utopia.” In The Utopian
Impulse in Latin America. Ed. Kim Beauchesne and Alessandra Santos.
New York: Palgrave, 2011. In reviews of critical works on contemporary
Latin American and Brazilian fiction, David William Foster has consist-
ently made the case for more concerted attention to the work of Hilda
Hilst in Anglophone criticism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: HILDA HILST

Works in Portuguese
Poetry
Presságio. São Paulo, Revista dos Tribunais, 1950.
Balada de Alzira. São Paulo, Edições Alarico, 1951.
Balada do festival. Rio de Janeiro, Jornal de Letras, 1955.
Roteiro do silêncio. Rio de Janeiro, Anhambi, 1959.
Trovas de muito amor para um amado senhor. São Paulo, Anhambi, 1960.
Ode fragmentária. São Paulo, Anhambi, 1961.
Sete cantos do poeta para o anjo. São Paulo, Massao Ohno, 1962.
Poesia (1959/1967). São Paulo, Editora Sal, 1967.
Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão. São Paulo, Massao Ohno, 1974.
Da morte. Odes mínimas. São Paulo, Massao Ohno/Roswitha Kempf, 1980.
Poesia (1959/1979). São Paulo, Ed. Quíron/INL, 1980.
Cantares de perda e predileção. São Paulo, Massao Ohno/M. Lydia Pires e
Albuquerque, 1983.
Poemas malditos gozosos e devotos. São Paulo, Massao Ohno/Ismael Guarnelli,
1984.
Sobre a tua grande face. São Paulo, Massao Ohno, 1986.
Amavisse. São Paulo, Massao Ohno, 1989.
Alcoólicas. São Paulo, Maison de vins, 1990.
Bufólicas. São Paulo, Massao Ohno, 1992.
Do desejo. Campinas, Pontes, 1992.
Cantares do sem-nome e de partidas. São Paulo, Massao Ohno, 1995.
Do amor. São Paulo, Edith Arnhold/Massao Ohno Editor, 1999.
Poetry re-issues and collections by Editora Globo.
Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2001.
Bufólicas. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2002.
Cantares. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2002.
Exercícios. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2002.
Da morte. Odes mínimas. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2003.
Baladas. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2003.
Do desejo. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2004.
Poemas malditos, gozosos e devotos. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2005.
Fiction
Fluxo-floema. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1970.
Qadós. São Paulo, Edart, 1973.
Ficções. São Paulo, Quíron, 1977.
Tu não te moves de ti. São Paulo, Cultura, 1980.
A obscena senhora D. São Paulo, Massao Ohno, 1982.
Com os meus olhos de cão e outras novelas. São Paulo, Brasilense, 1986.
O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby. São Paulo, Massao Ohno, 1990; 2a edição, São
Paulo, Massao Ohno, 1990.
Contos d’escárnio: Textos grotescos. São Paulo, Siciliano, 1990; 2a edição, São
Paulo, Siciliano, 1992.
Cartas de um sedutor. São Paulo, Paulicéia, 1991.
Rútilo nada. Campinas, Pontes, 1993.
Estar sendo. Ter sido. São Paulo, Nankin, 1997; 2a edição, São Paulo, Nankin,
2000.
Cascos e carícias: crônicas reunidas (1992/1995). São Paulo, Nankin, 1998; 2a
edição, São Paulo, Nankin, 2000.
Fiction re-issues and collections by Editora Globo.
A obscena senhora D. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2001.
Cartas de um sedutor. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2002.
Kadosh. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2002.
Contos de escárnio/Textos grotescos. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2002.
Fluxo-floema. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2003.
Rútilos. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2003.
Tu não te moves de ti. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2004.
O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2005.
Com os meus olhos de cão. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2006.
Estar sendo. Ter sido. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2006.
Cascos e carícias. São Paulo, Editora Globo, 2007.
Theater
Teatro reunido, volume I. São Paulo, Nankin Editorial, 2000.
Works in Translation
Works in French:
L’obscène madame D suivi de le chien. Trans. Maryvonne Lapouge-Pettorelli.
Paris, Gallimard, 1997.
Contes sarcastiques – fragments érotiques. Trans. Maryvonne Lapouge-Pettorelli.

Paris, Gallimard, 1994.
Agda (fragment). Brasileiras. Org. Clélia Pisa & Maryvonne-Lapouge Petorelli.
Paris, 1977.
Sobre a Tua Grande Face. Trans. Michel Riaudel. Revista Pleine Marge, 2o
semestre de 1997, Paris.
Da morte. Odes mínimas/ De la mort. Odes minimes. Bilingual edition. Trans.
Álvaro Faleiros. Illustrations by Hilda Hilst. São Paulo, Nankin Editorial/
Montreal-Noroît, 1998.
Works in Italian:
Il quaderno rosa di Lori Lamby. Trans. Adelina Aletti. Milano, Sonzogno, 1992.
Works in Spanish:
Rútilo nada. Trans. Liza Sabater. Revista literária de Azur (Summer 1994): pp.
49–59.
Works in English:
“Glittering Nothing.” In Urban Voices: Contemporary Short Stories from
Brazil. Ed. Cristina Ferreira-Pinto. Trans. David William Foster. New York:
University Press of America, 1999. pp. 20–32.
“Two poems.” Trans. Eloah F. Giacomelli. In The Antigonish Review, no 20. St.
Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1975. p. 61.
The Obscene Madame D. Trans. Nathanaël and Rachael Gontijo Araújo.
Callicoon, NY: Nightboat, 2012.
Letters from a Seducer. Trans. John Keene. Callicoon, NY: Nightboat, 2014.
“Crassus Agonicus.” Triple Canopy 17. Trans. Julia Powers and Lívia
Drummond. 2014.
With My Dog-Eyes. Trans. Adam Morris. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014.
Works in German:
Briefe eines Verführers. Trans. Mechthild Blumberg. In Stint. Zeitschrift für
Literatur, n° 27.15, Bremen, October 2001, pp. 28–30.
Funkelndes Nichts. Trans. Mechthild Blumberg. In Stint. Zeitschrift für Literatur,
n° 29.15, Bremen, August 2001, pp. 54–66.
Vom Tod. Minimale Oden. Trans. Curt Meyer-Clason. In Modernismo Brasileiro
und die brasilianische Lyrik der Gegenwart. Berlin, 1997.
Major Prizes:
Prêmio PEN Clube de São Paulo (1962), Prêmio Anchieta (1969), Prêmio da
Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte (APCA) for best book of the year
(1977), Grande Prêmio da Crítica, APCA (1981 and 2003), Prêmio Jabuti
(1984 and 1994), Prêmio Moinho Santista (2002).
Authors’ Biography
Adam Morris is a writer, translator, and scholar. He has translated Hilda Hilst,
João Gilberto Noll, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Nuno Ramos, Vivian
Abenshushan, and others. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Luso-
Brazilian Review, CR: The New Centennial Review, parallax, Criticism, The
Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, The
Believer, BOMB, Music & Literature, Public Books, Cabinet, and elsewhere. His
book American Messiahs is forthcoming from Liveright/W.W. Norton. He was
a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester Humanities Center in 2016.
Bruno Carvalho’s research and teaching interests range from the early mod-
ern period to the present, and include literature, culture, and the built environ-
ment in Latin American and Iberian contexts, with emphasis on Brazil. He has
published widely on a variety of topics, and is the author of the award-winning
Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (2013), as well as co-editor
of O livro de tiradentes: Transmissão atlântica de ideias políticas no século XVIII
(2013), and of Occupy All Streets: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in
Rio de Janeiro (2016). He is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish
and Portuguese at Princeton University, and associated faculty in the Department
of Comparative Literature, the Princeton Environmental Institute, the Programs
in Latin American Studies and Urban Studies, and the School of Architecture.
A Rio de Janeiro native, Bruno Carvalho received his Ph.D. in Romance
Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
PART I
Hilst on Stage
A Brazilian Teorema: Queering the Family
in Hilda Hilst’s O Visitante (The Visitor)
David William Foster
Abstract  Hilst’s plays were written between 1967 and 1969, when

the theater was a major focal point of cultural resistance to the 1964
authoritarian dictatorship. These plays anticipate Hilst’s prose works
by exemplifying the development of her distinctive écriture feminine,
which questions the masculinist authoritarian and patriarchal discourse
of Brazil during the first phase of its sequence of military dictatorships.
Focusing on the play O visitante, this chapter describes how Hilst’s
theater expresses her irreverence toward authority, her mocking of patri-
archal power, her questioning of the pieties of bourgeois decency, and
her defense of a pansexuality that today we would called queer jouissance.
Keywords  Hilda Hilst · Queer theater · Pier Paolo Pasolini

Annunciation story · Queering the family · Queer Portuguese
Written the same year that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s magnificent film Teorema
premiered (on September 7, 1968), Hilda Hilst’s play O visitante,
D. W. Foster (*) 
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
e-mail: david.foster@asu.edu

20 D. W. Foster
probably written toward the end of that year, may or may not have been
inspired by the Italian film. The star of Pasolini’s film, Terence Stamp in
the role of Il Visitatore, exudes a hot and angry eroticism that detaches
the moorings of sexuality and interpersonal relationships in a staid Milan
industrial family, from haughty pater familias to dowdy maid, passing
through the mother and various sons, daughters, and cousins. Although
Pasolini, despite his own turbulent homoerotic life and perhaps homo
phobic murder, did not deal much with homosexuality directly in his
filmmaking, he certainly did in this, his first major film and international
success, based on his own novel by the same name (also released in
1968).1 One cannot overlook the fact that Hilst’s play is called O visi-
tante, even though, in the universe of the play, the visitor is, also with a
common noun, Corcunda (Corcovado; “Hunchback”).2
It is not my intent to engage in an examination of the parallels
between Pasolini’s novel and film and Hilst’s play,3 which has had only
one modest production.4 Rather, the specter of the major Italian film
and text serves to enhance the interest of Hilst’s play and to enrich both
its Christological features and the way in which it queers the decent
bourgeois family, of which the Brazilian instantiation in the play is every
bit as alternately staid and weird as it is in the potential Italian texts.
Playwriting for Hilst was only a fleeting pastime, a transition between
her early very successful poetry and her subsequent true métier, the
extremely successful and influential experimental—indeed, pornographic,
as she herself called them—novels that predominated in the last decades
of her life.5 Hilst left eight full-length plays composed between 1967
and 1969, O visitante being the third and one of the four published in
2000 by Editora Nankin; the others remained unpublished until the
2008 Editora Globo edition of all eight under the title of Teatro com-
pleto. As such, one is not especially interested in the plays as significant
contributions to Brazilian dramatic art. Rather, the brief dalliance with
the dramatic form was yet another way for Hilst to work toward her
own distinctive literary expression, a discursive form that allowed her
to begin configuring narrative worlds that she really only developed in
a definitively satisfying way when she settled on short fiction and the
novel as predominant literary genres in her oeuvre (without ever aban-
doning poetry, one must add). Indeed, Alcir Pécora, in his “Nota do
organizador,” asserts, first of all, that Hilst’s plays had little to add to
the language of university-based protest theater of the period,6 being in
the main, works that denounced the oppressions and repressions of the
A BRAZILIAN TEOREMA: QUEERING THE FAMILY IN HILDA … 21
period from the point of view of prevailing left-wing resistant ideologies:

indeed one play, Auto da barca de Camiri (1968), has as its backdrop
the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.
However, O visitante is “different,”7 and the prefatory note links it
to the second part of Hilst’s subsequent novel, Tu não te moves de ti
(1980). Be that as it may, as a dramatic text it is distinctively Lorquian.
The Lorquian aspects are to be seen both in the mixture of prose and
poetry (it is the only Hilst play that makes use of poetry as a form of dra-
matic dialogue), in the recurrence of certain vital motifs such as the sun
and the moon, and, most of all, in the queer challenge to the concept of
stable family, fixed gender roles and erotic relationships, and an affective
sexuality that raises highly unconventional or scandalous propositions.
Aside from leading the reader to recall the nuclear Lorca trilogy, Bodas de
sangre (1932), Yerma (1934), and the posthumous Bernarda Alba
(1936; not performed until 1945 in Buenos Aires), O visitante, in line
with Hilst’s interest in what we call the surreal in most general terms,
recalls Lorca’s final great, albeit incomplete play, El público (1929–30;
not performed until 1972 in Madrid). However, where El público is a
rereading of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, O visitante is, at least in
its general outlines, a reformulation of the Christian Annunciation
story.8 Teorema is Christological in the way that the Visitor fills each of
the members of the modern alienated urban Italian family with sexual
grace. By contrast, O visitante is Christological in two ways: the way that
Maria’s husband brings impregnation,9 not to Maria, but to her ostensi-
bly sterile mother, Ana (see, however, the following on how Corcunda is
also accused by Maria of having sexual relations with her mother) and
in the way that the visitor, whom the husband claims to have met along
the road as occurs in several major stories of Christ’s miracles, brings sex-
ual grace to Maria’s husband. It is noteworthy that her husband is here
called simply Homem and not José. Maria is, apparently, transfixed by
the sexual fulfillment of both her husband and her mother in this fash-
ion. In addition to this sort of apparently outrageous retelling of the
Marian story, it is likely that Ana will give birth to a third girl child (she
senses it will be a girl [p. 177]), also to be named Maria (one other died,
as did the respective fathers of the first two Marias). Finally, as sort of a
metacommentary on this eccentric retelling of the Marian story, the visi-
tor also ironically gives his name as Meia-Verdade (Half-Truth).
Even as sociohistorical events undermine the model of the Holy
Family and cultural alternatives question and even deconstruct it (most
22 D. W. Foster
notably the constellation of gay marriage partners and the children they
are raising), strenuous campaigns promoted by reactionary and ultracon-
servative forces struggle to maintain the supposed universal—indeed,
God-given—legitimacy of the Holy Family formulation (overlooked
is the fact that a marriage with the issue of a single child is a formula
for economic disaster, which may explain the fact that some allege Jesus
had siblings). Even when Mary’s divine conception is acknowledged to
be highly irregular (a continual source of waggish humor that includes
viewing Joseph, then, as a divine cuckold), it does serve to mystify con-
ception and childbearing as an integral part of this hegemonic social
model.10 Mary’s entire being is marked by her divine motherhood; she
has no other history. Thus, even when the basic facts of human life defy
the model of the Holy Family, it continues to be defended as an unques-
tionable ground zero of human life.
Hilst’s play will have none of this. O visitante anticipates by decades
queer revisions of affective relationships that bring into their conjugated
universe those based on homoaffective love and desire, along with con-
sequent revisions of the family and other social units.11 It postulates a
realm of lived human experience in which the family includes other sex-
ual dynamics than those associated with the Holy Family model. Indeed,
the specific heteronormativity that that model enshrines is noticeably
absent from the realm in question. Set in a remote locale—an “almost
monastic scene”12 (perhaps Hilst had very much in mind her own oth-
erworldly Casa do Sol)—the play postulates an instance of familial soci-
ety that is somehow separate from and even in defiance of the prevailing
model that is likely to be part of the audience’s horizons of sociohistori
cal knowledge.13 Moreover, the note for the setting ends with a direct
allusion to the Nazarene (the geographical locale, of course, of the Holy
Family story) and to the Middle Ages, where that story is retold inces-
santly, including in the auto (religious dramas) and figural or allegori-
cal writing that finds that story in mundane and often unlikely places:
“I see everything between the medieval and the Nazarene, white, red,
and brown).”14
In Hilst’s queering of the family, an ars combinatoria of alternative
affective and erotic relationships takes place. In the first place, the four
characters are paired in terms of the (here, nonqueer) sexual binary: Ana
and Maria, mother and daughter, wear identical dress, while Homem
(Joseph) and Corcunda (Christ?15) are equally identically dressed.
In the opening scenes of the play, until the Homem appears to announce
the impending surprise arrival of Corcunda, whom he says he has met on

the road home and invited to join the family for a glass of wine,16 the dia-
logue between Ana and Maria very much turns on the tight affective bond
between the two women, stronger on Ana’s part than on Maria’s. It is a
bond that borders on the lesbian, if not being outrightly lesbian in nature:
MARIA: I see you all the time now. Every night. Every day. (she pauses)
ANA: You were gentle. You loved me. Do you still love me now?
MARIA (serious and ironic):
The things you say!17
Nevertheless, Ana hectors her daughter about fulfilling her matrimonial

obligation (“But you must fulfill [it]”18), asking whether Maria is happy
that she, Ana, speaks about the son she must someday come to give birth
to (p. 151). Maria eventually accuses her mother of really wishing that it
were she who could become pregnant again:
MARIA (sternly): You never conformed to old age (approaching her)

You still want to give birth. Open your legs.19
Ana does indeed show signs of pregnancy, while Maria does not, although
we must await the appearance of the two men to confirm the former fact.
When Homem arrives, although the women acquiesce to the impend-
ing surprise appearance of an unknown visitor, some conventional bick-
ering takes place between husband and wife that points to the lack of
strong affective ties between them, confirmed by allegations that all is
not right in the matrimonial chambers. Maria seeks to dismiss it all:
MARIA (coming in to arrange the table):
Words, words.
So many useless words.
Every day.20
The words may be vain insofar as they change nothing, but they are
eloquently symptomatic of the extent of the sexual dissonance at issue.
It is when the stranger arrives that the queer geometry at play begins to
24 D. W. Foster
define itself. Maria refuses to answer the door, so Ana does, receiving the
flower that the visitor announces he has brought to give to the person
who opens the door to him.21 The Homem reacts immediately:
MAN (getting up):
So much the better it was Ana and not me.
A flower for a man, can you imagine?
The wife might start to wonder
Whether you were the fond messenger
Of some scheme.22
Significantly, the stage instructions do not indicate what tone or atti-

tude Homem is supposed to strike. Certainly, a heterosexist presumption
would have him be ironic, with a touch of disdain or sarcasm; a queer
interpretation would have him speaking wistfully, perhaps even dreamily.
What we come to learn, as I have already anticipated, is that the queer
interpretation is of a whole with what is the secret relationship between
the two men: the Homem has brought his lover home to his wife and
mother-in-law. Although neither man admits to anything, it is Maria who
figures out that, while Homem is the father of the new Maria that Ana
will bring forth, he is also her husband’s lover. Maria, rather than being
announced to, now assumes the revised role, in this Holy Family saga, of
the announcer. Moreover, Hilst’s stage instructions have already alerted
us to the suspect nature, so to speak, of the visitor:
The hunchback should not be treated as an ostensibly magical element.

He should not have any tics, only a certain smile, a certain gaze and some
perturbing gestures.23
Indeed, one associates with the Christ icon certain eccentric gestures,
such as the stiff perpendicular-arm blessing with three extended fingers
or the gesture toward his Sacred Heart. It is important to remember that
gestures are part of the signs by which both homophobic and gay read-
ers identify the queer individual, in a sort of semantic chaining in which
a network of metonymies and gestures confirm, irreproachably, the pres-
ence of the queer.24
The quality Maria announces regarding the visitor is akin to the power
of Pasolini’s protagonist:
MARIA: O Satan of enchantment! It’s what you see
(pointing to Ana) in her that gave me life
And in every corner where she is
You and another will be present. Another:
O Satan of enchantment!25
It is only then that Maria can be happy:
(laughs. Yawns) Now I’m going to lie down quietly (goes walking down the
corridor). Tell him [my husband] that I know everything, dear mother.26
Prior to this moment, the Homem has left the room and, after a long
speech in which she accuses her mother of allowing Corcunda to fre-
quent the former’s bed, she notices that he, too, has disappeared:
ANA (pained): Nevermind. Daughter. He must have gone looking for

your husband.27
There is, to be sure, a marked feminist note to all this business. In the
first place, it is Ana and Maria who “hold” the home in close company
with each other, while Homem appears unannounced and leaves in
a similar fashion, introducing, on a rather fishy pretext, into the living
room, the family’s common domestic space, a stranger who also comes
and goes essentially unannounced. Moreover, in the second place, Maria,
speaking to Corcunda, complains of her husband’s arbitrary masculinist
behavior:
MARIA: And don’t you think it strange
That a man would invite you
Into his own home
Without knowing you?28

26 D. W. Foster
That is how Maria insinuates Corcunda and her husband could also be
lovers. Even if one were to insist that the text is not conclusive in this
regard and that what is really at issue is that Homem has facilitated sex-
ual access to his mother-in-law, one and another alternative are equally
queer as regards the central figure of the heteronormative Holy Family.
As Maria has already said, as she begins to restructure the erotic geom-
etry of this nuclear family: “You know what, mother, I’m starting to
feel happy.”29 Finally, the play has feminist overtones in the continually
implied criticism of male prerogative, which includes Homem’s recourse
to a denigrating characterization of his wife, accompanied by physical
violence. As Maria says: “MARIA: Worried…like every man.”30 There is
nothing particularly remarkable here except the way in which the topoi
of male dominance are made to function within the confines of the
queering of the ostensibly heterosexist Holy Family.
What is most remarkable about the play is the highly erratic incor-
poration of the peninsular Portuguese norms of second-person address.
This might be less noticeable if the play were entirely in a poetic form:
in both Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America, peninsular pronomi
nal norms, with accompanying verb forms, have historically prevailed
in poetry (and prayers) over the norms of regional dialects. And while
the tu form is used as the unmarked pronoun in many different parts of
Brazil, the national norm is that of the você (with second-person singular
verb agreement and third-person verb agreement, respectively, although
one may encounter tu and third-person verb agreements); vocês (with
third-person plural verb agreement31) is the universal second-person
plural pronoun (the peninsular plural vós only occurs in Brazil in direct
address to God—where it is written as Vós—and in some exceptional and
virtually archaic honorifics, or in parodies of pretentious usage).
One would assume, therefore, that when Hilst has mother and daugh-
ter speaking with the tu form from the beginning (a form that was not
part of Hilst’s own São Paulo dialect), she has, for better or worse,
decided to imprint her text, which is partially in occasionally rhym-
ing verse, with a “poetic” flavor. What is remarkable, however, are the
ways in which Hilst on occasion gets her forms wrong, shifting pro-
nouns, failing to have proper pronoun-verb agreement, and even on
one long occasion, suddenly shifting from tu to the hyper-Brazilian
você, when Homem tells Corcunda, with regard to Ana: “Mas deixe-a
contar” (“But let her tell it.” p. 167). Elsewhere throughout the text,
Homem and Corcunda speak to each other in the tu form, as do Ana
and Maria between themselves and with Homem. Corcunda, by con-

trast, is addressed by both women with the vós form (with accompany-
ing second-person plural verb agreement); he in turn addresses Maria as
tu and Ana as vós. This is an unusual choice, because, as I have said, vós
in Brazil is now customarily limited to direct address to God32: the cus-
tomary formal form in Portugal is você, while it is, of course, o senhor/a
senhora in Brazil. Other anomalies occur in Hilst’s deployment of the
second-person forms, such as when Ana says: “Disseste que tu e ele
eram dois homens” (“You said that you and he were two men.” p. 161),
when the standard agreement, observed elsewhere in the text, would be
the regular familiar plural form accompanying the implied vós (tu+ele):
“tu e ele éreis.” Another example would be where Ana, who elsewhere
has been using vós in a “correct” way, says to Corcunda “Perdoa”
(“Pardon me.” p. 165) instead of the expected “Perdoai.”
My interest here is not to inventory all of the so-called proper ver-
sus anomalous usages in Hilst’s text, but rather to discern the semi-
otic effect they have for the texture of the play. In effect, I would
insist they add to the queering of the human universe of O visitante
contributing to the unmooring of conventional heterosexist relation-
ships in a queering that must necessarily affect language as much as
the experiences, emotions, and interpretations of them that language
is called upon to give a verbal accounting or rendering. Hilst was a
master craftswoman of the Portuguese language,33 and it would be
foolhardy for anyone to claim that she didn’t know exactly what she
was doing with every word she wrote. As a consequence, one can only
assume that Hilst’s erratic manipulations of second-person pronouns
and verb forms is a strategic discursive decision intended to contribute
to undermining the regulatory relationships between the members of
this social microcosm. After all, one of the essential pragmatic func-
tions of language is to signal such regulatory relationships in terms not
just of what individuals may say to each other on the basis of their
relationship, but how they must and must not say it. This is espe-
cially true in the family, where metalinguistic features (metalinguistic
because they call attention to how language is being used) are crucial
to intergenerational relationships (mother/daughter), relationships
across the sexual divide (husband/wife), and across the divide between
putative familiars and strangers (Ana or Maria/Corcunda). The slip-
pages in this regard that occur, the unexpected discourse features,
serve to alert the audience to ways in which this microcosm is not a
28 D. W. Foster
matter of business as usual, not a matter, at least, of heteronormative

business as usual.34
O visitante is not a major play. In a very real sense, none of Hilst’s
texts are major texts in the way that Brazilian literature holds Machado
de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1899), João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão:
veredas (1956), or Clarice Lispector’s A paixão segundo G.H. (1964) to
be signposts of national literary history. Hilst wrote brilliant fragments
that became assembled into discrete published volumes, at least as con-
cerns her prose and the brief period of transitional theater leading up to it.
This does not demean her overall artistic importance for Brazilian culture,
but merely means we need to approach it in a fashion other than as a suc-
cession of titles that interact with each other as elements of a masterful
oeuvre.35 One could view them as parts of a mosaic in which certain recur-
ring forms and issues can be found, among them the parodying of the
icons and motifs of conventional Judeo-Christian morality, as well as the
jouissance-laden endorsement of queer erotic configurations. No wonder
Maria, who is so sour and unhappy at the beginning of O visitante, exits at
the end of the play to dream the sleep of the contented.
Notes
1. Regrettably, Vito Russo, in his groundbreaking work on queer filmmak-
ing, only makes passing reference to Teorema; c.f. The Celluloid Closet:
Homosexuality in the Movies. rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987),
193. Alberto Mira, on the other hand, comments very directly on the
(homo)erotic elements of Passolini’s film, noting that its homoaffective
dimensions, however, were not well received by the Italian gay move-
ment; c.f. Miradas insumisas: gays and lesbianas en el cine (Barcelona:
Egales Editorial, 2008), 364–69; 369 in particular.
2. O visitante. Teatro completo (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2008), 143–82.
3. This could only be done, first of all, if one could ascertain that Hilst had
some sort of access to either Pasolini’s novel or his film in the year 1968,
the year that she composed her play. I have not been able to ascertain
anything to that effect.
4. The chronology accompanying Hilst’s Teatro completo indicates that it was
put on with another of her plays, “para o exame dos alunos da Escola de
Arte Dramática da Universidade de São Paulo” (Hilst, Teatro completo,
p. 543).
5. On this development in her writing, see Ermelinda Ferreira, “Da poe-
sia erudite à narrativa pornográfica: sobre a incursão de Hilda Hilst no
pósmodernismo.” Estudos de literatura brasileira contemporânea 21

(2003): 113–27.
6. Álcir Pécora. “Nota do organizador” Hilda Hilst, Teatro completo (São
Paulo: Editora Globo, 2008), 7–19.
7. Pécora, “Nota,” 11.
8. For an analysis of the Lorca play, see Carlos Jerez Farrán, Un Lorca descon-
ocido análisis de un teatro “irrepresentable” (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva,
2004).
9. Pallottini insists on this fact. “Postfácio,” Teatro completo (São Paulo:
Editora Globo, 2008), 504.
10. The contradictions of the figure of the Virgin Mary who is also the
Mother of Christ is famously examined in Julia Kristeva’s influential
essay “Stabat Mater.” In The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi (New York:
Columbia UP, 1986), 160–86. These contradictions are enshrined in a
prevalent Mexican social imaginary whereby, despite the evident presence
of one’s father and the urgings of one’s own active sexuality with oth-
ers who may end up the mother of one’s children, Mexican males believe
their mothers to be virgins, never to be defiled by the sexual act.
11. As discussed in detail in the second chapter, “Who’s Your Daddy? Queer
Kinship and Perverse Domesticity” of her Sexual Futures by the Puerto
Rican queer theorist Juana María Rodríguez. See her Sexual Futures,
Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (Albany, N.Y: New York
University Press, 2014).
12. “Cenário quase monacal”, Teatro completo, 147.
13. See the characterizations of the conventional Brazilian family and its con-
cepts of sexuality in Maria del Priore. Históriasíntimas: sexualidade e ero
tismo na história do Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Planeta do Brasil, 2011).
Also useful, especially as regards the ultraconservative role of women in
Brazil, the newspaper columns on femininity penned by none other than
Clarice Lispector in the 1950s and 1960s, precisely the social milieu of
Hilst’s play and unquestionably her point of departure in her writing for
the deconstruction of such ultraconservative roles, particularly in her
“pornographic” texts, see Foster, “The Case for Feminine Pornography
in Latin America.” In Bodies and Biases: Sexualities in Hispanic
Cultures and Literatures. Ed. David William Foster and Roberto Reis.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 246–73. For
Lispector, see Correio feminino. Org. Aparecida Maria Nunes (Rio de
Janeiro: Editora Rocco, no date); and Só para mulheres. Org. Aparecida
Maria Nunes (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, no date).
14. “Vejo tudo entre o medioevo e o nazareno—branco, vermelho e mar-
rom.” Teatro completo, 147.
30 D. W. Foster
15. I realize this is far-fetched, but queer readings can, with a measure of
legitimacy, indulge in the far-fetched: the Brazilian national symbol of
Christianity is the Cristo de Corcovado, the huge cement Christ that sits
atop the humpback mountain that has been an icon of the Rio de Janeiro
coastline since the 1930s. If the ostensibly hunchbacked mysterious
stranger in Hilst’s play is indeed Christ or a figure of him (including the
angel Gabriel), making him corcovado is a sly way to exercise a gratuitous
dig at Brazilian Catholicism, so much a part of the ambience of repres-
sion Hilst criticizes in her other plays and, subsequently, in her fiction.
Hilst is interested in working systematically against the hegemony of
sexist and homophobic Catholicism. However, the Argentine theolo-
gian Marcella Althaus-Reid engages in quite fascinating reinscriptions
of canonical Christian thought within a queer perspective. See Marcella
Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (London: Routledge, 2003).
16. The sacramental implications are too obvious to dwell on, especially
because we also see Maria preparing bread (hosts?). One can make
too much of these details, as I have already done with the Cristo de
Corcovado, because they are not determinative of the queer revision of
the Holy Family that is central to the work. That is, they are the sort of
incidental dramatic details that fill in the theatrical space.
17. MARIA: Agora vejo-te sempre. Cada noite. Cada dia. (pausa)/ANA:
Eras mansa. Me amavas. Ainda me amas agora? (p. 149) MARIA (grave e
irônica): As coisas que tu dizes! (p. 152).
18. “Mas te falta cumprir.” Teatro completo, 151.
19. “MARIA (severa): […] Nunca te conformaste com a velhice. (aproxi
mando-se)/Queres parir ainda. Abrir as pernas.” Teatro completo, 153.
20. “MARIA (entrando para arrumar a mesa):/Palavras, palavras./Quantas
palavras inúteis/A cada dia.” Teatro completo, 158.
21. One will recall the importance flowers play in the Holy Week enactment
of the Annunciation (white), Glory (yellow), and Sacrifice (red) of Christ.
22. “HOMEM (levantando-se) /Ainda bem que foi Ana e não eu. /Uma flor
para um homem, já pensaste? /Até a mulher podia duvidar /Se serias ou
não, mensageiro amoroso /De uma trama.” Teatro completo, 162.
23. O corcunda não deve ser tratado ostensivamente como um elemento mágico.
Não deve ter tiques, apenas um certo sorriso, um certo olhar e alguns gestos
perturbadores. Teatro completo, 145.
24. I have examined this notion of queer semantic chaining in detail in Foster,
El ambiente nuestro. (Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe,
2004), 86–89; and in Foster, “Five Proposals on Homophobia [revised
version].” Expanding the Circle: Creating an Inclusive Environment in
Higher Education for LGBTQ Students and Studies. Ed. John C. Hawley
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 225–35.
25. “MARIA: O satanás do encanto! É o que tu vês /(aponta Ana) Nessa que

me deu a vida. /E em cada canto onde ela estiver /Tu e um outro estará
presente. Um outro: /O satanás do encanto!” Teatro completo, 174.
26. “(ri. Boceja) Agora sim me deito sossegada. (vai caminandho para o corre-
dor) Conta-lhe [a meu marido] que eu sei de tudo, minha mãe.” Teatro
completo, 182. The differential spacing of the quotes is a consequence of
when the characters are speaking in a poetic mode (the first quote here
from Maria) and when they are speaking in prose (the second quote
here).
27. ANA (angustiada): Deixa. Filha. Deve ter ido buscar o teu marido.”
Teatro completo, 181.
28. MARIA: E não achas estranho /Que um homem te convide /À própria
casa /Sem te conhecer? (p. 179).
29. “Sabes mãe… estou ficando contente”, Teatro completo, 180.
30. “MARIA: Inquieto… como todo homem”, Teatro completo, 161.
31. Of course, I am simplifying things somewhat, as there are many com-
plications regarding pronoun and verb agreement in spoken colloquial
Brazilian Portuguese and its written representation in reported direct dia-
logue in cultural texts.
32. Again, I am simplifying somewhat, because there is a long list of honorif
ics in use in Brazil that include the possessive vossa and, therefore, pre-
sumably the archaic use of vós is a singular pronoun. However, forms like
Vossa Senhoria and Vossa Magnificência have now been routinely replaced
by third-person forms, in line with the prevailing formal use of o senhor
and a senhora: Sua Senhoria, Sua Magnificência. To be sure, Brazil is a
vast country, with many pockets of archaic grammatical usages, and one
is speaking generally of the norma culta, professional/educated usage. It
is important to note, however, that agreement with these honorifics in
Brazil is executed with third-person verb agreement.
33. One is confident that it is only the insouciant and forthright manner of
the transgressive nature of her writing that kept Hilst from being elected
to the Academia Brasileira de Letras, to which she had every literary right
to belong.
34. This is the sort of study of the queering of language I undertake to prel-
ude in Foster, “Espanhol queer, português queer.” Excluídos e margin-
alizados na literatura: uma estética dos oprimidos. Ed. David William
Foster, Lizandro Carlos Calegari, and Ricardo André Ferreira Martins
(Santa Maria: Ed. da UFSM, 2013), 213–39.
35. To be sure, such a feature of her work may also have contributed to her
exclusion from the Academia Brasileira de Letras, as much as it quintes-
sentially subscribes to very conservative literary forms.
32 D. W. Foster
Author Biography
David William Foster Ph.D., University of Washington, 1964; BA, 1961; MA,
1963 University of Washington, is Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women
and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. He served as Chair of the
Department of Languages and Literatures from 1997–2001. In spring 2009, he
served as the Ednagene and Jordan Davidson Eminent Scholar in the Humanities
at Florida International University. His research interests focus on urban cul-
ture in Latin America, with emphasis on issues of gender construction and sex-
ual identity, as well as Jewish culture. He has written extensively on Argentine
narrative and theater, and he has held Fulbright teaching appointments in
Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. He has also served as an Inter-American
Development Bank Professor in Chile. McFarland Publishing brought out
Urban Photography in Argentina in 2007. São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and
Cultural Production was published in 2011 by the University Press of Florida.
Latin American Documentary Filmmaking: Major Texts (University of Arizona
Press) and Glimpses of Phoenix: The Desert Metropolis in Written and Visual Media
(McFarland Publishing) were both published in 2013. From El Eternatura to
Datripper: Graphic Narrative in Argentina and Brazil was published by the
University of Texas Press in 2016. In June and July 2013, as in June 2010,
Foster directed a program in São Paulo on Urban Brazilian Narrative as part of
the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College and
University Teachers.
Is the Word Alive? An Inquiry into Poetics
and Theater in As Aves da Noite (Nightbirds)
by Hilda Hilst
Tatiana Franca Rodrigues Zanirato

System inquiry—II
There are many philosophies
and rationalizations for everything
but one day you will see,
in the users’ faces,
perplexity.
—Alex Polari
What verse recomposes you?
What fiber still moves you?
—Hilda Hilst1
Abstract  Hilst’s play As aves da noite (Nightbirds 1969) stages the

Jewish Holocaust. The elaboration of the characters, their dialogues,
and the line notes by the author all echo the Adornian question about
what type of poetry is possible after Auschwitz. Crisscrossed by a “per-
formance of the archive,” the text’s reflection moves from its specific his-
torical context, to historical analogy and timeless questions about human
cruelty and fragility. Nightbirds defines the poetic diction and the atem-
poral character of Hilst’s theater, and demonstrates the “allegorizing
T. F. R. Zanirato (*) 
Universidade Federal de Goiás, Jataí, Brazil
e-mail: tatianapaschoa@gmail.com

34 T. F. R. Zanirato
gaze” that results from her political and poetic use of language and space
in the theater.
Keywords  Hilst · Theater · Poetry · Lyric
Poetics and Theater: A Form for Hearing,

a Form of Inquiring
The eight plays that make up Hilda Hilst’s Teatro Completo were written
during the 1960s—more precisely between 1967 and 1969—and they
represent an experience with theater that the author never repeated again
at any other point in her life’s work. Doubtless, Hilst’s decision to pur-
sue theater was a political reaction to the times. The scenario that fol-
lowed the Brazilian military coup of 1964, like the one that came after
the Second World War, was characterized by the coercion of subjectivity,
which aimed at alienating individual consciousness in society, and in turn
propelled engagement with this coercion in the arts.
The world and common sense seemed to have become brutish, no
longer appalled by the loss of life, and accustomed to the estimates (always
hypothetical, of course, due to the distance maintained from the victims) of
deaths and forced exile, which occurred on a scale theretofore inconceivable.
In the words of Eric Hobsbawm, “humanity has learned to live in a world
where the extermination, torture, and mass exile have become everyday
experiences which we no longer notice.”2 An incredulous stare and a ques-
tioning of ethics thus affected the artistic productions that were made dur-
ing and following the global conflict, and continued after the Brazilian coup.
Hilstian theater had barely anything in common with artistic engage-
ment in Brazil at the time: unlike the CPC (Centro Cultural de Cultura,
or Popular Culture Center) and Teatro de Arena, to cite two examples,
Hilst’s essentially poetic diction never sought didactic clarity or explicitly
Brechtian models: as throughout all of her literary oeuvre, theater is first
and foremost a reflection on the measure of the word, or, better yet, on
what kinds of words are possible for art in a state of exception. Precisely
for this reason, Hilst’s theater hasn’t become dated.
Hilst’s insertion of drama into her poetic trajectory formed part of a
larger literary project in which she mapped the social context and simul-
taneously promoted a reading of the status of human beings—an attempt
to evaluate potentialities, in the Nietzschean sense—and questioned
IS THE WORD ALIVE? AN INQUIRY INTO POETICS AND THEATER … 35
the Enlightenment project for mankind. Her perspective was doubtful:

in Hilst’s work, reason, like faith, is insufficient for contemplating the
world: what remain are the perplexities, those that Polari describes.3 The
image of God, recurrent in various plays, is her metaphor for thinking
through the emptiness of human desire and the loss of critical sensibility
that nourishes the fascism to which humankind falls prey.
Jean-Pierre Ryngaert writes that every topic has its own theatricality
that requires specific modes of narration:
In his theater, which became a model (or anti-model), Brecht imposed rad-
ical epic forms. Beckett, in turn, gradually cleaned the plot of any a necdote
and concentrated it on what for him is essential: the presence of death.
He imposed a merciless diet to traditional narrative, to the point of most
emphasizing the permanent threat of definitive silence. After these two
greats, it’s difficult to ask oneself: “how to narrate?” and “what to narrate?”4
Silence and death are also terms used by Silviano Santiago to speak about
the incommunicability and poverty of experience in postmodern nar-
ratives: mute when asked to give advice, his narrators fictionalize the
author’s own memories, which were not lived but rather observed.5 In
this way, the narrative maintains a limited, closed-up perspective, over-
determining the stories it tells. The silence typical of these exhausted
narrators, according to Santiago, develops eloquence through the recon-
structions of a perspective on the world that is “rejected and distanced”
from the subject. Moreover, through this perspective, one oscillates
“between pleasure and criticism, always keeping the posture of some-
one who although removed his self from the plot, thinks and feels, and is
moved by what body and/or brain are left in him.”6
Hilst resolves the problem posed by postmodern theater with lyric-
narrative plays based in the specific context of the period in which she
wrote. She feels what she sees, and from there, Hilst’s poetic-narrative
theater begins critically recreating the subject’s own existential dimen-
sion. The politico-social context specific to Hilst’s work—the Cold War
and the Brazilian military dictatorship—seem to give rise to a new aes-
thetic experience, as though a new elaboration of language could recon-
cile the written word with the “experience of looking” through memory:
memorialist narrative is necessarily historical (and in this sense it is closer to

the great conquests of modernist prose, that is, it is a vision of the past in
the present, trying to camouflage the process of generational discontinuity
with the wordy and rational continuity of a more experienced individual).

Postmodern fiction, going through the experience of the narrator who sees
himself—and not sees himself—yesterday in the young man of today, is the
priority of the “now” (Octavio Paz).7
Consequently, the presence of the poetic within drama would be a pro-

cess both of resignification and resistance to specific notions and ration-
alizations during a time of perplexity. It is an attempt to expand the
possibilities of writing, which itself is a mode for using language to prob-
lematize the human experience, since the “gaze of the now” and mem-
ory are not reconcilable.
For this reason, Hilst’s decision to work with a hybrid artistic genre
is anything but fortuitous. Rather, it is crucial to her writing because
it dislocates lyric verse. In its most traditional definition, lyric poetry is
understood as expression of the poet’s subjectivity8—it assumes a cer-
tain totality, as though the metaphysical, total expression of the self were
even possible. When poetry emerges in drama, the opposite happens, as
it points toward a failure of the “impotence” of this I, suggesting that
there is no such thing as a total expression and no ideal representational
relationship between word and thing. According to the poet herself:
With As aves da noite I wanted to hear what was said in the hunger cell, at
AUSCHWITZ. It was very difficult. If my characters seem too poetic it is
because I believe that only under extreme circumstances can poetry emerge
ALIVE, IN TRUTH. Only under extreme circumstances do we question
this GREAT DARKNESS that is God, with voracity, despair, and poetry.9
Likewise, the Derrida of Passions welcomes the value of the nonresponse

represented by such a “darkness,” the value of the obliqueness of a
secret. He does so in order to think about the act of witnessing offered
by literature. The performative act would in this manner compose scenes
in which literary writing refuses to respond to reality; in other words,
instances when literature does not engage with reality to the point
of responding to it. Rather, the “aestheticizing game” is not reduced
to obviousness, and it is kept a secret. Le secret affiché, the “displayed
secret” is the “discourse from which one expects a serious, thoughtful,
or philosophical response.”10 It becomes performative when confronted
with the fact that language cannot be reduced to knowing, but rather
doubles knowledge, signaling the “impossibility, for any testimony to
guarantee itself by expressing itself”11:
There is something secret. But it does not conceal itself. Heterogeneous to

the hidden, the obscure, the nocturnal, to the invisible, to what can be
dissimulated, and indeed to what is nonmanifest in general, it cannot be
unveiled. It remains inviolable even when one thinks one has revealed it.
Not that it hides itself […]. It simply exceeds the play of veiling/unveiling,
dissimulation/revelation, night/day, forgetting/anamnesis, earth/heaven
etc. It does not belong therefore to the truth, neither to the truth as homoi-
osis or adequation, nor to truth as memory, (Mnemosyne, aletheia), nor to
the given truth, nor to the promised truth, nor to the inaccessible truth.12
So the testimony or witnessing offered by literature cannot be

reduced to knowledge or certainty, and is made up of traces, which
do not allow themselves to be “captured or covered over by the rela-
tion to the other, by being with or by any form of ‘social bond’.”13
There, in that place made up of “traces,” the scene of Hilstian poet-
ics is constituted. Renouncing God and deposing him from his lumi-
nous image is a way to contest the human experience and its obscurity.
Thus, the witness borne by literature is performative to the extent that
it destructures certainty and does not commit itself to any truth, as though
that were a sort of perjury that could legitimize what has been declared.
In this manner, the episodic quality of Hilst’s theatrical oeuvre resides
not with its participation in the political engagement of the 1960s, as
Alcir Pécora emphasizes, or in pointing out postwar fractures; beyond
this perspective, Hilst’s theater rehearses expectations. It opens itself in
several discourses and realizations, analyzing future societies through the
context-womb in which it was generated.14
This happens because literature, as an archive—that is, as a place
where a memory can reside—looks toward the past/present at the same
time as it speculates about the future. In Archive Fever, Derrida describes
the fictional aspect of the archive as the dwelling place of a memory that
does not close itself off to the past, but makes a performance of it, con-
signing certain elements to the future:
This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis,
or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for
conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case,
such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No,
the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure
of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its
relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records
the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media.15
Because the past is always being resignified by memory, the archive can
only be comprehended through the dynamic movement of rewriting his-
tory. This is the difference between memorization and memory: whereas
memory appears in the realm of enunciation and in the possibilities of
understanding history as a dialectic movement, memorization becomes
sedimented in repetition, foreclosing the anarchic, consignatory potential
of the archive with a muteness that turns it into a storage space where
discourse or knowledge are merely in reserve, and conferred with the sta-
tus of “truth.”
This is why it is possible to understand that plays, as archives, are
predominantly allegorical in the etymological sense of the word, whose
Greek root állos presupposes the movement of literature itself: heter-
onomy is the act of affirming oneself in alterity, and in theater, history
becomes the other that is tangent to the poetic.16 This is how the enunci-
ative memory functions in Hilst’s theater.
As aves da noite (1968) takes as its theme the Jewish Holocaust during
the Second World War. The plot revolves around Father Maximilian Kolbe,
who volunteers to die in the so-called “hunger cell” instead of another
prisoner of the SS. The elaboration of characters, as well as the dialogues,
echoes the Adornian question about what type of poetry is possible after
Auschwitz. Without giving a direct answer, Hilst’s play stages a discomfort
that cannot be reconciled with the experience of the spectator/reader’s
isolation. The instructions for stage and setting make explicit the author’s
intentions for how the dramatic text should be received:
SETTING
Cylinder of variable height, depending on the height of the theater.
Interior height of the cell, inside the cylinder: 1.9 meters.
In the cell, a low iron door, with a small visor.
Window around the cylinder covered in transparent material (wire,

acrylic, etc.).
Individual chairs around the cylinder, isolated from each other with
dividers.
NOTE
I idealized the setting of As aves da noite in order to achieve the spectator’s

complete participation in what is happening inside the cell. I also wanted
the spectator to feel completely isolated, and that is why the chairs are sep-
arated by dividers.17
As a whole, Hilst’s writing is a system in a permanent state of perplexity;

in it, aesthetic choices necessarily pass through their context, such that
the propulsion of her poetic work derives from the astonished gaze the
author casts on the era; precisely for this reason, the force of the work
does not become dated.
Word-Body
In the theater, the body is the metonymical instantiation of the word:
there is contiguity between the voice of the actor (or even the character)
and the text that is written and read. However, at stake is not just repre
sentation, but the creation of another language, a heterotopic language.18
Constituted in and by another topos, this language represents the rela-
tionships of a language placed in permanent crisis by its successive and
incessant movement of opening onto the alterity of signs.
If “reinventing the language” (in the text or in the voice of the person
staging it) is to dislocate it from its habitual meaning, then relationships
of semantic representation become disarticulated as well. In other words,
similarity, a category that helps us to know (or recognize) the connection
between word and thing, is destabilized through the internal crisis in lan-
guage. According to Michel Foucault:
Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine lan-

guage, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they
shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance,
and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that
less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also oppo-
site one another) to ‘hold together’.19
This is why when Ryngaert considers the elaboration of a new language

in theater, he emphasizes poetry as one element capable of corroding the
stable relationship between representation and the world. The corrosive
effect of poetic or lyrical diction in the dramatic text, especially when
staged, results at least in a “diverse topography,” if not exactly in the het-
erotopia that Foucault describes.20
By forcing the limits of writing through the presence of the body that
reads or performs it—as the character is also a text—poetry reminds the
listener of “what this speaking wants to say and of how much suffering
the individual is exposed to when seeking a reconciliation between her
language and body.”21 In other words, theater, when lyric, assumes an
aesthetic condition of distancing from common, automatized language
and thus responds to a political demand by investing, via the crisis of lan-
guage, in a reflection on human potential. According to Ryngaert,
The crisis of language also subtly combats the way in which the characters
express themselves, which does not correspond to their various states in
reality, in which they are invested with a language not their own depending
on social norms. […]
Dislocating language is also a way of hearing it differently and attending

to its political implications. The differential between the character and the
language that he speaks also questions his dispossession, but there is noth-
ing metaphysical about it.22
At this point it becomes interesting to reflect on the frontiers of

poetry in the twentieth century. According to Italian theorist Alfonso
Berardinelli, during the twentieth century the classic Hegelian concept
of the lyrical genre becomes distanced from the notion of poetry as a
mode of stressing the interrogation of subjective expression, that is, of
an individual speaking for herself. As Berardinelli writes, “touching the
‘borders of poetry,’ dislodging and forcing them, becomes necessary in
order to exit stylistic systems that tend toward closure.”23 Due to this
confluence of genres (and bodies, as we are speaking of theater), the
opacity of lyric poetry is reintroduced to its role of generating alienation
and, from there, deautomatization. It represents resistance to the reifica-
tion of the world.
Nevertheless, this does not mean it stakes itself on overcoming the
fracture between individual and society and the recovery of the Hegelian
“lyrical essence.” On the contrary, the nontransparency of signs in poetry
is due to a dissonance that is not purely aesthetic, but social:
Dissonance is the laceration of existence, which poetry cannot recompose

with the resources at its disposal. What distances and opposes the poetic
world to the real world is also what links them in a mortal connection.
This connection is at the same time historical and aesthetic: it determines
the non-communicative and anti-realist forms of modern poetry and
denounces the state of affairs in contemporary society.24
As a place of representational disorder par excellence, literature entan-

gles and misleads, treating words not as enunciated but as enuncia-
tions. The theatrical text attains vital vigor and makes itself present in
representation. It is worth mentioning, with Ryngaert, that “the theatric
text does not imitate reality, but proposes a construction for it, a ver-
bal replica ready to unwind on the stage.”25 It is a construction that is
not passive, centered on the figure of the author, but dialogical between
the text and spectator/reader who, from an enthusiastic perspective, cre-
ates new dislocations of language and other possibilities for representing
the world.
In relation to the question of “meaning” in the theatrical plots of the
twentieth century, Ryngaert recalls that “some contemporary authors
consider the relationship with plot in a different way. They think of
themselves less as ‘storytellers’ and more as writers who call upon the full
density of the act of writing.”26
Perhaps one could think of this last argument as a summary of those
examined up to this point, and understand “the density of writing” as a
concept useful for reflecting on the word-body, a category that in Hilst’s
work, as a whole, offers a theoretical location from which one can exam-
ine literature and its drifting paths. This is why the aesthetic choice of
theater at this point in Hilst’s career seems to suggest the amplification
of possibilities for reflection via metalanguage. It is there that the word
becomes personified in the body, not just through the actors on stage
but through the gazes of the spectators who thus become actors in the
text. Thus, as an elaboration of the possibilities of writing, Hilst’s dra-
matic text becomes one more persona in the whole of her work.27
In addition to this is Hilst’s attempt to desacralize theater itself, as
language, perhaps similarly to the process Antonin Artaud describes in
The Theater of Cruelty, where he defends the need to deautomatize ges-
tures (which are also forms of language) in the performative act through
a poetics and metaphysics that are not internal to the actor, but which
may “manifest external forces”28 in other words,
[…] create a metaphysics of speech, gesture, and expression, in order to

rescue it from its servitude from psychology and “human interest.”
[…]
It is not, moreover, a question of bringing metaphysical ideas directly onto
the stage, but of creating what you might call temptations, indraughts of
air around these ideas. And humor with its anarchy, poetry with its sym-
bolism and its images, furnish a basic notion of ways to channel the temp-
tation of these ideas.29
It seems that Hilst did not follow any programmatic agenda in her
theater, which is convenient, as we therefore gain various theoretical
entry points to understand it. We will borrow as signposts for our read-
ing (as if they were spontaneous theories by the author) the author’s
introductory notes and stage directions in her plays as components of a
reflexive analysis.
It is worth noting that, in a manner very close to the one Artaud
desired, Hilst promotes distance from common language as means of
reflecting on her processes of representation. She does not necessarily
adhere to Artaud’s program; however, her efforts to reevaluate forms of
representation in language bring their work closer together.
The very definition of the notion of cruelty condenses within itself
Artaud’s ambition to refine the sense perception of the spectator by
breaking common registers of language and favoring a
[…] transgression of the ordinary limits of art and speech, in order to real-
ize actively, that is to say magically, in real terms, a kind of total creation in
which man must reassume his place between dream and events.
[…]
Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater

is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin
that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.30
The chronological distancing in Hilst’s plays and the proposal of a reen-

counter with metaphysics through bodies, along with the derision of any
logos and of attempts to “redefine” theorems and corollaries in her work,
appear to converse with Artaud’s project.31
According to Derrida’s essay “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closing
of Representation,” Artaud proposed overcoming typical Western cul-
tural values through a reelaboration of dramatic art. Derrida explains
that normally the relationship of the word with theater mirrors the logo-
centric tradition in which reason, in so far as it is a form of demiurgic
control the author exercises throughout the text, augments the crises of
representation that lead to the erosion of sensibilities. That is why, for
Derrida,
The theater of cruelty is not a representation. It is life itself, in the extent

to which life is unrepresentable. Life is the nonrepresentable origin of rep-
resentation. “I have therefore said ‘cruelty’ as I might have said ‘life’” (TD,
p. 114). This life carries man along with it, but is not primarily the life of
man. The latter is only a representation of life, and such is the limit—the
humanist limit—of the metaphysics of classical theater. The theater as we
practice it can therefore be reproached with a terrible lack of imagination.
The theater must make itself the equal of life—not an individual life, that
individual aspect of life in which characters triumph, but the sort of liber-
ated life which sweeps away human individuality and in which man is only
a reflection. (TD, p. 116)32
This “theater of life” works for Hilst. As a poet, she looks for ways to
redefine the lyric mode, so that the word does not submit to repet
ition, or to naïve mimesis, but rather is capable of extending the human
dimension. This is where the proposal to isolate the spectator in As aves da
noite originates: so that theater and poetics are not seen as mere doubles of
life or existence but rather as life itself, or as part of its “redefinition.”
Another distancing that merits consideration with respect to Hilst’s
theater is that of the word. It is as though Hilst desired to reelaborate
the concept of the lyric, to elevate it to the dimension of existence, of
the collective itself, to examine there the possibilities for language when
representing the human. In other words, she elaborates a poetics which
liberates a new lyricism of gesture which, by its precipitation or its ampli-

tude in the air, ends by surpassing the lyricism of words. It ultimately
breaks away from the intellectual subjugation of the language, by convey-
ing the sense of a new and deeper intellectuality which hides itself beneath
gestures and signs, raised to the dignity of particular exorcisms.33
Therefore the poet opts, at various points, for silence as a way to resig-
nify language, as a form of questioning the primacy of intellectuality
and exposing its impotence as a form of representation, because words
“become ossified,” and “cramped in their meanings.”34 Refusing the
word in favor of silence forms part of the proposal to rethink poetics in
Hilstian theater, in which the body becomes a metonymical image of lan-
guage, thus producing a radically new representation.
The relationship between poetry and body, which will be revisited
later in Hilst’s work, is further complicated by a third element crucial
to theater: the gaze.35 For phenomenology, the gaze is what mediates
between individuals and the world; it subtracts us from the world to the
same extent that it brings the world inside us. As Merleau-Ponty reveals
in his essay The Eye and the Spirit, “to see is to keep at a distance.”36
In Phenomenology of the Gaze, Alfredo Bosi reminds us that
Eidos, form or figure, has affinity with Idea. In Latin there is a small differ-
ence in sounds between video (I see) and Idea. And the etymologists find
in the word historia (Greek and Latin) the same root id, which is found in
eidos and in Idea. History is a thought-vision of what happened.37
The gaze, understood as a way to perceive the world, is both the recep-
tion and the sensible and active expression of ideas; that is, it constitutes
itself in the world as it constitutes the world. According to Bosi, the
gaze is not isolated, but rooted in corporality as sensibility and motor
function.38
Theater, like painting, is a technique of the body. Thus, the human
being becomes able to see and be seen in front of another human being,
mirroring and duplicating himself or herself and whom he or she rep-
resents. Before the gazes of those who see, or read, forms multiply
themselves in ideas, troubling the initial text. This occurs because the
reception of the gaze is not merely passive, but also active: the percep-
tion of the other depends on the reading of his or her expressive phe-
nomena of which the gaze is most replete with meaning.39
It is interesting to consider the possibilities of signification through
the silence in the act of gazing: the expression of the one who gazes at
the expression of the one who acts resounds with meaning and occurs in
the interval of the “pauses that are far from evident,” as Hilst points out.
Or, put better by Merleau-Ponty: “Language speaks peremptorily when
it gives up trying to express the thing itself.”40
The sign affirms itself through its absence and through the suspicion of
whoever watches and distrusts what is being presented. Returning to Bosi,
It is also true that this expressive gaze, this language-gaze of existential

discourse appears, in contemporary thinking, recorded by the schools of
suspicion which in the end described it best. It is a gaze that, having suf-
fered Marx’s ideological reduction, already affected by the knowledge of
the will-to-power Schopenhauer and Nietzsche discovered in it, finally
appeared to us compromised by the unconscious motivations that Freud
accused it of harboring. Contrary to the rationalist gaze which had sover-
eignly reigned for two centuries, this gaze was born philosophically hum-
ble, because it finds itself caught in the tangle of needs and impulses.41
This is why the gaze of Hilda Hilst, or the gaze that she relies on, is a
silence thundering with meanings and enunciations.
In the Supposed Carcass of a Mollusk

One of the main themes of Hilda Hilst’s literary project is affect—alle-
gorical constructions pass, necessarily, through the comprehension of
one who understands the urgent necessity to improve the ability to feel
in a society corrupted by forms of power, the most insidious and sub-
tle of which, paradoxically, is violence. Perhaps this is why there is an
emphasis on the Christian God, a character that is emphasized to elabo
rate on a lack of love and a state of abasement among human beings.
In this way, questioning the “Great Obscurity” of God becomes a tool
for analyzing reality and of resisting the effects of reification. If drama,
as form, appears as an efficient means of reproducing the eloquence of
gestures in moments of silence in the characters’ speech, that is because
allegories that are produced in poetic-dramatic performance require that
readers/spectators intervene and produce a subtext capable of elaborat-
ing the semantics of reality and of the word, extracting it from a silenced
condition.
In As aves da noite, like in other plays, there are various indications for
the stage and setting, as well as director’s notes that aim to emphasize
the moments of pause between the characters’ actions. The intention to
amplify the advanced state of emotional frailty shared among the prison-
ers in the hunger cell is contrasted with the superficial characterization of
psychological profiles. With the exception of the Poet and the Jeweller,
who are described by their states of fragility, no other character is given
any directions, and, with the exception of Father Maximilian, none is
given a name. The only common element shared by all other charac-
ters—the Jailer (a Jewish prisoner, like all characters), the Student, and
the Woman—is the description of their ages, which place them between
youth, as in the case of the 16-year-old Poet, and young adulthood, as
in the case of the others. The SS officer and Hans, his assistant, are not
characterized in any way.
Hilst’s theater has no heroes. Even Father Maximilian, whose dis-
course promotes compassion and tolerance, will inevitably capitulate:
MAXIMILIAN: […] when I started at the seminary, (trying to sound nor-

mal) I thought that in my prayers… God would reveal himself. I thought
that the act of praying would be accompanied by infinite consolation, that
I would have sensations, you know? That I would feel light, that my heart
would be flooded with light, warmth, maybe … I might even have visions.
Once, standing before the Most Holy revealed, I saw a clarity… and do
you know what it was? (laughs) They had turned on the lights in the sac-
risty. (laughs) The lights, you know, the lights from in there had also lit the
altar, of course. (laughs) Of course, of course. The lights in the sacristy.
[…]
STUDENT: And now?
MAXIMILIAN: Now darkness and light are one and the same. (pause)
STUDENT: You wanted this death a lot, didn’t you?
MAXIMILIAN: I couldn’t contain myself. I really couldn’t contain

myself.42
Father Maximilian Kolbe’s altruistic act, his offer to go himself to the

death cellar in the place of another prisoner, is not a heroic act, but
rather an opportunistic attempt to exercise virtue and practice martyr-
dom: lessons learned in a seminary void of light or consolation.
“Your God isn’t very nice,” the Jailer will say to Maximilian. If one of
a hero’s characteristics is the ability to bear an exceptionally painful fate,
this is because deep down, torment does not lessen over time and the
hero’s pains become monuments built by memory:
JEWELLER (mounting tension): They will remember. Twenty years from

now they will remember us. Each one, every day, every night, will remem-
ber us […].
STUDENT: At the beginning… they will remember. Afterward… you

know, there is something in human beings that makes them forget
everything… (pause. Slowly) Human beings are… (quietly) voracious…
voracious.43
Every sacrifice is innocuous in the face of oblivion. Every sacrifice

becomes innocuous when confronted with the fact that other sacrificial
victims will be made indistinguishable by the burdens they must bear and
of which they will never be free.
“Memory is an open process of reinterpreting the past which makes
and remakes its nodules so that events and comprehensions are rehearsed
again”: this is Nelly Richard’s definition of memory in her essay “Politics
of Memory and Techniques of Forgetting,” which concerns how the

transition to democracy in Chile involved erasing memories of trauma
and, for that reason, engendered a new state of exception—one of con-
sensus, which annulled the value of experiences and muted the discourse:
But to what can language [and, we could add, image] turn so that the
revindication of the past is morally attended as an interpellative part of a
valid social narrative, if almost all of the languages that survived the crisis
were recycling their vocabularies in a passive conformity with the insen-
sitive and disaffectivized tone of mass media and if the mass media only
administers the “poverty of experience” (Benjamin) of a technological
actuality without mercy or compassion for the fragility and precariousness
of the rests of wounded memory? (my emphases)44
Hilst wants to transform her theater into experience. Her plays are and
are not about the specific contexts in which they were written: they are
allegories of the human experience. This is the “memory of disaster,”
which can be read in the exhaustion diagnosed by the wounded image,
offered shamelessly to the cloudy, settled gaze.
The spectator will see human destruction for herself. As if it were a
narrator “rooted in the people,” the play recounts to the public (and also
shares) its own fractures. The language chosen by the poet intends to
unsettle, to resensibilize the empty vocabulary of representation, and to
awaken and revive memory, to vivify the past as an avatar of the present.
If in Brazil today we look toward the 1960s as a past of trauma, a state
of exception, it is to understand that our age imposes new traumas and
establishes a regime of exception that inherits and gives continuity to the
same fascism as in the past. Returning to Nelly Richard’s text,
This is where there are the policies of institutional obliteration of the fault
that, through the laws of non-punishment (pardon or amnesty), separate
the truth from justice disconnecting the two—by decree—of the ethical
reclamation out of which the identified culpable will not escape (again)
gaining the same perverse operation of deidentification. And weaving
secret associations between both networks of convenience and transaction
there are the dissipative forms of forgetting which the means of commu-
nication elaborated daily so that neither remembering [we could also say,
“flashes of light”] nor its suppression become obvious among so many
invisible censorships which restrict and anaesthetize the field of vision […]
(my emphases)45
At the beginning of the play the Poet is moved to recite some of his
verses for the prisoners:
JEWELLER (to the poet): Go on… this could give us

some relief. (pause)
POET (recites the poem touching himself, gazing at him-
self. Tense. Moved):
I’m drawing closer to this dead man.
JAILER (objective): You’re not dead yet.
POET (slowly):
I bend over what used to be a face. Oval in white.
Remote eyelid
Mouth disciplined for song. The long arm
Wing of the shoulder… He loved. Dreams corroded
themselves.
And accomplice to afflictions was built and remade
In salt and wheat.
(slightly changes the tone. Smiles)
The darkened womb did not generate,
(gravely)
Maybe that is why
He had immense hands
And the verse was what I exacerbated with a shout. He
loved. He loved.
(speaks faster, gazing at himself)
He has the feet of a child: tall and curved.
His body extended like a lance. It’s whole and bright.
(without a pause. Grave tone of voice. Exalted from the
beginning to the word “hour”. Afterward softer)
Oh, extensive time, great endless time
where I extend myself
Not to contemplate this whole from the outside

Winding gaze, breathing time…
Before a gaze suspended like an arch,
I look inside the fiber that circumscribes it, mortuary hoop.
JAILER (objective): You’re not dead yet.
POET (maintains the same tone):
After the night, immense body…
And the straw of my name…
(high voice as if calling out)
What verse recomposes you?
What fiber still moves you?
(quietly)
The world, the world…
The body that moves
In the supposed carcass of a mollusk.
Touch it. It recoils, mutely.
(shrinks into himself)46
The personification of the world turns it into a metonymic device for

speaking about humankind. The elegy declares the death of love and the
triumph of fear, guaranteed by the “disciplined mouth.” In other words,
the use of violence, in its diverse forms, becomes a familiar oppression
from which people do not feel alienated, or even acknowledge as such.
Instead, it becomes part of the regular social environment, like that
“touch” capable of making us fall mute and shrink back.
The poet is given two verses that sound out the existential: What verse
recomposes you?/What fiber still moves you? He also gives the name “night-
birds” to the SS officers: They are like certain birds whose two wings were
wounded… and if you want to save them… you won’t know how to… or
how to hold them. They are like some kind of nightbirds.47
Those locked in the cell question the dimensions of the human expe-
rience: innocence, love, spirit, life, and death. The Student remembers
his scientific theories and tries to apply them to himself, to others, and to
the SS. The Jeweller looks for some form of pure life in stones. The Jailer
does not accept innocence and incessantly seeks the memory of the iron
keys from his former profession. The Woman looks desperately for com-
passion, because it is up to her to separate the bodies of the Jews who are
killed in the gas chambers. Father Maximilian cannot help his cellmates
because his religious principles are not sufficient to make it possible to
love certain kinds of nightbirds:
JAILER (with irony): Ah, yes, it’s true, we will have love… for the first
time. For the first time the world will have compassion, the whole world
will become possessed by love for us. That’s right isn’t it, Maximilian? Is
that what your God planned? Love for this chosen people. Love at any
cost! Love.48
Maximilian’s self-sacrifice will not save human beings from themselves.

Those on death row, those generated in a “darkened womb”—we are all
the same. Or perhaps we are only the “reverse” of one another:
STUDENT: You wanted this death a lot, didn’t you?
MAXIMILIAN: I couldn’t contain myself. I really couldn’t contain myself.

[…] I don’t know… It was much more than an impulse, it was much
more.
STUDENT (referring to Hitler. Looks at the loudspeaker, in a dark tone):

He feels that way too… much more than an impulse. He’s the reverse, you
know? The reverse. The other face of each and every one of us.49
The moments of lucidity among the characters are scarce and brief. Most
of the time, the prisoners are delirious due to the state of total dejection
in which they find themselves. This dialogue between the Student and
Maximilian, which seems to be situated at the border of madness and sanity,
is an example of this delirium; as they discuss the need Father Maximilian
feels to sacrifice himself for his God, the Student manages to glimpse the
similarity among everyone, the defacement of love according to the Liturgy.
The last scene in Aves da noite occurs after the death of the Poet, and
involves Hans, the SS officer, and the remaining prisoners. The Nazi sol-
diers bring the priest a crown made of barbed wire, of which Maximilian
does not consider himself worthy. With his refusal, the SS officer com-
pels everyone to stand in a circle around the crown and warns them:
“From now on, ladies and gentlemen (slowly) a holy dawn, a holy day,
a holy dawn, a holy day, like a wheel, ladies and gentlemen, a perfect
wheel (with one hand he makes an increasingly faster circular movement).
Perfect, infinite, infinite, infinite (discreet laughter. Exits abruptly).”50
Thus, the damnation is reserved for those who “are not dead yet”: like a
perfect and infinite wheel, the days will follow one after the other with-
out any sanctity or redemption.
“Is the word alive?” asks the Student. And the Poet, trying to believe
in what he’s saying, according to Hilst’s directions, responds:
One day, maybe the word will transform into matter… and everything
it says will become that way… image… alive, that’s right, a living image
before everyone’s eyes… and then those to come will be compelled to
remember us… (to the Jailer) Isn’t that right?51
It would seem that the word has life in memory. Hilda Hilst wished to
propose a performative poetics to do the work of reinterpreting the past,
which, like a perfect, infinite circle, we still live—even if at times we might
forget it, believing that we’re safe in the supposed carcass of a mollusk.
Translated by Elena Dancu and Nathaniel Wolfson
Notes
1. Alex Polari. Inventário de cicatrizes (São Paulo: Teatro Ruth Escobar/
Comitê brasileiro pela anistia, 1978). Hilda Hilst, As aves da noite. In
Teatro Completo (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2008).
2. Eric Hobsbawm. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–
1991. (London: Abacus, 1994), 52.
3. See epigraph.
4. “Dans son théatre devenu un modèle (ou um anti-modèle), Brecht a
imposé des formes épiques radicales, Beckett, lui, a nettoyé un peu
la fable de toute anecdote et il l’a centrée sur ce qui est pour lui essen-
tial, la présence de la mort. Il a imposé au recit traditionnel un régime
amaigrissant impitoyable jusqu’au point de faire peser la menace perma-
nente du silence définitif. Difficile, après ces deux grandes figures, de
se poser à nouveau et de manière innocente la question de « comment
raconter? » et de « quoi raconter? »” Jean-Pierre Ryngaert, Écritures
dramatiques contemporaines. Cited by Nadine Ly in Figures du discontinu
(Pessac: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2007), 323.
5. Silviano Santiago’s observations on postmodernity will not be explored in

this essay, as it is not my intention to locate Hilda Hilst’s theater in any chro-
nology or literary tradition. Reflections motivated by the analysis of “The
Postmodern Narrator” refer merely to considerations about the changes that
take place in modes of narration, from Benjamin to the contemporary.
6. Silviano Santiago. “The Postmodern Narrator.” The Space In-Between:
Essays on Latin American Culture. Trans. Tom Burns, Ana Lúcia
Gazzola, and Gareth Williams. Ed. Ana Lúcia Gazzola (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001), 59.
7. Santiago, 142.
8. Emil Staiger. Conceitos Fundamentais da Poética. Trans. Marise M.
Curioni (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1978).
9. “Com As aves da noite, pretendi ouvir o que foi dito na cela da fome,
em AUSCHWITZ. Foi muito difícil. Se os meus personagens parecem
demasiadamente poéticos é porque acredito que só em situações extremas
é que a poesia pode eclodir VIVA, EM VERDADE. Só em situações
extremas é que interrogamos esse GRANDE OBSCURO que é Deus,
com voracidade, desespero e poesia.” Hilda Hilst, Teatro Completo (São
Paulo: Globo, 2008), 232.
10. Derrida, “Passions”: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” Trans. David Wood. In On the
Name, Ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 22.
11. Derrida, “Passions,” 24.
14. cf. Alcir Pécora, “Postfácio” in Hilst, Teatro Completo (São Paulo: Globo,
2008).
15. Jacques Derrida. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” Trans. Eric
Prenowitz. Diacritics 25:2 (Summer 1995), 17. For Derrida, the archive
concentrates in itself a specific diachrony in relation to time and con-
sciousnesses/awarenesses since “[t]he archontic power, which also gath-
ers the functions of unification, of identification, of classification, must
be paired with what we will call the power of consignation. By consigna-
tion, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of
assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign,
to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning
through gathering together signs.” Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 10.
16. T.F.R. Zanirato. “Corolário das perdas: um teatro para tempos alegres.”
(PhD Dissertation, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, 2012), 106f.
17. CENÁRIO Cilindro de altura variável, dependendo da altura do teatro.
Altura interior da cela, dentro do cilindro: 1,90 m./Na cela, porta de
ferro baixo, com pequeno visor. Janela à volta do cilindro recoberta de
material transparente (arame, acrílico etc.). Cadeiras individuais à volta do

cilindro, isoladas umas das outras por divisões.
NOTA Idealizei o cenário de As aves da noite de forma a conseguir do
espectador uma participação completa com o que se passa na cela. Quis
também que o espectador se sentisse em total isolamento, daí as cadeiras
estarem separadas por divisões. Hilst, 231.
18. I use the words heterotopic and heterotopia in their Foucauldian sense.
19. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (London: Routledge, 1989), xix.
20. I am thinking particularly of the metaphor of paper as a body perforated
by words, which would have its topos altered by the dissimilar graphic
representation that disturbs its predicted anatomy or “syntax.”
21. Ryngaert, 179. Sources originally published in French are sometimes cited
in translations from their Brazilian editions.
22. Ryngaert, 162.
23. Alfonso Berardinelli. Da poesia à prosa. Trans. Maurício Santana Dias.
(São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007), 184.
24. Berardinelli, 36.
25. Ryngaert, 5.
26. Ryngaert, 7.
27. Rodrigues, 2007.
28. Antonin Artaud. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline
Richards. (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 86.
29. Artaud, 90.
30. Artaud, 93, 99.
31. See T.F. Rodrigues. “A impossível linguagem: Uma leitura sobre as vozes
dissidentes na escritura de Hilda Hilst.” (Master’s Thesis, Universidade
Federal de Juiz de Fora, 2007), 104f.
32. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass (London:
Routledge, 2001), 294–295.
33. Artaud, 91.
34. Artaud, 119.
35. Rodrigues, A impossível linguagem.
36. cf. Merleau-Ponty.
37. Alfredo Bosi. “Fenomenologia do olhar.” O Olhar, Ed. Adauto Novaes
and Flávio Aguiar (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1988), 65.
38. Bosi, 66.
39. Bosi, 77.
40. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Maurice Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader:
Philosophy and Painting. Ed. Galen A. Johnson. Trans. Ed. Michael B.
Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 81.
41. Bosi, 81.
42. MAXIMILIAN: […] quando eu entrei para o seminário (tentando ser nat-
ural) eu pensava que nas minhas orações… Deus se mostraria. Pensava
que o ato de rezar seria acompanhado de infinito consolo, que eu teria
sensações, sabe? Me sentiria leve, o coração ficaria inundado de luz, de
calor, quem sabe… se até visões teria. Uma vez diante do Santíssimo
exposto eu vi uma claridade… e depois sabe o que era? (ri) Tinham acen-
dido a luz da sacristia. (ri) A luz, sabe, a luz lá dentro também clareou o
altar, lógico. (ri) Lógico, lógico, a luz da sacristia.
[…]
ESTUDANTE: E agora?
MAXIMILIAN: Agora a treva e a luz são uma coisa só. (pausa)
ESTUDANTE: Você desejou muito essa morte, não foi?
MAXIMILIAN: Eu não pude me conter. Na verdade eu não pude me
conter (Hilst, Teatro completo, 252–279).
43. JOALHEIRO (tensão crescente): Eles vão se lembrar. Daqui a vinte anos
eles vão se lembrar de nós. Cada um, a cada dia, a cada noite, vai se lem-
brar de nós […].
ESTUDANTE: No começo… eles se lembrarão. Depois… sabe, há
uma coisa no homem que faz com que ele se esqueça de tudo… (pausa.
Lentamente) O homem é… (voz baixa) Voraz… voraz. Hilst, 290.
44. Nelly Richard. “Políticas da memória e técnicas do esquecimento.” Trans.
Maria Antonieta Pereira. In Wander Melo Miranda, Narrativas da
Modernidade. (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 1999), 332.
45. Richard, 330.
46. JOALHEIRO (para o poeta): Continua… isso pode nos aliv-
iar. (pausa)/POETA (fala o poema tocando-se, olhando-se. Tenso.
Comovido):/E deste morto me aproximo./CARCEIREIRO (objetivo):
Você ainda não está morto./POETA (lento):/Curvo-me sobre o que foi
um rosto. Oval em branco./Pálpebra remota/Boca disciplinada para o
canto. O braço longo/Asa de ombro… Amou. Corroeu-se se sonhos./E
cúmplice de aflitos, foi construído e refeito/Em sal e trigo./(muda leve-
mente o tom. Sorri)/O ventre escuro não gerou,/(grave)/Talvez por
isso/Teve mãos desmedidas/E grito o exacerbado foi o verso. Amou.
Amou./(fala mais rapidamente, olhando-se)/Tem os pés de criança: altos
e curvados./O corpo distendido como lança. É inteiriço e claro./(sem
pausa. Voz grave. Exaltada de início até a palavra “hora”. Depois mais
branda)/Ah, tempo extenso, grande tempo sem fim/onde me estendo
Não para contemplar este todo de fora/Olhar enovelado respirando a
hora…/Antes um olhar suspenso como um arco,/Olho dentro da fibra que
o circunda, cesta mortuária./CARCEIREIRO (objetivo): Você ainda não está
morto./POETA (mantém o mesmo tom):/Depois a noite, corpo imenso…/E
a palha do meu nome…/(voz alta como um chamamento)/Que verso te rec-

ompõe?/Que fibra te comove ainda?/(voz baixa)/mundo, o mundo…/O
corpo que se move/Na pretensa carcaça de um molusco./Toca-o. Ele se
encolhe mudo. /(encolhendo-se). Hilst, Teatro completo, 242–244.
47. Que verso te recompõe? /Que fibra de comove ainda? […] Eles são como cer-
tas aves que se feriram nas duas asas… e se você quiser socorrê-las… não
saberá como… nem por onde segurá-las. Eles são como certas aves da noite.
Hilst, Teatro completo, 269.
48. CARCEREIRO (com ironia): Ah, sim, é verdade, nós teremos o amor…
pela primeira vez. Pela primeira vez o mundo inteiro terá compaixão, o
mundo inteiro ficará possuído de amor por nós. É isso, Maximilian?
Foi isso que o teu Deus planejou? Amor para esse povo eleito. Amor a
qualquer preço! Amor.” Hilst, Teatro completo, 275.
49. ESTUDANTE: Você desejou muito esta morte, não foi? MAXIMILIAN:
Eu não pude me conter. Na verdade eu não pude me conter. […] Eu não
sei… foi muito mais do que um impulso foi muito mais.
ESTUDANTE (referindo-se a Hitler. Olha o alto-falante, tom muito som-
brio): Ele também se sente assim… muito mais do que um impulso. Ele
é o reverso, você sabe? O reverso. O outro rosto de cada um de nós.”
Hilst, Teatro completo, 279.
50. Daqui por diante, senhores, (lentamente) uma santa madrugada, um santo
dia, uma santa madrugada, um santo dia, como uma roda, senhores, uma
roda perfeita. (faz com uma só mão um movimento circular cada vez mais
rápido) Perfeita, inifinita, infinita, infinita. (riso discreto. Sai abrupta-
mente). Hilst, Teatro completo, 297.
51. Um dia quem sabe a palavra se transforma em matéria… e tudo o que ela
falar vai ficar assim… imagem… viva, isso mesmo, imagem viva diante dos
olhos de todos… e então os que vierem serão obrigados a se lembrar de
nós… (para o Carcereiro) Não é isso? Hilst, Teatro completo, 261.
Author Biography
Tatiana Franca Rodrigues Zanirato holds a doctorate in literary studies
from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora. Her thesis was titled “Corolário
das Perdas: Um Teatro para Tempos Alegres (Repressão e resistências nas peças
de Hilda Hilst)” [“Corollary of Losses: Theater for Happy Times (Repression
and Resistance in the Plays of Hilda Hilst)”]. She is a professor of literature
at Universidade Federal de Goiás, where she researches and publishes work in
literary theory and Brazilian literature, in addition to her work developing

educational outreach projects in the humanities.
PART II
Obscenity and the Human Condition

Figurations of Eros in Hilda Hilst
Eliane Robert Moraes
Abstract  This chapter explores Hilda Hilst’s complex eroticism, which

oscillates vertiginously between mystical heights and the most bra-
zen pornographic depths. Hilst compares the most prosaic of subjec-
tive experiences with idealized ones, forcing the immanent and the
transcendent to coincide. As she juxtaposes these extremes, Hilst sug-
gests a third way, another symbolic meaning for sexual life that is neither
mystic nor debased. Hilst deploys the category of the obscene to medi-
ate the ambivalent aspects of both language and human existence. The
opening offered by this “obscene” third space tears a definitive slit in the
literary landscape onto which her work emerges.
Some passages in this text resume, with various modifications, arguments from
articles I have already published. These are “Da medida estilhaçada” In Cadernos
de literatura brasileira—Hilda Hilst, São Paulo, Instituto Moreira Salles, No. 8
(October 1999); “A obscena senhora Hilst” In Idéias—livros 189, a supplement
of Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro. December 5, 1990; “A prosa degenerada”
In Jornal de Resenhas, Discurso Editorial/USP/UNESP/UFMG/Folha de São
Paulo, São Paulo, October 3, 2003.
E. R. Moraes (*) 
Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
e-mail: elianermoraes@uol.com.br

60 E. R. Moraes
Keywords  Eroticism · Obscene · Metaphysics · God · Animal · Body
1. Released in 1990, Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook was considered,

especially in the heat of the moment, as a book that marked a radical
turn in the work of Hilda Hilst. Her readers brooded over this unex-
pected creation: a scandalous sexual memoir written by an eight-year-old
girl, who narrated her trysts without a hint of shame or reservation when
it came to uttering obscene words.
After four decades of devoting herself to the creation of “serious”
work, Hilst had ostensibly taken up the filthiest of pornography. The
majority of her readers, friends, and critics declared their perplexity con-
cerning this “new phase” in the author’s work. Hilst’s reactions to these
suspicions were varied. At times she justified her choice with ironic
remarks about her financial troubles, but on other occasions she made
cryptic statements that demanded interpretation. One such remark was
made on the back cover of Amavisse, a book of poems published in the
same period. There, she explained the controversy by asking readers to
spare themselves “the waste of explaining the act of jest. /The earlier gift
(the work) exceeded itself in luxury. /The Pink Notebook is merely the
remains of a Potlach. /And today, to repeat Bataille:/‘I feel at liberty to
fail.’”1
Embracing the possibility of failure presented itself, therefore, as a
condition for exercising total freedom. In fact, what was at stake for Hilst
in that turn of the decade, a prelude to the turn of a century, was her
desire to explore other forms of literary speech: an excursion through
regions not yet trespassed by her creative genius, risking herself on ever-
more daring textual projects. In other words, to fail meant to transgress,
the moto perpetuo of Georges Bataille, a writer whom Hilst had carefully
chosen as the guardian angel of her passage across the continent of licen-
tious literature.
In truth, it wasn’t the first time that Hilst had ventured through
other literary plains. For nearly 20 years—that is, since the publication
of Presságio in 1950—her poetic work returned to pure and exalted
forms. Taking up an elevated diction, marked by its celebration of
the incantatory power of poetry, Hilst cultivated a lyric nourished by
idealized models whose privileged theme was love, be it human or
divine. A previous turnabout in Hilst’s work had come at the end of
the 1960s, when she wrote eight plays. Her theater not only explored a
FIGURATIONS OF EROS IN HILDA HILST 61
new genre; it was also new fictional material. Her dramaturgy, in keep-
ing with contemporary practice, embraced allegory as a way to confront
institutional repression, allowing her to denounce the authoritarianism of
the State, the Church, the School, and other institutions altered by the
repressive yoke of dictatorship. In this way, as Alcir Pécora has suggested,
“the most important effect of her theater was its rehearsal of her prose.”2
Indeed, Hilst shifted her attention from theater to prose shortly thereaf-
ter, in 1970, beginning with the publication of a collection of short nar-
ratives titled Fluxo-Floema.
This book represented a watershed moment in Hilst’s literary crea-
tion. Theretofore, Hilst had been dedicated exclusively to poetry, aside
from her brief incursion into theater. Still, the act of trying her hand
at a new genre was less revealing than the appearance of a new literary
material that, born together with her prose, would definitively contam-
inate her poetic verve thereafter. It was at this point that Hilst opened a
vigorous line of force within her work, which was already fixated on the
domains of Eros.
Here, one must recall that 20 years prior to the publication of O cad
erno rosa de Lori Lamby (Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook), Hilst had already
penetrated these domains with assurance, inaugurating an exploration
of eroticism without precedent in Brazilian letters—one that she
continued until the end of her life. A dispassionate consideration of Hilst’s
vast production from 1970 onward uncovers a remarkable coherence.
The “serious” books, often considered “hermetic,” reveal themselves
to be inexhaustible founts of reflection on matters sensual, carnal, and
sexual.
Take, for example, the crop of novels that came before the aforemen-
tioned pornographic harvest. Even with its title, Hilst’s novel A obscena sen-
hora D (The Obscene Madame D) had announced a particular attention
to the libidinous body. Originally published in 1982, this text continued a
characteristic precedent in Hilst’s work: turning speech acts into a tabula
rasa on which to combine metaphysical disquiet with eschatological pleas-
ures, theological doubts, and erotic revelations; and problems of the soul
with questions of sex, thus exposing points of contact between thought and
carnal demands. This precedent would reach its monumental expression
in the obscene trilogy, and is well synthesized by the question a character
from Contos d’escárnio: Textos grotescos (Tales of Derision: Grotesque Texts)
poses to a lover who admires his obscene paintings: “Is it metaphysics, or
the sleaziest prostitution?”3
62 E. R. Moraes
2. This is a trick question, as by juxtaposing philosophical terms with

crude expressions, Hilst betrays the association between metaphysics
and the “sleaziest prostitution” that will mark her literary production
from Fluxo-floema forward. Certainly, this is where Hilst establishes
great novelty in her prose, setting out on an unexpected incursion into
the lowest domains of the human experience. Thus, by juxtaposing
a poetry of the pure and immaterial with the realm of the perceptible
and contingent that constitutes daily human life, Hilst exceeds her own
method, subordinating abstract models to the concrete imperatives of
the material.
The circumspect approach that her first books of poetry take in
the direction of an amorous ideal, whether human or divine, is sub-
stituted by a violent challenge waged against a diffuse alterity that,
having become multiple, begins to be referred to by way of a multi-
plicity of strange and contradictory terms. Thus, in the years following
1970, there proliferate in Hilst’s writing evocations of That Other, the
Nothing, the Luminous, the Great Obscure, the Name, the Nameless,
the Triple Acrobat, the Stone Dog, the Mask of Nausea, the Unfounded,
the Hollow Face, the Great Face, the Guardian of the World, and so
on. Carried to its absurd extreme, the task of designating this alter-
ity—which is not unnamable, and is instead dispersed through an infin-
ity of names—ends up operating as a subversion of the poet’s initial
disposition.
The formerly yearned-for totality and plenitude become manifest as
a form of nostalgia for the past, or in its correlate inversion, a percep-
tion of the immediacy of the present. In the case of the amorous lyric,
this disposition is revealed above all following the publication of Júblio,
memória, noviciado da paixão (Jubilation, Memory, An Apprenticeship in
Passion), released in 1974. By exploring the devotion of a lover exasper-
ated by the absence of her beloved, the book evokes a tragic conscience
of the passage of time, one rendered with particular vigor in one of the
poems as “time of the body”:
Take me. Your mouth of linen on my mouth,

Austere. Take me, NOW, BEFORE
Before the fleshforce is unmade in blood, before
Death, my love, my death, take me
Thrust your hand, breathe my breath, swallow
In cadences my dark agony.
Time of the body, this time, of that hunger

From inside. Body knowing itself, slowly,
A diamond sun nourishing the womb
The milk of your flesh, my own
Gone fugitive.
And over us this future time is spinning
Spinning a great cloth. Over us life
Life is spilling. Cyclical. Flowing away.
…
Toma-me. A tua boca de linho sobre a minha boca
Austera. Toma-me AGORA, ANTES
Antes que a carnadura se desfaça em sangue, antes
Da morte, amor, da minha morte, toma-me
Crava a tua mão, respira meu sopro, deglute
Em cadência minha escura agonia.
Tempo do corpo este tempo, da fome
Do de dentro. Corpo se conhecendo, lento,
Um sol de diamante alimentando o ventre,
O leite da tua carne, a minha
Fugidia.
E sobre nós este tempo futuro urdindo
Urdindo a grande teia. Sobre nós a vida
A vida se derramando. Cíclica.Escorrendo.4
Certainly, the two stanzas that open the section titled “Intense-preludes
for those disremembered in love” are sufficient to perceive here an inten-
sification of those affects whose operator is, unequivocally, the body. The
epiphany of the sensual instant is affirmed in tandem with the threat of
death: the NOW coincides with the BEFORE of a shrouded “future,”
64 E. R. Moraes
which, made liquid as time, spills and flows away. Between the “dark
agony” that dwells in it and the “fugitive” flesh that consumes it, the
poetic voice drinks in, austere and anxious, the fluid of the sex of life
in a single act. Gravity and carnality mutually found one another, giv-
ing density to the erotic-metaphysical poetry that transforms the beloved
into the lover, taking advantage of subtle irony without ever giving up its
pursuit of a certain sublime ideal.
This line of inquiry will occupy a central location in the dense poetics
of the books that follow, which, while they maintain an elevated diction
in comparison with the prose, become ever-more crisscrossed by the con-
tingencies of a life marked by sensuality yet tragically harnessed to death.
Such a landscape thus appears before the author to challenge the formal
neatness of a lyric that increasingly yields to her most excessive appeals.
Read, for instance, the opening poem of Do desejo:
Because there’s desire in me, it’s all scintillation.

Before, the quotidian was pondering the heights
Searching for That Other, decanted
Deaf to my human hounding,
Secretion and sweat, they’ve never come together.
Today, from flesh and bone, laborious, lascivious,
You take my body. And what rest you give me
After each struggle. I dreamed of cliffs
When there was a garden here beside us.
I thought of hiking where there were no trails.
In ecstasy, I fuck with you
The inverse of yelping before the Nothing.
Porque há desejo em mim, é tudo cintilância.

Antes, o cotidiano era um pensar alturas
Buscando Aquele Outro decantado
Surdo à minha humana ladradura,
Visgo e suor, pois nunca se faziam.

Hoje, de carne e osso, laborioso, lascivo
Tomas-me o corpo. E que descanso me dás
Depois das lidas. Sonhei penhascos
Quando havia o jardim aqui ao lado.
Pensei subidas onde não havia rastros.
Extasiada, fodo contigo
Ao invés de ganir diante do Nada.5
Released in 1992, Do desejo (On Desire) is nearly two decades older than
Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão. Here we find a lyrical persona who is
more comfortable with a sexualized lexicon. In fact, what was once “a dia-
mond sun nourishing the womb,” is here put more plainly as, “In ecstasy,
I fuck with you.” Aside from this, to the allusive images of Júbilo—the
“mouth of linen,” “milk of your flesh”—the later poems prefer the con-
creteness of “secretion and sweat” or “flesh and bone.” This however does
not prevent the sensual verses in Do desejo from maintaining, and with
renewed vigor, the interrogative character that constitutes Hilst’s erot-
ic-metaphysical poetry and which, to wit, places her among the rare num-
ber of Brazilian poets to practice the erotic-metaphysical as a lyric genre.
It is unsurprising, then, that reflection on this desire ends up encom-
passing the strange figures of alterity that never cease to darken the
Hilstian imaginary from 1970 onward. If “before, the quotidian was
pondering the heights,” the lyrical voice now makes its profession of
faith in the “human hounding,” staking herself on voluptuous pleasures,
“the inverse of yelping before the Nothing.” But this definitive descent
to corporeal lowliness does not pacify the poet’s metaphysical disquiet.
On the contrary, such a fall implies that the Nothing becomes present in
the inexhaustible multiplicity of meanings that the poet lends it. She con-
fronts its juxtaposition with the void in which the eternal becomes irre-
deemably confused with the provisory and the essential slips completely
into the accidental. Not coincidentally, the first target of this violence
is “That Other, decanted,” which will be put to the test of the lowest
sexual signs.
3. God is a pig—this synthetic and brutal affirmation appears in nearly
all of Hilst’s work, gaining particular prominence after her first work in
66 E. R. Moraes
prose. At times it becomes the feminized version “the sow is God,” as pro-
posed by the protagonist of Com os meus olhos de cão (With My Dog-Eyes),
who inverts the poles of the proposition to accentuate the equivalence of
the terms. Attenuated by the poetic voice, in Amavisse (To Have Loved) the
assertion takes the form of a prayer to the “Lord of pigs and men,” which
introduces a third element to inhabit the same swamp of filth, identified as
the “Pig-poet.” Most times, however, the swinish identity of God becomes
the watchword for her interrogations of the void. This is the case of the
widow in A obscena senhora D who, left alone in the Pig House, presents
herself as the wife of the “Pig-Child World-Builder.”6
Recurrent in Hilst’s work, the association between God and pig syn-
thesizes vein of blasphemy that marks the diction of a great number of
her characters. Because there are no limits when it comes to defaming the
divine, some rather diverse modalities fall under the heading of blasphemy.
It’s worth recalling, to name an example, the memories of the protagonist
of Matamoros, a text that might be considered a tragic version of Hilst’s
jeering novella O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby. Among many m emorable
scenes from that text, one in particular stands out: an 8-year-old girl
is happy to “suck the holy juice” of a priest, after which follows the
“sanctity” of having the “divine wetness” introduced between her thighs.7
Or, better yet, the burlesque fantasies of the characters from Contos d’es-
cárnio (Tales of Derision): while the lascivious Clódia creates a painting
with the image of a strange “clitoris-finger” inspired by the finger of God
in the Sistine Chapel, the melancholic Crasso is delighted to imagine his
lover’s canvas illustrates “God’s cock.”
Lowered to the level of the most abject acts, Hilst’s God-pig retains
nothing, or almost nothing, of that intangible entity that reposes on the
horizon of humanity. The juxtaposition between the high and the low,
aside from subverting the hierarchy between the two planes, has as its
consequence a disheartening consciousness of human abandonment. The
principles of a tragic thought can be recognized here, founded on the
interrogation of God before his alterities. This suggests, once more, a
comparison between Hilst and Georges Bataille. The author of Madame
Edwarda also resorts to defaming God, and likewise takes advantage of
porcine imagery to associate God with the most sordid extremes of the
human experience, whence there emerges a feeling of anguish, which
he defines as a “supplication without response.” In Hilst, the denial of
divine superiority seems to lead down two complementary yet oppo-
site paths: one path, facing the absence of salvation, leads to the same
cosmic anguish that is present in Bataille’s texts; the other finds a way of
resisting the seriousness of human damnation, opting instead for comic
relief. Nabokov’s words on Gogol may thus be applied to Hilst, as their
writings both invite the reader to recall that the “difference between the
comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant.”8
“In dog we trust”9—the jocular inversion of the sacred American slo-
gan, and also the title of one of Hilst’s crônicas, marks the subtlety of
the difference between two signifiers, establishing an unexpected link
between the words. These mysterious relations, uncovered by lan-
guage—which in Portuguese also participates in this play of dualities,
as língua means both “language” and “tongue” in colloquial speech—thus
begin to disavow contrasts considered to be self-evident, provoking a
degradation of the noble meanings of each term. Moreover, this expression
condenses a literary precedent typical of Hilst’s work, not only through
the play on words, but through the use of unexpected jux tapositions.
This is the case in the opening fable of her narrative Fluxo (Flux), in
which, after issuing the austere verdict that “there is no salvation,” the
narrator chooses the most pathetic way of going forward—effectively
inverting the tragic into the banal when he suggests to the reader this swift
and easy remedy: “Calm down and suck a lollipop.”
A typical Brazilian escape? It’s possible, as the writer defines Brazil as
“the country of dirty deeds,”10 words that suggests a dubious outlook,
one that implies the notion of the carnavalesque as much as it does that
sort of karma expressed in the assertion that “to be Brazilian is to be no
one, it is to be helpless and grotesque before oneself and the world.”11
Brazilianness would thus imply a fundamental ambiguity between mel-
ancholy and mirth, one that continually justifies Hilst’s double register,
alternating between the most serious causes of humankind’s misery and
the most pathetic aspects of man’s daily life.
Even so, the national reference does not completely drain the dis-
quiet from Hilst’s work. There remains a residue of ambivalence that
always resists interpretation, and if this occurs, it’s because, in the end,
ambiguity is written into language itself. Proof of this is found in the
secret links that unite the words god and dog, drawing a border that
at the same time separates and draws together the highest and lowest
of signs. Likewise for the author of With My Dog-Eyes,12 the differ-
ence between the human and the animal depends on a subtle inversion:
“because each one of us, Clódia, must find his own pork. (Attention,
don’t confuse it with corpse.) Porks, my friends, porks, corpse turned
inside-out.”13
68 E. R. Moraes
4. In Hilst’s work, animal conscience derives from the desire to inter-

rogate the identity shared between man and beast in their most pro-
saic dimension, setting animal affinities over against the “beastly life”
that humans and animals both share. This consciousness remains
coherent because Hilst’s zoological imagination never contemplates
the monstrosity of certain animals, preferring to limit itself to domes-
ticated species that share in human misery every day. There’s no lack of
examples.
Matamoros tells how he would go to bed with the children of the vil-
lage “caressing them alongside the cows”; Lori Lamby narrates the story
of a young girl and a donkey who lie down together to engage in acts
of sexual deviance in a rustic corral; Hans Haeckel writes a story about
a man’s passion for a monkey called Lisa, who lives with him in a flop-
house and “caresses his sex with her little, dark, delicate hands.” This
intimacy becomes even more intense in the relation between Amós and
the sow Hilde, whose human attributes—she is gentle, patient, silent,
affable, kind, “make [her] great company” for him—approximate her to
the sow Hillé, a sort of alter-ego of Hilst’s that is present in several of her
books.
The animal is, above all else, a fellow creature. In the sense that its
existence coincides completely with organic life, the animal enunciates an
impersonal plane, purely biological, on which identities are reduced to
the particularities of their material. Even with their silent existence, ani-
mals offer a reminder that the body is provisional and perishable. Thus, if
the protagonist of The Obscene Madame D affirms that the “animal gaze
is a question without response,”14 the question that it poses unleashes
others in a vertiginous sequence: “What is it like to be made of flesh,
my friends? And fruit? And the apple, with that core in the middle? And
mouth? And hunger? And to be old and deformed and wrinkled, is that
still being? And to be a caressing young mule, woman, blonde or creole,
what is being? And what will it be, this thing, to have to die, will it be
sad?” The series concludes, finally, with indignation: “What is it to be
alive? And did you know that the dead are lively too?”15
A question without response, the animal flaunts its body before these
inversions, against which the rationalist incursions of the cogito lose all
meaning. Logic cedes to the animal. Or as Madame D sums up: “the pig
and the madwoman understand one another.” From that understanding
emerges the rapid and disordered flux of thinking yoked to the provi-
sory “time of the body,” to which Hilst’s convulsive writing surrenders,
obscuring the boundaries between reason and unreason. Nourished by

this opacity, Hilst’s prose is marked by a telegraphic syntax that often dis-
penses with punctuation and which multiplies the narrative foci to the
point of absurdity, to show, with the body of language, the intolerable
void that resides within each one of us. The pig in language.
As a point of passage between inside and outside, the mouth contains
unparalleled ambiguity in comparison with the rest of the human body’s
organs, an ambiguity to which Hilst’s texts devote great attention.
A character from Floema (Phloem) recalls that the throat serves as well
for intoning canticles as it does for snoring: its duality is accentuated
in the approximation between the act of eating and the act of sexual
devouring—as occurs when a character in Cartas de um sedutor (Letters
from a Seducer) who devours the nipple of his lover is inspired during a
fit of jealousy to create an ice cream sundae with “a little strawberry on
top.” A similar inspiration motivates Madame D’s imagined cannibalism:
“If we ate one another’s flesh, what taste? And a soup of ankles? And a
soup of feet? We put pork’s feet in food, don’t we?”17
The ambivalence becomes even more complex when the object in ques-
tion is teeth, a recurring metaphor in Hilst’s work, often translating to an
ontological dimension. “Saved teeth. They never wear down if they’re
saved. In the mouth they rot,” recalls the protagonist of With My Dog-Eyes,
as though he anticipates the question that concludes one of the crônicas in
Cascos e Carícias (Shells and Caresses): “why do teeth fall out when we’re
old, still alive, and they remain eternally in our bright and gleaming skulls?”18
This is, in a sense, the central question of Hilst’s last book, Estar
sendo, Ter sido (To Be Being, To Have Been), which not coincidentally
introduces a character in relation to his dental problems. In the figure
of old and decrepit Vittorio, Hilst concentrates the impasses that she
had been questioning since Phloem-Flux, but with a radicality that, as
she interrogates death, carries her poetic violence to an extreme. Faced
with the prospect of losing his teeth, Vittoro realizes he will not be able
to sustain himself, and loses even the hope of persisting through his
scattered teeth. On the verge of oblivion, he takes note of the hollow
sound of his skull—a sovereign sign of the absence that translates, on the
human plane, to the absolute alterity of the Sunken Face.19 Such is the
excessive ambiguity accorded to teeth: they represent the only possibil-
ity of persisting eternally in the material, but to remain alive necessarily
means one’s teeth will rot.
70 E. R. Moraes
By concentrating life and death in this dramatic way, the mouth

becomes a metaphor with both ideal and abject dimensions. As the site
of entry and leaving, it serves for singing and snoring, speaking and
spitting, kissing and vomiting, eating and devouring. Toying with this
duplicity, Hilst’s writing takes advantage of the metaphor by alternating
between intensifying the physical plane of desire and revealing another
immaterial plane, thereby indicating her determination to explore the
“two bodies of language.”20
5. The exploration of language gains an archeological dimension in Lori
Lamby’s Pink Notebook, which excavates diverse layers of language—
beginning with the fact that it’s attributed to a character whose name
evokes the third person singular of the verb to lick (lamber). Licking
enjoys a privileged attention among the experiences the girl narrates as
she explores every sort of pleasure with her mouth, circumscribing an
erotic field centered on orality.
Like every child, Lori writes the way she speaks: her tale includes
constructions like, “and then my uncle said,” “and then mommy said,”
and “then daddy touched it and said,” creating a narrative that is organ-
ized around speech and reiterating the oral imperative that governs the
child’s world. In fact, the girl only interrupts her story to substitute the
pleasure of speaking-narrating with that of eating cake and cookies. In
this way she also expresses her childish curiosity for language, treating it
simultaneously as an erogenous and symbolic zone: Lori asks her “uncle”
what predestined means, and after hearing his explanation concludes
that “the predestined thing is more or less like this: some are born to be
licked and others to lick them and pay them.”21 It is, for her, a process
of getting acquainted with the double register of “the tongue”: speaking,
narrating, and inventing, as well as sucking and tasting, demand a subtle
and never-ending apprenticeship, one that unfolds across various modali-
ties—an expansion of the field of orality.
This is precisely why the figure of the writer assumes such a central
role in this narrative. Lori is the daughter of an author who is consumed
by the task of writing “a book of dirty deeds” to resolve his financial
difficulties. However, “trabalhar com a língua” (working with language/
one’s tongue)—a phrase that the girl uses to define her father’s occupa-
tion—may or may not work out, and may or may not earn any money;
it’s a risky profession, without guarantees. The writer, and above all the
one who refuses to be shaped by the market, might always fail, whether
in the commercial or artistic sense of failure. While Lori is successful
“working with her tongue,” it is her father who fails. The moral of the
story: writing means running the risk of exploring a mysterious tongue
that, by finding cavities and secret nooks, poses an endless chain of prob-
lems for the author.
Disguised as pornography, Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook is a remark-
able reflection on the act of writing as the possibility of toying with
the limits of language. This is why the book is dedicated “à memória
da língua”—in memory of tongue/language—a phrase that would
suit perfectly as the epigraph to Hilst’s collected work. If this memory
invokes everything from the primitive speech of a child up to the most
elevated of literary forms, it also contains the lowest registers of human
experience in the world. It is a chaotic and perturbing memory that jux-
taposes God and the pig, the metaphysical and the material, man and
beast, cosmic and comic—in short, life and death—thereby uncovering
the intolerable vanishing point that constitutes the center of helpless
human abandonment.
Thus conceived, Hilst’s so-called “obscene trilogy” in fact maintains
greater affinity with the rest of her work than is normally admitted. Of
course these affinities constantly cause a certain discomfort, not least
because they oblige the reader to recognize a series of relations between
body and spirit that prevailing morality, by tradition, attempts to conceal.
But perhaps it’s exactly at this point that the coherence of Hilst’s writing
is confirmed with greater vigor, giving the lie to arguments that insist on
separating her writing and categorizing her works as either “serious” or
“pornographic.”
It is worth evoking here, by way of conclusion, a powerful and enig-
matic image found in the novel With My Dog-Eyes. Originally published
in 1986, the text was written between The Obscene Madame D and Lori
Lamby’s Pink Notebook, which locates it in a significant transitional position
between the “serious” prose fiction and the novels of “dirty deeds.”
The novel’s protagonist is the mathematician Amós Kéres, who
is as embittered as he is libidinous, and who is worn out by his quo-
tidian duties, whether those be familial, professional, or to society
in general. By day, uncomfortable department meetings at the university,
with their “asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous
talk, megalomanias,”22 leave him totally disconsolate. By night, the pro-
fessor patiently undertakes his study of mathematics, seeking the cold
comfort of numerals, those “magnificent suns of ice,” to restore order
to his life. However, he’s barely had a chance to flip through some pages
72 E. R. Moraes
of his books when he’s surprised by an abrupt sensation, “wasn’t it in a

sudden burst that everything was no longer?”23
The attempt to escape from the bustle of daily life, imposed by cohab-
itation with others, throws the tormented and lascivious Amós into an
even greater disorder now that the solitude of night can’t deliver its
promise of plenitude, reserving for him instead an experience that sub-
verts all his expectations. The narrator thus describes the sensation that
assaults the central character of With My Dog-Eyes, seeking to bring him
nearer the reader: “Like if you thought you knew every little corner of
your own house and then discovered, for instance in the hall through
which you’d passed many times, in the hallway my God, you discovered
a crag with mirrored surfaces or a black prism.”24
This notable image, a boulder in the middle of a hallway, is one that
perhaps only finds its match in the famous “drawing room at the bot-
tom of a lake,” imagined by Rimbaud in Une saison en enfer. Amós’s
vision begins to perturb his convictions, from the most tedious aspects
of daily life to his arithmetic abstractions, placing both the real and the
ideal in check. By designating a trivial hallway as the site of revelation,
Hilst equates the most prosaic human experience with its most idealized
experience, forcing the immanent to coincide with the transcendent. But
it’s precisely in this place of passage where there emerges a third plane,
represented by the scandalous black crag, which opens a definitive rift in
the landscape.
It’s a notable image that applies perfectly to Hilst’s entire work, not
only because, like the crag, it presents many faces, but also because she
is likewise situated within a rift in the landscape of late twentieth-cen-
tury literature. Perhaps today, more than 10 years after Hilst’s death,
we might now have the ability to approach this crag, this chiseled black
prism at the entrance, to discern, between the novelties proposed by
Hilst’s writing, the many impassable mirrored faces of Eros.
Translated from Portuguese by Adam Morris.
Notes
1. Hilda Hilst, Amavisse (São Paulo: Massao Ohno, 1989), back cover.
2. “o efeito mais importante de seu teatro foi o de ensaiar sua prosa.” Alcir
Pécora, “O limbo de Hilda Hilst – Teatro e crônica,” in Revista da bib-
lioteca Mário de Andrade, 69 – Obscena, (São Paulo: Biblioteca Mário de
Andrade, 2015.), 130.
3. “É metafísica ou putaria das grossas?” Hilda Hilst, Contos d’escárnio:

Textos grotescos (São Paulo: Globo, 2002), 78.
4. Hilda Hilst, Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão (São Paulo: Globo,
2001), 71.
5. Hilda Hilst, Do desejo (São Paulo: Globo, 2001), 71.
6. “Porco-Menino Construtor do Mundo”
7. “sugar o sumo santo”; “santidade”; “divino molhado.”
8. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol. (New York: New Directions, 1944),
142.
9. ser brasileiro é ser ninguém, é ser desamparado e grotesco diante de si
mesmo e do mundo. Hilda Hilst, Cascos e carícias: crônicas reunidas
(1992–1995) (São Paulo: Nankin, 1998), 137.
10. “o país das bandalheiras”.
11. “ser brasileiro é ser ninguém, é ser desamparado e grotesco diante de si
mesmo e do mundo.” Hilda Hilst, Contos d’escárnio: Textos grotescos (São
Paulo: Globo, 2002), 84.
12. Eds. note: At the conclusion of With My Dog-Eyes, the protagonist
becomes, or imagines he becomes, a dog.
13. “porque cada um de nós, Clódia, tem que achar o seu próprio porco.
(Atenção, não confundir com corpo.) Porco, gente, porco, corpo às aves-
sas.” Hilda Hilst, Contos d’escárnio, 79.
14. “o olho do bicho é uma pergunta sem resposta”; translated by the edi-
tors. The English translation from The Obscene Madame D reads: “the eye
of the beast is a dead question.” Trans. Nathanaël and Rachel Gontijo
Araujo (Calicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2012).
15. “O que é ser feito de carne, heim, gente? E fruta? E maçã, com aquele
rego no meio? E boca? E fome? E ser velho e disforme e verrugoso, ainda
é ser? E ser uma jovem mula acariciante, mulher, loira ou crioula, é ser o
quê? E o que será isso, triste, de ter que morrer?…O que é estar vivo? E
você sabe que o morto fervilha?” Hilda Hilst, Cascos e carícias, 56–57.
16. “fecha os olhos e tenta pensar no teu corpo lá dentro. Sangue, mex-
eção. Pega o microscópio. Ah, eu não. Que coisa a gente, a carne, unha
e cabelo, que cores aqui dentro, violeta vermelho. Te olha. Onde você
está agora? Tô olhando a barriga. É horrível Ehud. E você? Tô olhando
o pulmão. Estufa e espreme. Tudo entra dentro de mim, tudo sai.” Hilda
Hilst, A obscena senhora D (São Paulo: Globo, 2001), 42.
17. “Se a gente mastigasse a carne um do outro, que gosto? E uma sopa de
tornozelo? E uma sopa de pés? Na comida não se põe pé de porco?”
Hilda Hilst, A obscena senhora D, 42. Translation Nathanaël and Rachel
Gontijo Araújo. The Obscene Madame D. p. 22
18. “por que os dentes caem quando estamos velhos, mas ainda vivos, e per-
manecem eternos nas nossas límpidas e luzidias caveiras?” Hilda Hilst,
Cascos e carícias, 14.
74 E. R. Moraes
19. This is one of Hilst’s names for God.

20. “os dois corpos da língua.” See Michel Riaudel, “A leitura no quiasma de
sua sedução”, in Leitura: Teoria & Prática 18, no. 3 (June 1999): 55.
21. “a coisa de predestinada é mais ou menos assim: uns nascem pra ser lambi-
dos e outros pra lamberem e pagarem.” Hilda Hilst, O caderno rosa de
Lori Lamby (São Paulo: Massao Ohno, 1990), 31.
22. Hilda Hilst, With My Dog-Eyes, trans. Adam Morris (Brooklyn: Melville
House, 2015.).
23. “puxa-saquismos, antipatias por nada, gratuitos ressentimentos, falas
invejosas, megalômanas”; “não é que de repente num sopro tudo não
era?” Hilda Hilst, Com os meus olhos de cão (São Paulo: Globo, 2006),
40. English translations from With My Dog-Eyes Trans. Adam Morris
(Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014), 31.
24. “como se você conhecendo cada canto de sua própria casa descobrisse, no
vestíbulo por exemplo por onde você passara muitas vezes, no vestíbulo
meu Deus, descobrisse um rochedo de faces espelhadas ou um prisma
negro.” Hilda Hilst, Com os meus olhos de cão, São Paulo: Globo, 2006,
p. 41. English translation from With My Dog-Eyes, 31.
Author Biography
Eliane Robert Moraes is Professor of Brazilian Literature at the University of
São Paulo (USP) and researcher at the Brazilian National Council for Scientific
and Technological Development (CNPq). She has been a visiting professor at
the University of California, Los Angeles; the Université de Nanterre (France);
and at the New University of Lisbon (Portugal). She has published various
essays on erotic imagination in art and literature, and also translated Georges
Bataille’s Story of the Eye to Portuguese. She is the author of many books, includ-
ing Sade—A felicidade libertina (Sade: Libertine Happiness, Imago, 1994),
O Corpo impossível—A decomposição da figura humana, de Lautréamont a
Bataille (The Impossible Body: The Decomposition of the Human Figure, from
Lautréamont to Bataille, Iluminuras/Fapesp, 2002), Lições de Sade—Ensaios
sobre a imaginação libertina (Lessons from Sade – Essays on the libertine imag-
ination, Iluminuras, 2006), and Perversos, Amantes e Outros Trágicos (Perverts,
Lovers, and Other Tragic Figures, Iluminuras, 2013). She is currently research-
ing Brazilian literary eroticism, having organized the first Anthology of Brazilian
Erotic Poetry, published in 2015 by Editora Ateliê.
Hilda Hilst, Metaphysician
Adam Morris
So if we run through the sacred books we will see that all those things God revealed
to the Prophets were revealed to them either in words, or in visible forms, or in both
words and visible forms.
– Baruch de Spinoza
Abstract evidence retreats before the poetry of forms and colors.

– Albert Camus
Poetry is basically intuition

– Hilda Hilst1
Abstract  Departing from Hilst’s documented interest in French vitalist

philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, as well as her citational use of philos-
ophers such as Bertrand Russell and Elias Canetti in her fictional texts,
this chapter demonstrates that a responsible reading of Hilst’s “mys-
tic” or “philosophical” literary activity reveals a deep, antiphilosophical
commitment to vitalist and antirationalist modes of thought. The nexus
between mathematics and poetry was more than just a plot device for
Hilst’s novel With My Dog-Eyes and certain of her other fictional texts:
A. Morris (*) 
University of Rochester, Rochester, USA
e-mail: ajmorris@stanford.edu

76 A. Morris
it expressed Hilst’s belief in a transcendental gnostic unity that is at the

heart of all metaphysics.
Keyword  Philosophy · Metaphysics · Mysticism · Obscene

Jankélévitch
“I believe in everything,” Hilda Hilst told her friends, by way of explain-

ing her personal religious syncretism. Hilst was a lapsed Catholic—if
she’d ever really practiced—but the Casa do Sol, her home and retreat
for the latter half of her life, was filled with religious icons from the
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and indigenous traditions.
Hilst and her work were fixated on the spiritual dimensions of human
existence, particularly the anxieties of alienation, abandonment, and the
abjectness of the human condition. Literature, for her, was a means of
travel in her personal metaphysical quest, as well as a way of reaching
out to fellow travelers. This firmly situated Hilst in the intellectual and
spiritual tradition of gnostic mysticism.
Unlike Christian mystics, but akin to their medieval polymath con-
temporaries, Hilst was ecumenical in her intellectual interests. She did
not discriminate between literary disciplines and genres, and her personal
library at the Casa do Sol reflects this: tomes of theology, spiritualism,
and mysticism abut those of Joyce, Homer, and Kazantzakis. She also
read science, history, and psychology texts. Although strangely prideful
about her family’s formerly aristocratic lineage, Hilst deliberately chose
the life of an impoverished hermit and was snobbish only about the intel-
ligence and taste (and, admittedly, the zodiac signs) of her guests. In
her studies, all that mattered was her own judgment and whether or not
an idea expressed any truth about human nature or existence. She was
not the sort of thinker who doubted so-called pseudoscience any more
than she would the claims of scientific reason. Nor did she diminish the
mythologies of dead and defeated empires. On the contrary, she cher-
ished them. The obscure Portuguese Christian mystic tradition retained
a favored status among her poetic inspirations.2
Hilst’s attitudes toward religious thinking and experience were as
curious as those of William James, a thinker who greatly interested her.
In Hilst’s personal copy of the Penguin anthology United States and
HILDA HILST, METAPHYSICIAN 77
Latin American Literature, she circled the great psychologist’s entry and
underlined its description of James: “He was impatient of pedantry, of
the formal side of teaching, and even of philosophy as a purely intellec-
tual pursuit: he was impulsive, imaginative, deeply affectionate, uncon-
ventional in his tastes, sympathetic with spiritualism and mysticism, and
broadly democratic in his feelings.”3 From everything I’ve learned about
Hilst from friends who knew her, this description and all of its adjectives
apply equally to her.4
However, Hilst’s methods of engagement with religion were different
than James’s. Unlike James, Hilst was less interested in cataloguing and
examining religious experience than in recreating it: she wished to raise
the reader’s awareness to the idea that as an experience, contact with the
divine is not transferrable even via the most sublime literature. It must
be known and pursued individually if one’s life is to have any meaning.
In this framework, the divine remains the ultimate Derridean supple-
ment, not circumscribable by language any more than by scientific for-
mulae or the rituals of any religion. However, Hilst believed that poetry,
above all else, came closest to communicating the emotions, ideas, and
other nameless affects of raw gnostic enrapture and horror. In her efforts
to expand its affective power and representational capabilities, Hilst’s
poetry crossed the genre lines typically drawn to contain poetry to verse,
imbuing her fiction and theater with a distinct poetic register. This was
a method of incitement aimed at her readers: she demanded not only
close and careful reading, but also that her readers seek out this personal
contact with the beauty and dread of the divine, and of the human con-
dition, on their own.
Gnostic tropes are already evident here. Harold Bloom observed that
gnostic thought is the repressed of Western civilizations, and that the
gnostic quest for individual contact with transcendent, incommunicable
knowing (gnosis) became a guiding impulse of Western art, occasionally
breaking to the fore as it did in the case of Romanticism. Although it
would be improper to describe Hilst as a Romantic on the basis of her
poetic production—which is still to say nothing of her greater affection
for decadent writers such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Pierre Louÿs, who
made it their business to corrode and undercut Romantic sentiment—
she shared in the Romantic and decadent denunciation of capitalist
alienation. Her devout bohemianism, coupled with her deep disgust for
bourgeois pretensions, were coordinates that distanced her, quite delib-
erately, far from the Brazilian literary establishment.
78 A. Morris
This strategic distance was part of Hilst’s plan to follow in the foot-
steps of great iconoclastic thinkers in both literature and philosophy:
she created for herself a pantheon of heroes who were outcasts in their
time.5 Hilst identified with Camus’s “absurd man,” for whom “it is not
a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing.
Everything begins with lucid indifference.”6 Hilst lived out this indif-
ference to write from that detached, but ardent, experience of life: hers
is a fierce individualism characteristic of the gnostic writer, but one that
nevertheless craves communion with other souls, living or dead. Like
Camus, she idolized the rebellious loner-geniuses of the literary tradi-
tion, the poètes maudits, particularly those who made great worldly sac-
rifices, as she had, in the pursuit of truths available only to those who are
utterly, ascetically devoted to their art.
Hilst’s wide readings in philosophy, religion, and the spaces in-between
left traces throughout her work. Although usually unmarked, uncited, or
otherwise covert, allusions to Hilst’s vast readings compose a trail of herme-
neutic breadcrumbs for readers to follow and interpret across her body of
work. Owing to the vast expanse of her knowledge, acquired over the course
of decades maintaining a dedicated and inflexible schedule of reading for
nearly eight hours each day, it is impossible to detect or catalog all of these
allusions. A truly comprehensive annotation of any of Hilst’s texts would
necessarily be a collective endeavor involving many people and many years’
labor. In the face of such a Sisyphean task, each contributes what he can.
This chapter focuses instead on Hilst’s readings and writing in the
1980s, following the shift in her attention, from the late 70s onward,
from poetry to prose. This transition, widely remarked in the scholar-
ship,7 had diverse motivations, one of which was surely financial. Prose
sells better than poetry, and Hilst’s funds by the 1980s had dipped to
a point where she found it necessary to emerge from her retreat at the
Casa do Sol to lecture in the more buttoned-down environs of Unicamp,
a prestigious state university in nearby Campinas.
At Unicamp, Hilst befriended a diverse set of professors and academ-
ics that she might otherwise never have met. They included those whose
names appear in the acknowledgments to her 1986 novella Com meus
olhos de cão (With My Dog-Eyes): the composer and pianist José Antônio
de Almeida Prado, the theoretical physicist Mário Schenberg, and the
mathematician Ubiratàn d’Ambrosio. Hilst admired her colleagues’ pow-
erful minds and their depth of knowledge in their particular fields, even
if they did not always respect her inquiries into paranormal activity on
the grounds of the Casa do Sol, particularly after some of her experi-
ments gained wide publicity in a Brazilian TV special. They encouraged
Hilst to read further beyond Spiritism8 and metaphysics, and their influ-
ence lured Hilst into the hard sciences: her book collection expanded to
include texts on theoretical mathematics, physics, and astronomy—sub-
jects that appear in With My Dog-Eyes.
Hilst’s poetic vagrancy across the physical sciences reinforced her phil-
osophical inclinations: she was a Neoplatonic realist. That is, she believed
in a higher Unity or Oneness that could explain, or at least incorporate,
all the diverse fields of human knowledge. This inclination is detectable in
her poetry, which promiscuously borrows tropes and poetic devices from
pagan antiquity and the Iberian mystic poets, as well as more straightfor-
wardly gnostic attitudes regarding mankind’s fall from the fullness of the
Pleroma and yearning for contact with a now-unknowable god. While her
poetry explores gnostic notions of the divine, as well as themes of love
and passion, Hilst’s turn to prose reflected a renewed commitment to
Neoplatonic metaphysics. In this, she believed she followed in the foot-
steps of some of her most admired predecessors.
Hilst’s metaphysical positions were of her own devising, but notable res-
idues of Henri Bergson’s influence in Latin America are in evidence. For
instance, in addition to Ernest Becker, to whom all of Hilst’s books after
1982’s A obscena senhora D (The Obscene Madame D) are dedicated,
Hilst lists Vladimir Jankélévitch on the dedicatory page of her 1989 book
of poems, Amavisse (To Have Loved). Jankélévitch was a French philos-
opher, musicologist, and Bergsonian protégé. His writings have barely
entered English translation at all (he doesn’t get mentioned in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy), but Jankélévitch, like other Bergsonian thinkers,
benefited from Bergson’s extraordinary popularity in Latin America. Hilst
owned at least four of Jankélévitch’s books (two in the original French, one
in Spanish and another in Portuguese), and her dedication in Amavisse,
alongside perennial favorite Ernest Becker, suggests that his work was the
principal font from which she drank the Bergsonian metaphysical elixir.
Hilst’s route to and through her own vitalist metaphysics has much
to do with recommended readings that she undertook at the suggestion
of her Unicamp friends. No record of these conversations exists, but
one suspects it was Almeida Prado who introduced her to Jankélévitch.
In any case, by the time she was writing With My Dog-Eyes in the early
1980s, Hilst was exploring the deep cuts of European vitalist and
Neoplatonic metaphysics. As late as 1984, the date of the edition held
80 A. Morris
in her library, Hilst acquired a book by René Guénon, a thinker notable

for his attempts to steer Western esotericism away from Theosophy and
toward Eastern religions, particularly Hinduism.
These mid-career additions to her library joined works by midcentury
philosophers and writers who in their lifetimes found themselves on the
margins of what was considered “philosophical” writing. I refer to think-
ers like Camus, Sartre, Bataille, and even Nietzsche and Kierkegaard—
writers whose work intentionally blurred the line between philosophy
and literature.9 Hilst does not make direct reference to Camus in her
novel With My Dog-Eyes. Instead she names or references Bataille,
Canetti, Bertrand Russell, William James, and Otto Rank. However,
by 1986 she possessed most of Camus’s work, including the Gallimard
edition of L’homme révolté, in which Camus explored the concepts of
absurdity and rebellion. Echoes of these readings appear throughout
Dog-Eyes, as well as in the poetry Hilst published in the 1980s.
Camus had himself already considered the antiphilosophical lineage
that interested Hilst, but in different terms. He wrote,
The great novelists are philosophical novelists—that is, the contrary of

thesis writers. For instance, Balzac, Sade, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Proust,
Malraux, Kafka, to cite but a few. But in fact the preference they have shown
for writing in images rather than in reasoned arguments is revelatory of a
certain thought that is common to them all, convinced of the uselessness
of any principle of explanation and sure of the educative message of per-
ceptible appearance. They consider the work of art both as an end and a
beginning. It is the outcome of an often unexpressed philosophy, its illus-
tration and consummation.10
Hilst considered herself a participant in this literary tradition of antiphil-

osophical writing, or in Camus’s terminology, “unexpressed philoso-
phy.” She had made the decision, following an inspired reading of Nikos
Kazantzakis, to leave São Paulo, separate herself from bourgeois institu-
tions, and devote her life to writing. In this radical act of abandonment,
she followed Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Thomas Merton, and other writ-
ers she deeply admired and whose works she collected. Like them, Hilst
understood that her literary and philosophical objectives would only be
realized if she devoted her entire waking life to them.
For most of her lifetime, the jury of Hilst’s peers remained indeci-
sive about whether she had indeed accomplished anything approaching
a masterpiece. Although she won all of Brazil’s major literary prizes

and enjoyed the esteem of a cadre of Paulista writers—not to mention
the adulation of young poets dispersed across Brazil, who lionized her
devout independence—Hilst never deemed the public understanding of
her work to be sufficient. Nobody understood her, she complained to
friends and in interviews. This was partially because critics ignored the
antiphilosophical objectives in her work, and because her method of
writing across and between genres did not accommodate the twenti-
eth-century notion of a master “piece.” Instead, segments and volumes
of her work intersect, cross-reference, and resist formal conventions
and containment. Although she is renowned for her prose, it is hard to
accept “novel” or “story” as a descriptor for most of Hilst’s prose work.
In fact, Hilst referred to the short works that made up her 1977 prose
début simply as “fictions.”11
By that year, although she was known to the literary establishment
she made it a point to avoid, Hilst was not yet a familiar name to most
Brazilian readers. This only began to change in the 1990s, with the
publication of her so-called pornographic works. Hilst’s renown cul-
minated at the end of her life: in 2000, her works began to be reis-
sued by Editora Globo, marking the first time her books would be
distributed by a mainstream publisher and reach bookstores across the
country. Critical introductions to her works offered readers, at last,
a preliminary guide to a writer who was said to be too forbiddingly
arcane to read.
The reason for the change in tides is attributable largely to the public
and critical response to a tetralogy of books begun in 1990 with the pub-
lication of O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby (Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook).
That book, in which an eight-year-old girl narrates sexual liaisons with
older men set up by her father, generated a scandal in the Brazilian lit-
erary community, one fueled by Hilst’s own provocative behavior in
interviews she gave at the time of the book’s publication. Hilst fills Lori’s
notebook with dozens of slang euphemisms for g enitalia and sex acts, but
the girl’s prattle is otherwise that of a normal eight-year-old. Lori’s occa-
sionally acid humor is inflected with naïve grace. Her matter-of-factness
compels the reader to confront modern taboos on child sexuality. Lori
is pimped by her father because he is a struggling writer who needs the
money to maintain his family and to sustain his writing. By the end of
the novel, the reader is forced to question whether the text is Lori’s diary
or the literary masterpiece of her father—something along the lines of
82 A. Morris
Lolita, as the title of the novel subtly suggests with its rolling Ls—and
in the latter case, whether Lori’s sexual exploitation had ever occurred
at all. By bourgeois social standards, Lori’s father is either a criminal or
a pervert. That Lori’s diary, or Lori’s father’s imitation or falsification of
her diary, could ever be considered great literature—through its manipu-
lation of sexual prejudices and conservative social values—is the obscene
wager Hilst offers her reader. To wit, she asks: what truths of life, and
of the human condition, are foreclosed by prudish and hypocritical social
mores?
Lori Lamby marked the inauguration of Hilst’s pornographic tetral-
ogy, although the title of 1982’s The Obscene Madame D, Hilst’s first
novel-length prose work, suggests that the category of obscenity
had been on her mind since at least the turn of that decade, when she
began writing Madame D. With Lori Lamby and works that followed,
Hilst articulated a coherent nomenclature for her literary innovation.
She understood the obscene as an aesthetic and philosophical category
explored by writers such as Sade, Huysmans, Genet, Bataille, Nabokov,
Miller, and others. The objective of obscenity is to achieve what Camus
meant by rebellion: the obscene is a jolt to bourgeois consciousness.12
But it is also intended to be ineffable, just like Hilst’s concept of God,
for whom she instead had devised dozens of names—many of which slip
between the notion of a personified God and the gnostic Absolute: her
own cataphatic theological lexicon.13 God, to Hilst, was both obscene
and divine, neither of which can be said or confined by language.
Lori’s sexpot banter, for instance, isn’t obscene—it’s vulgar.
Obscenity, for Hilst, requires an act of social and moral provocation.
The “obscene” in Lori Lamby is what is unsaid: the father’s unforth-
coming confession that he has fabricated the diary provokes a tension
and a crisis for bourgeois moralism, which demands that he be pun-
ished as a degenerate peddler of smut or as a child-abusing monster.
That he might instead have created an audacious work of art that par-
odies a moralizing, bourgeois literary culture—this is obscene. The
lack of confession, or the undecidability of his act, only intensifies its
provocation.
As a category, obscenity is complementary to, or perhaps the inverse
of Jankélévitch’s notion of “charm” in music. Charm, he wrote in Music
and the Ineffable, is a bewitching power that cannot be captured in color
or poetry—in other words, neither painting nor verse can render or
wield it. It is perhaps that notion to which Camus refers when he writes,
“abstract evidence retreats before the poetry of forms and colors.” For
Jankélévitch, only music possesses this “immediate, drastic, and indis-
creet” power; he relates it to Plato’s assertion that music “penetrates to
the center of the soul.”14 Like charm, obscenity is ineffable, yet can be
sensed; for Hilst it seems to reside in the fundamentals of the human
condition, particularly the grotesque animality of the human body, and
the profane comedies of sex and decrepitude.
Jankélévitch wrote of what he called an “Orphic civilization” where
beasts are calmed by men; this is very different from, yet symmetrical
to, the desire expressed by the obscene. If the beasts are charmed by
Orpheus’s enchanting music, Hilst’s strident obscenity is intended to
shock the beastly bourgeois consciousness into recognition of what it
most disavows: the absurdity and irrationality of the human condition,
sadomasochistically exacerbated by crass commercialism, modern separa-
tion from nature, and increasingly sophisticated technologies of human
violence.
***
Let us return to the 1980s, the formative period of this development

in Hilst’s work. In the early years of that decade, 1981–82, Hilst passed
through a profound personal crisis that resulted from a disastrous love
affair with a cousin. Perhaps to escape the catastrophe of her emotional
life, and certainly a result of her teaching at Unicamp, Hilst redirected
her energies into the friendships that would bend her metaphysically
inclined mind toward science and mathematics and the possibilities that
these posed for poetry, and vice versa.
Although constantly present throughout her work in varying degrees,
Hilst’s commitment to metaphysical inquiry reaches a period of intensity in
these years. Hilst’s mathematician and physicist friends all trafficked in some
sort of pure science that purported to explain all that is known; she read
books in quantum mechanics alongside the works of Bertrand Russell. The
result of these combined readings was With My Dog-Eyes, a book that theo-
rizes the relation between poetry and physics through the tale of a descent
into madness experienced by its protagonist, Professor Amós Kéres. Dog-
Eyes was published in 1986; three years later, Hilst published Amavisse, a
book whose title and epigraph derive from a quotation of Jankélévitch: “ter
um dia amado (amavisse)” “(to have one day loved (to have loved)).”15
84 A. Morris
The slim volume of poems further illuminates Hilst’s thinking regard-

ing the relationship between poetry and mathematics.. Poem IV, for
instance, reads:
If people arrive, tell them I’m living my inverse.

That there is a livid scarlet
Across my chest, before so pale, and sparkling linens
Across these thin hips, and troublesome shoals
Across my feet. That my mouth cannot be seen, nor any word
heard
But there are phonemes syllables suffixes diagrams
Ringing my back room with no beginning.
That the woman seemed just right that night, back then,
And woke at dawn as though she dwelt upon the water. Wrinkled.
Buoyant.
Tell them mainly

That there’s a fulgent hollow fully opened.
And a dark spot drawn on the chalk walls
Where the woman–inverse put herself.
That she’s not all right this Sunday afternoon

That she drank musk
And shouted to the chickens that she’d spoken with God.16
“Avesso” (inverse) is assonant with the book’s title, Amavisse. This slant
rhyme is at the heart of this book. But what is the inverse of amavisse,
roughly translated “to have loved”? Is it to have hated? To have loved
not? Never to have loved? Such ambiguities of course exist in language,
but not in simple arithmetic. In more advanced math, however, indeter-
minacy, the subject of so much philosophy, is everywhere. Amós Kéres
discovers this. “Vivir o avesso,” or to live one’s inverse or opposite, is
to grasp at the nonrational and ineffable—at what can be figured, but
not captured, by language or equations. Instead, these experiences of the
obscene and the divine arise, as the image of a wizened Aphrodite here
suggests, in unexpected moments of gnostic illumination and transfor-
mation by which all an individual’s prior experience—her gnostic quest,
her Zarathustran pilgrimage, her reading, her suffering, her sorrows—are
suddenly inflected.
Hilst rewards readers who have accompanied her on her path with
subtle references to her other works. The above lines from Poem IV, for
instance, evoke With My Dog-Eyes in a way that demonstrates the manner
in which Hilst worked across individual works and even across genres as
she continued to explore the possibilities of literary thought and form
as a mode of connecting the ineffable aspects of both aesthetics and sci-
ence. These connections offered Hilst small moments of gnostic rapture
such as the one Amós experiences on the top of a hill at the outset of the
novel:
Poetry and mathematics. The black stone structure breaks and you see
yourself in a saturation of lights, a clear-cut unhoped-for. A clear-cut
unhoped-for was what he felt and understood at the top of that small hill.
But he didn’t see shapes or lines, didn’t see contours or lights, he was
invaded by colors, life, a flashless dazzling, dense, comely, a sunburst that
was not fire. He was invaded by incommensurable meaning. He could say
only that. Invaded by incommensurable meaning.17
This experience causes Amós’s entire life to unravel in a crisis of faith,

as he realizes that he had previously been ignorant of the shimmering,
if fleeting, connections between poetry and math, connections that are
ineffable, and which reduce only to Amós’s description of the dance of
shapes before his eyes and the abstract stanzas of verse that punctuate
that novel.
Indeed, Amós is afflicted with muteness in the novel whenever he
attempts to explain “the instant of Love” he felt. Echoing the notion of
living the “inverse” or “reverse” expressed by the speaker in Amavisse,
who is no longer the person she was, Amós asks, “How can the old love
live in me if I understood the instant of Love and now belong to the
world of mutes, my fibers wriggling with anxious signals and my throat
wide with blanks?”18 The novel concludes with the sketch of a dog and
illegible, hieroglyph-like markings that signal Amós’s ultimate silence and
estrangement from human language: his transformation into a dog.19
Shortly before this, Amós visits his classroom a final time, reporting,
86 A. Morris
The questions grow and form cubes in the air. They collide. […]
Grotesquely I’m dispersing. There’s blood spattering the walls of the cir-
cle. An avalanche of cubes blankets my tissues of flesh. I’m empty of any-
thing good. Full of the absurd.
Lift me, Shining One

To the opulence of your shoulder.20
These moments of gnosis overflow grammar and strain at the limits of

language, as Hilst indicates by suggesting the failure of synesthesia in
Dog-Eyes, as well as in Amavisse. Synesthesia was a poetic tactic used by
the Spanish-American modernista poets and their European Parnassian
forebears, and was part of their attempt to capture ineffable poetic expe-
rience “in both words and visible forms” as Spinoza put it, or in “the
poetry of forms and colors,” as Camus later remarks. The connection
between Dog-Eyes and Amavisse is drawn even more firmly in the latter’s
Poem VII, where the poet writes:
That outline of the hill

I want to lock behind the gate
Of my soul. Sustenance and measure
For my many afterlives.
Curve of a fleeting daydream

An all sprawled out adolescent
That thin trace of the hill
Will live on in my mental landscape.
The way that distances inhabit certain birds

The way the poet inhabits fervencies.21
It is on the top of a hill that Amós Kéres experiences the ineffable rap-
ture of being “invaded by colors, life, a flashless dazzling.” This expe-
rience causes him to open his scientistic faith in mathematics to an
unexpected divine and encounter with an ultimate Power that he can
sense or intuit, but which he cannot explain with theorems, words,
colors, or shapes. Their combination, however, seems to bring him closer

to the mystic whole.
Synesthesia recalls the decadent poets whom Hilst admired. And
the union here—of mathematics with poetry, of logic with mysticism—
is what Bertrand Russell describes as the core vocation of metaphysics.
One of the handful of texts Hilst cites explicitly in With My Dog-Eyes is
Russell’s Mysticism and Logic. In his conversation with the “distant” and
changed Amós at the outset of the novel, who is presumably already the
“inverse” Amós, en route to becoming a dog, the college dean deploys
a citation from Bertrand Russell as his opening gambit: “Obviousness is
always the enemy to correctness,” he quotes, to which Amós replies with
the next line in Russell’s essay: “Hence we invent some new and difficult
symbolism, in which nothing seems obvious.”
Mysticism and Logic is the essay in which Russell describes metaphysics
as the origin of true greatness:
Metaphysics, or the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means

of thought, has been developed, from the first, by the union and con-
flict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards
mysticism, the other urging them towards science. Some men have
achieved greatness through one of these impulses alone, others through
the other alone: in Hume, for example, the scientific impulse reigns quite
unchecked, while in Blake a strong hostility to science co-exists with pro-
found mystic insight. But the greatest men who have been philosophers
have felt the need both of science and of mysticism: the attempt to har-
monize the two was what made their life, and what always must, for all its
arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some minds, a greater thing than
either science or religion.22
Hilst was born a mystic; her poetry was almost already fully formed
with 1950’s Presságio. But hers was a metaphysical mysticism like that
of Russell’s greats: she understood the ineffable grandeur of science and
the poetry of mathematics. For Hilst, the way of maintaining the bal-
ance that Russell describes, the balance of the great philosophers, was to
remember, and represent, the depths of mathematics to be as obscene
and unknown as those of love—as dark and obsessive and pleasurable
and full of flights of fancy and madness. These depths, illuminated even
for an instant, are what drive Amós insane with gnostic rapture. What
he reverently and fearfully calls the “Unfounded” is, after all, another of
Hilst’s names for God.
88 A. Morris
Russell speaks of the “arduous uncertainty” of metaphysics. Indeed,

the three subtitles to Hilst’s volume Amavisse describe the metaphysi-
cal effort another way, one that links her work to the gnostic tradition
as taken up by her idols: “Amavisse. Via Espressa. Via Vazia.” These
last two may be translated as “dense path” and as “empty path,” and
may be read as a pun on “via expressa,” a term for an automobile
expressway, as alternatives to the theological terms via positiva and via
negativa, or even as wordplay to describe dark matter. The gnostic’s
path to knowledge is both dense and empty, as Hilst knew well. Her
poetry remarks constantly on this difficulty, this unknowability, this
“arduous uncertainty,” that gives rise to the obscenities of the human
condition.
While her fiction and theater dramatize this condition, Hilst’s poetry
at times reads like the lamentations of Sophia (Wisdom), the gnostic
figure who “begins to be unbalanced within the Pleroma because ‘she’
wishes to know the Father—a privilege granted only to Nous who is
closer to Father….The disturbance within Sophia leads to her conceiv-
ing ‘substance without form’….The product of her passion is discarded
from the Pleroma into the All, a void….”23 Cast out of the Godhead,
Sophia was left “endlessly searching, lamenting, suffering, repenting,
laboring her passion into matter, her yearning into soul.”24 Hilst’s poetic
voice and the plight of her fictional characters, particularly Madame D,
resonate with this description of Sophia. Hilst knew that her incessant
and thickening attempts to use language to circumscribe the “substance
without form” would lead nowhere, or to insights that only reinforced
the impossibility of naming and knowing the divine and the obscene.
But meditating on this obscenity was the path she chose for her art, the
way of her wayward genius. With her interwoven and multidimensional
texts, her dozens of names for God, her poetry of “shapes and forms,”
her charm and obscenity, hers was an endless pursuit through physics,
poetry, religion, the zodiac. The chase of elusive unity, the signature of
metaphysical greatness: this is what Hilst always sought.
Notes
1. Benedict de Spinoza. A Spinoza Reader. Ed. and Trans. Edwin Curley
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 12. Albert Camus, The
Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien (New York:
Vintage, 1955), 39. Hilda Hilst in “Entrevista: Das sombras” Cadernos
de literatura brasileira, No. 8, “Hilda Hilst.” p. 28. (“poesia é básica-

mente intuição”).
2. See Alva Martínez Teixeiro’s essay in this volume.
3. Jean Franco and Eric Mottram, Eds. United States and Latin American
Literature, Penguin Companion to Literature, Vol. 3 (Hammondsworth:
Penguin, 1971), 136.
4. Hilst’s own spiritualist inclinations ran deep and are well documented
in press interviews, in which the author was often questioned about her
experiments tape recording the voices of spirits that visited the Casa do
Sol. See Cristiano Diniz, Ed. Fico besta quando me entendem: Entrevistas
com Hilda Hilst (São Paulo: Biblioteca Azul, 2013), passim; and Adam
Morris, “Translator’s Introduction,” With My Dog-Eyes (Brooklyn:
Melville House, 2014), 20.
5. According to Jurandy Valença, a resident of the Casa do Sol in the 1990s
and the director of residency programs at the Instituto Hilda Hilst when
I visited, a book Hilst recommended and frequently cited in conversation
was Hans Mayer’s Outsiders, a study of women, homosexuals, and Jews,
and their importance to Western literary culture.
6. Camus, 70.
7. See Eliane Robert Moraes’s essay in this volume.
8. Spiritism is a variety of spiritualism founded and popularized by Allan
Kardec, the nom de plume of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail. Spiritism
enjoyed popularity in Latin America.
9. Alain Badiou and Boris Groys have both, in separate works, described
some of these writers as “antiphilosophers.” Although Badiou and Groys
offer different formulations and exponents of this category, they gener-
ally refer to thinkers who intervene from the exterior of institutionalized
philosophy to question the grounds upon which philosophy establishes
its objectives and claims. See Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosphy.
Trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso Books, 2011), and Boris Groys,
Introduction to Antiphilosophy. Trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso,
2012).
10. Camus, 74–75, my emphasis.
11. It is worth observing that Lispector had also labeled her later works
“Fiction” (Água viva: ficção, 1973) and “Pulsations” (Um sopro de vida:
pulsações, published posthumously in 1978).
12. As Pécora writes, “o lixo cultural do bestseller é, por assim dizer, a
condição de sua literatura parasitária e obscena. Ou em outras palavras:
o mesmo lixo mercadológico que ela denuncia, constitui também a oca-
sião da conquista de sua vontade própria” (“the cultural trash represented
by the bestseller sets, you might say, the conditions for [Hilst’s] par-
asitic and obscene literature. In other words: the same mercantile trash
90 A. Morris
that she denounces also provides an occasion for her triumph over it.”)
Pécora cites Hilst herself making this point: “[…] ao longo de minha vida
tenho lido tanto lixo que resolvi escrever o meu.” (“over the course of
my life I’ve read so much trash that I decided to write my own.” Por que
ler Hilda Hilst, Alcir Pécora, Ed. (São Paulo: Globo, 2010), 16. Hilst’s
use of “o meu” or “my own,” however, does not mean her trash is aes-
thetically or politically in the same category as the conventional trash of
mainstream publishing industry, Pécora’s “bestseller.”
13. Among the names Hilst used for God are: Tríplice Acrobata, Cara
Cavada, Cao de Pedra, Fazedor, Artífice, O Cego, O Isso, Haydum,
Cara Obscura, Grande Incorruptível, Lúteo Rajado, Grande Corpo
Rajado, O Mudo Sempre, Semidouro Ominoso, Grande Perseguidor, O
Incognoscível, Construtor do Mundo, Soberano, Cadela de Pedra.
14. Vladimir Jankélévitch. Music and the Ineffable. Trans. Carolyn Abbate
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1.
15. Hilda Hilst. Amavisse (São Paulo: Massao Onho, 1989).
16. Se chegarem as gentes, diga que vivo meu avesso. /Que há um vivaz
escarlate/Sobre o peito de antes palidez, e linhos faiscantes/Sobre as
magras ancas, e inquietantes cardumes/Sobre os pés. Que a boca não
se vê, nem se ouve a palavra/Mas há fonemas sílabas sufixos diagramas/
Contornando o meu quarto de fundo sem começo. /Que a mulher pare-
cia adequada numa noite de antes/E amanheceu como se vivesse sob as
águas. Crispada. /Flutissonante. //Diga-lhes principalmente/Que há
um oco fulgente num todo escancarado. /E um negrume de traço nas
paredes de cal/Onde a mulher-avesso se meteu//Que ela não está neste
domingo à tarde apropriada. /E que tomou algália/E gritou às galinhas
que falou com Deus. Hilst. Amavisse, Poem IV.
17. With My Dog-Eyes. Trans. Adam Morris (Brooklyn: Melville House,
2014), 10. “Poesia e matemática. Rompe-se a negra estrutura de pedra
e te vês num molhado de luzes, um nítido inesperado. Um nítido ine-
sperado foi o que sentiu e compreendeu no topo daquela pequena col-
ina. Mas não viu formas nem linhas, não viu contornos nem luzes, foi
invadido de cores, vida, um fulgor sem clarão, espesso, formoso, um sol-
origem sem ser fogo. Foi invadido de significado incomensurável. Podia
dizer apenas isso. Invadido de significado incomensurável.” Hilda Hilst,
Com meus olhos de cão e outras novelas (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986), 18.
18. With My Dog-Eyes, 42.
19. Coincidentally, perhaps, “god” and “dog” are inverses in English. I have
briefly considered the meaning of the title of Hilst’s novel in my transla-
tor’s introduction to My Dog-Eyes.
20. With My Dog-Eyes, 57–58. “As perguntas crescem e formam cubos no ar.
Se entrechocam. […] Grotesco me esparramo. Há sangue respingando
as paredes do círculo. Uma avalanche de cubos recobre meus tecidos de

carne. Estou vazio de bens. Pleno de absurdo. //Levanta-me, Luminoso
/Até a opulência do teu ombro.” Hilst, Com meus olhos de cão, 52.
21. “Aquele traço da colina/Quero trancar na cancela/Da alma. Alimento e
medida/Para as muitas vidas do depois. //Curva de um devaneio inat-
ingido/Um todo estendido adolescente/Aquele fino traço da colina/Há
de viver na paisagem da mente//Como a distância habita em certos pás-
saros/Como o poeta habita nas ardências.”
22. Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (1917) (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday Anchor, n.d.), 1.
23. Tobias Churton. The Gnostics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987),
54. See also Alva Martínez Teixeiro in this volume.
24. Hans Jonas. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the
Beginnings of Christianity (1958). 2nd Ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963),
xiii. I reserve for another occasion a more thorough analysis of gnostic
tropes in Hilst’s work.
Author Biography
Adam Morris is a writer, translator, and scholar. He has translated Hilda Hilst,
João Gilberto Noll, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Nuno Ramos, Vivian
Abenshushan, and others. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Luso-
Brazilian Review, CR: The New Centennial Review, parallax, Criticism, The
Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, The
Believer, BOMB, Music & Literature, Public Books, Cabinet, and elsewhere. His
book American Messiahs is forthcoming from Liveright/W.W. Norton. He was
a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester Humanities Center in 2016.
PART III
Hilst in National and Global Context

A Nation on the Ground Floor: The
Face of Brazil, Drawn with Hilda Hilst’s
Political Pen
Deneval Siqueira de Azevedo Filho
Abstract  Hilda Hilst is not usually considered among those Brazilian

writers who were intimately engaged in the construction of national
identity, but this did not mean the nation or national politics disinter-
ested her. On the contrary, Hilst engaged in acts of national identity–
deconstruction. Taking Hilst’s novella “Axelrod (da proporção)” from
the novella trilogy Tu não te moves de ti as its primary tutor text, this
chapter demonstrates how Hilst appropriates the marginal position of the
poète maudit to critique Brazilian bourgeois nationalism through a strat-
egy of combining genres and pushing language to the borders of sense.
Keywords  Hilda Hilst · Poetry · Love poems · Poetics · Erotic

Amorous
D. Siqueira de Azevedo Filho (*) 

Universidade Federal Do Espírito Santo, Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil
e-mail: denevalf@gmail.com

96 D. Siqueira de Azevedo Filho
On the role of literature in society, Antonio Candido writes: “The prob-

lem is that the magnitude of the subject and the pomp of language can
act as a disguise for reality and even of truth.” Although “literature often
runs this risk, the result of which is to destroy the reader’s ability to see
things directly, and to think of consequences,”1 it is not hard to identify
certain problems that have come to the fore in Brazil today, in the media
and in literary representations of events related to the street protests that
translate the discontent, revolt, and humiliation by which everyone on
the contemporary scene in Brazil is held hostage. Of course, such events
have occurred since the very beginning of the Republic, since Brazil has
been Brazil.
What, a propos of Candido, is magnitude in literature? What is
pomp? Are they found in literary production or reception, in the
relationship between literature and society, or between literature and
politics? And what of (hi)story, the literary form of the crônica, the fic-
tionalization of history, and the national narrative? And of the inven-
tion of the nation? Brazil today is a nation viewed from the outside,
in the sense put forth by Foucault rereading Blanchot, who had given
wing to Deleuze.
Rather than proposing a debate on the topic of “What is Brazil?” or
on who and what have created its national image, I instead invoke the
work of Hilda Hilst to highlight the fact that Brazil is, without a doubt,
now living through a time of tension and may be facing an “unjustifi-
able setback,”2 owing to alleged abuses of police authority and to the
criminalization of popular street demonstrations by members of the
state.
In 2013, the executive director of Amnesty International in Brazil,
Atila Roque, described a “framework” of “legal arbitrariness faced by
activists in our country,” including “arrests of protesters for alleged con-
spiracy to murder, an attempted banning of masks, and the assignment
of preventative imprisonment for allegations of the incitement of vio-
lence via social networks.”3 This disservice to justice is a theater of cru-
elty intended to deceive those who still believe in the positivist slogan of
“Order and Progress” that appears on Brazil’s flag.
But Brazil is not only this. It must be reread in light of its literary
inventory. How can literature provide us with a historiography? And
A NATION ON THE GROUND FLOOR: THE FACE OF BRAZIL, DRAWN … 97
should we read it as history or a humorous crônica? Literary theory may

give us some clues about how to read recent events in our collective
fiction/reality.
In “O frívolo cronista” (The Frivolous Chronicler), Carlos
Drummond de Andrade defines the crônica as a representation of that
which would not fit into other spaces in the newspaper, those spaces
viewed as “noble” and reserved for “accurate information” suited to a
“higher mission.” [The crônica] accommodates the “useless” in its per-
sonal and particular utility: “junk drawers,” uncompromised space, the
corner of the page, the ideal place where those “nothings of our exist-
ence” might gain voice.4
Voice is indeed the topic of the moment. Or rather “voices,” to do
justice to the chorus of voices presented in the literature to be reviewed
here. Brazil is living through a real, far-reaching chaos in terms of our
nationality and our Latin American identity, and we need only look
around to comprehend our own contradictions and paradoxes.
The crônica has always made this its business. Antonio Candido
describes the crônica as a “minor genre” which expresses what he calls
“life on the ground floor”:
Its intuition is not that of the writer who strives to “remain,” that is,
endure in the memory and admiration of posterity; and its perspective is
not that of writing from the mountaintop, but simply from the ground
floor. For this reason, it succeeds almost despite itself in transforming lit-
erature into something that is intimate in relation to individual readers.
When crônicas are collected and are published in the form of a book, we
discover, somewhat with amazement, that the crônica’s durability can be
greater than it had ever dreamed for itself, perhaps as a reward for being so
unpretentious, so suggestive and revealing.5
Candido describes how the crônica, although considered a minor

genre, is juxtaposed against everyday life. It photographs facts, chron-
ograms events, and humbly records scenes of marginality: the suburbs,
violence, hunger, corruption, and damnation. This literary form is for-
mulated with touches of humor and of the sardonic. Today it is dis-
seminated by various social media outlets as well as in print, and takes
up an ancestral language that marks it as a self-marginalized literatura
maldita.6
Candido elaborates on the crônica’s marginalized, anticanonical

status:
The fact of being so close to the day-to-day acts as a break from the mon-
umental and the “elevated.” The crônica is always helping to establish or
re-establish the scale of things and of people. Instead of offering a sublime
setting, in a torrent of adjectives and ardent intervals, it takes minutiae and
demonstrates its unsuspected grandeur, beauty, or uniqueness. The crônica
is the friend of truth and of poetry in their most direct manifestations and
also in their more fantastical forms, particularly owing to its frequent use
of humor.7
I will draw upon these formulations of the crônica as a vehicle for “noth-
ing voices” to examine the character of certain previous representations
of Brazilianness, likewise in their most direct forms as well as in their
more fantastical, visionary, and quixotic manifestations. I take my texts
from the work of Hilda Hilst, the demicanonical Brazilian autora mald-
ita of the twentieth century.
Hilst’s works A obscena senhora D, Com meus olhos de cão, and Cartas
de um sedutor (The Obscene Madame D, With My Dog-Eyes, and Setters
from a Seducer) can be categorized as malditas for their humor and sat-
ire, marshaled and applied by their uniquely Hilstian narrators. They are
works that dismantle neo-utopian nationalism in the broad sense of the
term.8 The very language of the these texts elaborates an antiromantic
aesthetic subjectivity: it takes up the national sign to disfigure it and thus
reveals how literary art might expose a fracture in the representative expe-
rience of language within the history of Brazilian literature.
This is the fruitful terrain that Candido’s “ground floor” notion
describes as “different.” To be more precise, the critique of the formu-
lated romantic aesthetic strikes the nerve of the nationalist problematic
when it takes up this problematic to deconstruct it by placing it in ten-
sion with this bias of “difference.” Hilst continually invests her ficção
maldita with a political reading of her country, which despite being
couched in the particularities of its historical time and social context,9
nevertheless remains a contemporary expression of Brazilianness and
Latinity: the attempt at the impossible task of building a national identity
and the arrival, at the site of this construction, of peripheral marginali-
ties in all their inhumanity. The inhumanity of Hillé, from The Obscene
Madame D, and Vittorio of Estar sendo, Ter sido (To Be Being, To Have
Been), are clear examples of this.
Let us turn to Hilst’s short story “Axelrod (da proporção)” (Axelrod,
of Proportion) from With My Dog-Eyes and Other Novellas, 1986. Were
it not for the depth of its lyricism, its cutting critique, and even per-
haps its humor and especially its aesthetic literary value, this text would
have been doomed to oblivion and failure by the end of last century,
in the sense of failure discussed by George Bataille.10 In “Axelrod,”
Hilda Hilst invests in continuous contrast and in permanent paradox
to reveal to us the very truths of our Latinity and our Brazilianness—
indeed, these are put down on all fours before the eyes of the world.
Definitions, aporias, fanfares, and jests appear at the thresholds between
inner and outer conflict, madness and sanity, sketched in the slow
stream of consciousness of the Hilstian narrator, Professor Axelrod
Silva. Axelrod’s narrative, the third in the trilogy Não te moves de ti (You
Move Not From Yourself)11 revisits the themes of time and finitude, yet
corrodes the vision constructed in the first two stories.
Axelrod, the protagonist, is a conventional professor of political history
whose story is significant, particularly as it bears upon the “proportion”
of the title. The character would seem to propose the enclosing of the
three novellas in this collection by aiming, perhaps, to find the balance
between reason (the character Tadeu) and fantasy (the character Maria).
On a trip to his parents’ house, Axel looks back on his life. The
journey that the character takes to his hometown, where he spent his
childhood, is completely symbolic in this text: it puts Axel’s self-for-
mulated historical consciousness to the test. What is most intriguing to
Axelrod is how his imagination, differentiated from his own subjectiv-
ity, anticipates his reactions and responses. The subject of the narrative
experiences a kind of ecstasy after engaging with historical textuality,
but in the relationship with his imagination Axelrod goes even fur-
ther: during the train ride, he actually has sexual relations with his
imagination.
Axelrod suffers from a confusion of feelings. He is merely dreaming
as the train of his life rolls onward, and yet he cannot manage to move
on his own. He loses all control over his lived experience and he rejects
its reality, which he seems to no longer recognize. Knowledge, pleas-
ure, oppression, and delirium call him by turn to experience their lim-
its, bringing him physical and intellectual ecstasy, lending the narrative an
intense rhythm. This is the most fragmented of the collection’s novellas,

and its voices continually mix without making clear to whom Axel speaks
or to whom he refers. The arrival of the train is the end of the journey
and also the first installment of the death sequence.
Hilst’s erudite prose is mixed with the street slang and inside jokes
that (dis)organize its antiauthoritarian speech; she also deploys traits of
fictional memoire and Machadian irony. Her prose reflects a silent cry of
anguish and of lucidity, railing against our passivity in the face of politi-
cal oppression and authoritarian conduct. She is the anticanonical canine,
despite her desire to be canonized—a transgressive linguistic attitude
that is nevertheless valued and recognized by the academy and by literary
critics:
Join, Axelrod, join with someone, that’s what you need. But with whom?
With History? As if it were a someone, that so-called History, staggering
fuzzily around, as if it were real, look over there, it’s History, there she
goes, look at her, look at History swallowing you, today you dine with
History, and History’s little children, Marat marx mao, the first a mur-
derer, the second so many things humanist economist sociologist Agitator,
oh so deep that second, so History so State. And that third one, O man,
what a third.12
By stating that literature distances itself from the role of representation, I

assert that it creates imaginaries about things, and that such imaginaries
are only likely to be elaborated via their infinite unfolding as language.
This will be made quite clear, from a different angle, to the reader of
Hilst’s “Axelrod.” If in this text the Brazilian experiences a dichotomous
passivity that is even more pronounced due to his repressed personal
alienation, what emerges is the supposed performance of a nationality
sucked dry by imperialism. Hilda Hilst depicts in this text the “bloodless
palm tree,” that is, the greenish-yellow brand of nationalism that does
not fight for its rights, for its spaces, or even for its identity.13 Hilst’s
text-protest warning transcends this, and the alienation of the nation
supplants that of the subject in the text, to develop a more national and
universal discourse that will actually shed some blood on the square.
Hilst creates an agonistic space of struggle, of the establishment of a
meticulous record of that struggle, of internalization and delirium, in
which the Brazilian male agonizes before his own oblique, odorless, and
neurotic speech acts:
Significant, pearly, his entire self extended in jade down in the depths, this
is how he saw himself, thus he saw himself, humanous, breathing historic-
ity, a composed historian, laughter as stuffy as those shiny old ties, hoho,
he saw himself completely in order, annotated books, cherry-red for the
Bolsheviks, small vertical yellow green crosses for revolutionary Brazilians,
no blood beneath the palm trees, no blood in sight, only on the cement
of the squares, in the sewer grates, on dark walls, blood in secret, ah he
knew about that, but alive, his austerity sufficiently long-lived to know it
was better to shut up about the secret blood, after all, what did he have to
do with it?14
Hilst’s narrative demonstrates the tradeoff at hand here: “Axelrod-

people, Axelrod-cohesion, virulence, Axelrod-child of the people,
HISTORY/PEOPLE, I dine with my parents, swallow monopoly;
thrilled, I drink revolution […] I shit capitalism, profit, securities
exchange, and I’m still famished, oh my god, I want me for myself, bone
dry, I”15 This “people” that Axelrod mentions was never, in reality, pres-
ent in the decisions that gave birth to a nation. Yet, with regard to this
political-linguistic construct, adverse to authoritarianism and therefore a
fictional text of political language—Hilst does not spare such metanarra-
tives from criticism.
Regarding this revolution of language that Hilst presents, Weverson
Dadalto comments on the book Rútilo nada (Glittering Nothing), 2003:
Why is a relatively simple story told via a seemingly painstaking disorgani-

zation of the constituent elements of the narrative (time, space, characters,
narrator, plot)? How is it that the text achieves the combination of superfi-
cially distinct themes, such as eroticism, morality, politics and poetry? And
what constitutes the identity of the characters, if such an identity exists?
More than questions for the text, these are the questions from the text,
which, incidentally, takes the general form of an outburst against the
absence of meaning and definitive solutions to the anguish of contempo-
rary man and sensation that his identity is diluted. This does not mean,
however, that the text does not contain a latent longing for definitions,
and a more or less explicit conclusion: man is constituted as language, only
as language, and that which constitutes him is precisely the largest bar-
rier to contact with others; the language that places man in the world and
that dilutes him within its large network of meanings is the same one that
denies him both fixed meaning and identity […]16
Drawing on Dadalto’s observation, I would assert that it is precisely in

its language that Hilst’s story chronicles a sociopolitical confusion culmi-
nating in the protagonist’s existential crisis. The narrative begins, then,
to encompass the external facts of the post-1964 military dictatorship,
and the observations that the text makes about its villains—that is, about
us—are significant:
[…] men in a single rhythm, always blood, ambitions, masks hardened

onto faces, curious, he’d repeat to his students, it’s curious, class, the truth
is nil novi super terram, nothing new, nothing new Professor Axelrod Silva?
Nothing, History turns, always spitting the same axial water my dears, hard
spokes radiating from a single axis, highly intense order, the light hitting
the spokes and the shaft at various hours gives you the idea that nothing
in history is repeated, oh but everything, everything is a single tooth, one
flesh, a thick claw, an indecomposable thickening, an eternal IT.17
The complex narrative, an intensely hybrid text that combines false

memories, short story, and drama, is centered on Professor Axelrod Silva,
a cultured academic. It follows him through various traumas caused by
both personal and philosophical-patriotic dilemmas at the hands of a
repressive, authoritarian, and politically cowardly apparatus. This high-
lights the misery of the Brazilian people, the decline of our institutions,
our racism, and ultimately, the total disregard for human rights in Brazil
and certain other countries in Latin America: “Byzantine Axelrod, his
paradoxes, his almost complete unintelligibility, I ask for facts and answer
myself, tortured, I ask for concreteness and out comes a breath, tenu-
ousness, emotions, or out comes the historical Byzantine: ‘a paradise of
monopoly, of privilege, of paternalism.’ (Permit me an aside: the scene
today is identical.)”18 To this end, Hilst throws the protagonist into a
politico-memoirist immersion, framed as a therapeutic activity for the
narrator, which allows him and us, as readers, to meditate, dialectically,
on repression and other conditions of our Latin American identity that
increase day by day:
He monologued a purifying opening prayer: something just short of

myself, something, I don’t know what, moves if I see photographs of the
excavated, from Auschwitz Belsec Majdanek Treblinka, if I see hungry
mouths, squalid black masses, if I see, let’s see, if I think of my student’s
story, I’ll tell you Professor Axelrod, I’ll speak right into your ear, elec-
tric shocks to the vagina, anus, inside the ears, then the hair down there
torched a sonofabitch doctor standing by, quick approaches each time I

faint, redness, flashing, holes bleeding. Why? Had she raised the acrylic
mask from a soldier of the king? Confided? Passed fury from mouth to
mouth? She told him and in him there moved soft aggressors, anxiety
and loneliness, enlarged, he squeezed his legs, and another he ejacu-
lated terror and poverty, another significant thing from him, another
grotesqueness flowed spasmodically, an inappropriate and disorderly
IT in Axelrod, Axelrod who until that moment had known himself as
undefeated.19
Specifically, the omniscient narration describes a scenario of universal

tragedies—from Auschwitz to the Brazilian miracle, to an extraordinary
disregard for fellow Brazilians—to show us the prototypical permeated
with a medieval flavor, emphasized by anachronistic pilgrimages through
recondite historical facts, supposedly the favorite repertoire of Professor
Silva. The buffoonery, however, strengthens Hilst’s political discourse,
which she has described thus:
I am motivated to write by an ethical compulsion, which in my view is the

only important motive for any writer: to refuse to make pacts, to not be
complicit with the lies that surround us. This is a visceral attitude, one that
emerges from the soul, the mind, and the heart of the writer. The writer is
the one who says “no,” who does not participate in this armed subterfuge
meant to deceive people!20
This literary anarchy is what provokes the construction of the narrative

metaphor for Brazil and aptly, of Professor Axelrod Silva himself as syn-
ecdoche for Brazil, Brazilian nationality, and Latin American civilization.
Hilst disjoins the sense of time to create a parable in tragicomic tone:
the portrait of Brazil as narrated through the voice of an academic, him-
self the representative of a (de)aestheticized class, which becomes the red
thread through the story of a people mistreated by the successive prob-
lems generated by the established powers—whipped as the nation is by
big business. For the Hilstian narrator, there is no salvation for Latinity,
which is plagued by sectarian Coronelism, by fatalism, and by the histori-
cal metanarratives of dramatic dialogues and metaliterary apparatuses.
The entire narrative in “Axelrod” exposes an act of violence, and Hilst
picks at the wound that’s masked by knowledge-power:
I smell like a man, I stand up straight, I am a man, I stumble, I am bent

over, face down, ready to be used, plundered, well-adjusted to my Latinity,
yes, I’m really bent over, the innumerable unending cosmic fornications in
all my Brazilianness, I am despised bent over, a thousand hard-ons in my
acosmic hole, giving it all, my rich interior depths, my soul, ah so com-
pliant Sr. Silva, so perfectly reasonable that you’re bending over, and in
the apparent thick belching, casting you aside, singing, the rich people
out there call you buttfucker, sir Silva Brazilian, sir Macho Silva, haha-
haha while you take it in the ass your women singing casting you aside,
what a huge cucumber, sir Silva in your crack, your poor joints breaking,
giving up your iron, your blood, hanging your head, groping your way,
half-blind, giving in, always giving in, you great Plundered, you big poor
plundered stud, face down, on all fours, multiplied by emptiness, by load-
ing docks, by multi-rationals, hungry maw, I exteriorize myself but I am
stuck to my History, it swallows me, I am swallowed by all chimeras.21
The Latin American writer must confront these ills. In the Hilstian narra-
tive, history tells us that as Latin Americans we are somehow compelled
to pursue the destinies of our own narratives, with no losses and no gains,
however difficult it may seem. The logical frameworks of sweet, mild,
uncompromised prose are nowhere to be found in Hilst’s ethico-liter-
ary-political project. The author seems to explain that following this path
demands that we should not be afraid of the journey, and that we should
not require a return: it is to enter dangerous territory, where the weapons
of consciousness prove useless and reason is pushed to its limits.
Hilst’s short theatrical text O Verdugo (The Executioner), 1969 is
exemplary in its use of this strategy of confronting the limits of reason.
The stream of consciousness has undoubtedly been a device (tékhne) of
aristocrats. (I use this term not in an economic sense, but in the orig-
inal Nietzschean usage meaning “the best.”) We must view Hilst’s fic-
tion as the necessary counterpoint to this understanding: not to deny
it, but rather as a call to focus our reflection on its hidden element, the
domestication of existence that is connected to every rhetoric of alterity.
At the very same time at which it begins to speak of the Other and of
the particular, history cannot escape the limits of translation. The act of
“making visible” is founded necessarily as a narrative presentation drafted
according to the judgment of those who weave the text of history: the
disorderly metanarrative in “Axelrod” and the monumental texts of
monumental history, in the Nietzschean sense of the word. For how
long will the aristocrats, the best, the genteel, the academy, bow before
such a Histor? The facts do not constitute Histor. Are facts—that narrow
region where we furtively delight: a hip, a breast, a gland—what shape
sequences? Forms? A carnival, a Wednesday, a histor(y) of love, a love
story? No. They are events whose stitching together is the task of our
biographies. Right? But the big story, the great Histor, etched in time by
the tip of the saber or the bayonet, it is always this: pain.
In a movement toward ruin, one might dare state that there are no
homosexuals under the dome of bureaucracy. Just as there are no blacks.
Uniforms are only ironed twills, whether from NATO or China. Militias
and commandos are movements of the lifeless: khaki lives. Among the
regular louts, the guy who just wants to gay bash, and the movement of
the khaki-souls.
We cannot repose the mind in decompositions of Proust, Hilst,
Mallarmé, Woolf, me, you, and so on. Hilst emphasizes the pleasure in
the ephemeral transit between the lewd, the lubricated, and the oiled. It
is the deconstruction of a récit doomed to failure: the canon closed to
the maudit. But this implies failure in the sense of “eternal transition”:
or as Idelber Avelar has described it, “Benjamin’s oxymoron that points
to the interlude in which history is suspended and contemplated in the
crystallization of its ruins. Nature here becomes an emblem of death and
decay, a way of relating a story that can no longer be seen as a positive
totality.”22 The Hilstian text would in this context be “an allegory, the
very aesthetic expression of despair.”23 Why?
In Avelar’s formulation, allegory would be the aesthetic face of polit-
ical defeat. This is something that occurs in Lima Barreto’s Triste fim de
Policarpo Quaresma (The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma, 1915), where
“ruins are the only raw material that allegory possesses at its disposal.”24
Quaresma’s defeat in relation to the Republic is a political defeat, much
as Hilst’s Axelrod Silva is a decadent figure. But the stuff of literature is
entirely crafted in ruins, giving the Hilstian allegory a horizon of pos-
sibility and a relevance in relation to the contemporary: “I exteriorize
myself but I am stuck to my History, it swallows me, I am swallowed by
all chimeras.” Hilst emphasizes images of petrified ruins in language, of
History on the ground floor, in its immanence, as the only possibility for
narrating defeat: “That filth of the world, Axelrod-executioner, so you
managed it, eh? […] You move not from yourself, you move not from
yourself, even if the train moves you move not …”25
José Castello draws our attention to the fact that:
Until the nineteenth century, the writer was a man who lived in eternal
covenant with failure. Baudelaire has long since been the symbol of this
cursed and misunderstood writer, who lived with money problems and was
seen as maladjusted, despised by his family and condemned to isolation
and disaster. Piglia says that today, on the contrary, the writer has become
the quintessential image of the successful man, although this representa-
tion is based more often than not on fantasy rather than fact. […] In this
new framework, success, and not a cursed existence, is the writer’s big
problem, since success forces him to repeat himself and impedes his failure,
whereas all literature worthy of the name is always built on the edge of the
abyss, and failure is its first condition of existence. […] By repeating insist-
ently that she is doomed by a curse, Hilda Hilst does nothing more, we
might say, than flee the problem of success and take refuge in the safer role
of ruin, a solution that may not bring immediate benefits, but brings her
literature closer to the shadows that point toward the future.26
Prof. Silva, her protagonist, is constructed according to his capture by

language: “What is my body’s language? What is my language? Language
for my body: a funeral for me, watered, fat, funeral of lilies and daisies,
someone repeating a useless cadence: sunflowers for the girl-woman.”27
Stamatius, Hilst’s alter ego in her later work Letters from a Seducer
(1991), thus describes his role as a writer:
Palomita, do you remember how you would dip my stick in your cup of
chocolate and soon afterward lick the bird? Ahh! your beautiful tongue! I
recall every sound, all the landscapes tones those afternoons… cicadas, the
black anus (cuculicod fowl from the cuculid family… my God!) and the
smells… jasmine-mango, lemon trees… and your movements smooth, pro-
longed, my movements frantic… Ahhhh! Marcel, if you remember, per-
ceived a whole universe with his madeleines… He must have sucked that
magnificent member of his driver, with madeleines and grandparents and
teas and all… Ah, irmanita, the mauve curtains, the silver jar, the golden
chrysanthemums, some petals on the mahogany table, you dissolved in my
half-closed eyes, your breath of chocolate and of… “fertilizing solution”
as your judge would say. I’ve been feeling like a dick of a writer, and when
this begins it never ends. What makes me think I probably might be one is
that whole perverted story involving father’s big toe. A creep of a writer.
The other day I told Tom the story of father’s big toe, as if it were another
guy’s story, not mine. You know what he said in response? “If any son of
mine had a fetish for sucking my big toe I’d sleep armed.” Ciao. Petite
showed up. She has fallen in love. A nuisance. I will continue shortly.28
Following the model of the eighteenth-century epistolary libertine novel

and submitting it to procedures such as the mise en abîme of the French
nouveau roman, Letters from a Seducer is the culmination of Hilst’s obscene
works, following O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby (Lori Lamby’s Pink
Notebook, 1990) and Contos d’escárnio, Textos grotescos (Tales of Derision,
Grotesque Texts; 1990), both in prose, and Bufólicas (Bufolics, 1993), in
verse. In these texts, pornography is considered dialectically, as the pub-
lishing industry’s injunction against the artistic freedom of the author, and
also as the creative imagination’s site of resistance against the prudery and
moralism of the culture industry and of conservative society. In them, Hilst
stitches language together to reveal banal and frivolous desires.
Moreover, Letters from a Seducer presents the poetic basis that
guides Hilst’s entire oeuvre, not just those works that are part of
the obscene series. It is a poetics comprised of characters lacking
well-defined stories, without clear individual biographies or psycho-
logical depth, but who unfold as the brief flights of a radically prob-
ing intelligence, which does not allow for the separation of thought
and existence. Letters from a Seducer is primarily a novel of living
concerns.
Continuing with the project of language mandalas is Tales of Derision:
Grotesque Texts, a compilation of notes and obscene sketches in which
the author hones her sardonicism:
Playhouse notation 0, no 2 Author: Baby Thick Skin

The She-Bear
I love her, Father
but she is a bear, Son.
you do not know how female bears are, Father.
Of course I know. I hunt them every day.
do not be cruel, Father.
very well, Son. Summon the she-bear.
She-bear!
(Father examining the she-bear) Well, my son? She is hairy, she
has a snout, she has paws (he looks at the teeth) she has bear teeth.
don’t you notice something different about her?
What, my son?
that.
that… what is that? Her tail?
the She-Bear’s thing, Father.
(thoughtful) The thing… Everything is a thing, son. And no one
knows what a thing is.
Shit, dad! The she-bear’s cunt.
Fuck! Why didn’t you say so?
We try not to be explicit, right, Father.
But what a mania people have for being vague.
Thing. Thing. Very well. And how’s the bear’s pussy?
It’s warm like a person’s. It’s as sweet as meringue.
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. And that means:
I am a man and nothing that is human is alien to me.
but she’s not a human, you idiot.
that’s what you think. Little bear, go make lunch (the bear swiftly
brings lunch).
Little bear, wash the clothes (the bear quickly brings the laundry).
Little bear, do some sweeping up (the bear sweeps madly).
(the father is very excited)
Son, ask her to do that thing to me. That thing I like.
how should I know what you like?
that thing, that thing.
baked bananas, turnips, sweet pumpkin… Cucumbers?
(the father, enthusiastic)
that! That!
but you never told me you liked cucumbers!
Oh, my heavens! You ass! I want to know if the bear knows how to
suck cock!
Does she?
why didn’t you just say so, Father? That… That… Well,
she sucks cock very well.
Oh son, let us marry her! Such a rare and singular a bear as this!
It will be good, Father. Thank you, Father.
It will be good, Son. Thank you, my Son.
(The positioning of the bear during the play to be determined by
the director)
Always on the edge of the abyss, Hilst’s narrative work wanders

through many genres and modalities, but remains anchored, as Alcir
Pécora explains in the introductory note to the author’s collected works.
With my Dog Eyes and Other Novellas (1986), may be understood as a
bridge between Hilst’s so-called “serious” and “obscene” work; it is situ-
ated between The Obscene Madame D (1982) and the novel Lori Lamby’s
Pink Notebook (1990).
In With my Dog Eyes and Other Novellas we find ourselves, finally,
before an absolutely mature author in full command of her writing
technique. As I have suggested, Hilst’s prose is poetic, in that it mixes
poetry, dialogues, and prose itself; this is evident in any fragment from
her prose work. Revisiting tested techniques, the author also multiplies
her narrators, creating ambiguous enunciators and tracing ghostly rela-
tionships between them, even positioning them as various alter egos. The
reader must be attentive, as the transition from one narrator to another
or between present and past is not indicated by any obvious literary prec-
edents. Instead, one must dismantle the text, phrase after phrase, teasing
out its enunciators. Mirrors of Brazil! Voices of Brazil! Literature is an
allegory of Brazil today, fucked as we are, Brazilian cultivators of cucum-
bers for our own use!
God? A surface of ice anchored to laughter. That was God. Even so he

tried to cling to that nothing, sliding frozen somersaults until finding the
anchor’s thick rope and descending descending in the direction of that
laughter. He touched himself. He was alive, yes. When the child asked
his mother: and the dog? The mother: the dog died. Then he threw
himself on a patch of earth curdled with squash, hugged himself against
one, a twisted cylinder with an ocher head, and choked out: died how?
died how? The father: woman, this boy’s a fool, get him off that squash.
He died. He fucked himself, said the father, just like that, he brought
the clenched fingers of his left hand down against he flattened palm of
his right and repeated: he fucked himself. This is how he learned of the
death. Amós Kéres, 48 years old, mathematician, stopped the car on top
of a small hill, opened the door, and got out. From there he could see the
University building. Whorehouse Church Government University. They all
looked alike. Whispers, confessions, vanity, speeches, vestments, obsceni-
ties, brotherhood. The dean: Professor Amós Kéres, certain rumors have
come to my attention. Okay. Care for a coffee? No. The dean takes off
his glasses. Gently chews one of their tips. Sure you don’t want a coffee?
No, thank you. Well, let’s see, I understand that pure mathematics avoids
the obvious, do you like Bertrand Russell, Professor Kéres? Yes. Well, you
know I’ve never forgotten a certain phrase in one of those magnificent
books. One of my books? Have you written a book, Professor? No. I refer
to the books of Bertrand Russell. Ah. And the phrase is: obviousness is
always the enemy of correctness. Of course. Well then, what I know about
your classes is that not only are they not at all obvious, they… excuse me,
Professor, hello hello, of course my love, obviously it’s me, I’m busy right
now, of course my dear, then take him to the dentist, I know I know…
Amós passed his tongue over his gums.29
In this caricature of a culturally obscene Brazil, Hilst does not spare a

particularly Brazilian brand of politics. She licks the Other’s gums, criti-
cizing above all the failures of the academic community and of its crite-
ria for canonization, our hypocritical sexuality, our environmental crisis.
In short, the author addresses Brazil’s most serious social problems in
an obscene and sardonic tone because she believes her literary work can
contribute by signaling the sociocultural-political obscenity. Hilst thus
exploits the delirium of a people: our greatest misery—ignorance—and
the legacy of more than 500 years of existence, with her aesthetic of the
social that deconstructs this sad and shameful world of ours, tying our
tongues.
Eliane Robert Moraes extols this value in Hilst’s work, which she calls
its “unusual poetic violence, unparalleled in Brazilian literature.”30 Her
essay confirms the continuing clash between the high and the low in
Hilst’s work, which has as its aesthetic and moral consequence a subver-
sion of more stagnant hierarchies, such as the subdivisions of genres and
distinctions between levels of discourse.31
Revisiting, then, The Obscene Madame D, we can say that:
From the derisory body to the work of art, from the work of art to the
realm of Ideas, there is a vast expansion to be undertaken by the dialectical
imagination. Hillé is entirely comprised of a technique of return, of pal-
impsest, of dislocation, of remission, disguise, and unfolding. The dialectic
of The Obscene Madame D is not a mere circulation of discourse, but rather
the transpositions and displacements of the Hilstian style, which have as
their results the representation of the same scene at different levels, accord-
ing to the returns and developments in the distribution of roles in the nar-
rative and the digressions of language.
It is quite true that the obscene wants, primarily, to push language to its
maximum limit by causing estrangement between the ‘limited human and
the amorphous, invisible, and elusive.’32
In Brazil, the great works of fiction dialogue on the edge of a blade, in

the anticanonical ruins of a country that actually lives in a state of excep-
tion, even while seeming or wanting to present itself, romantically, always
at the ground floor, democratic and revolutionary. In this way they sub-
vert our real Brazilianness, our magic Latinity, by fictionalizing them.
They subvert the canon, illuminating terrains of alterity and marginal
voices in Brazil. The chorus of the malditos and the collective library of
their texts suggest that we place the works of Hilda Hilst (in spite of
posthumous canonization) in the anticanon alongside those of Oscar
Wilde, Antonin Artaud, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Pedro Juan
Gutiérrez, Roberto Piva, and Maurice Dantec, among many others.
In Hilst’s work, fiction moves between the Brazilian literary tradition
reread by second-wave Brazilian modernism and intertextuality with authors
of the Western canon, thus undoubtedly performing a political (but not
engaged!) revolution in literature. Hilst employs a prose in which the fusion
of different genres articulates a mode of perception that ranges from the
low to the sublime, from the eschatological to the spiritual, from pleasure to
martyrdom, from mystical violence to rhetorical emphasis—always evoking
a grim awareness of the passage of time and the contingencies of life tragi-
cally linked to death—always working on the “borders of sense,” to borrow
a term from Eliane Robert Moraes.33 Hilst’s characters are thus immediately
included in our daily lives—and in the daily life of our fiction—clearly sign-
aling what we might understand as a sociocultural obscenity identified with
the media. This is the real obscenity, the author tells us, tearing our national
fantasy to shreds and bequeathing to us an echo chamber.
Translated by Ami Schiess.
Notes
1. Antonio Candido. et al. A crônica: o gênero, sua fixação e suas trans-
formações no Brasil. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 1992), 13–19.
Translator’s note: translations from the original Portuguese texts are my
own unless otherwise noted.
2. Carlos Madeiro, “País vive ‘retrocesso’ ao criminalizar protestos, diz represent-
ante da Anistia Internacional no Brasil,” UOL Notícias Cotidiano. September
10, 2013. Accessed September 13, 2013. http://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidi-
ano/ultimas-noticias/2013/09/10/pais-vive-retrocesso-ao-criminalizar-pro-
testos-diz-representante-da-anistia-internacional-no-brasil.htm.
3. Ibid.
4. Carlos Drummond de Andrade. “O frívolo cronista,” in: Boca de Luar
(Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1998), 199.
5. Antonio Candido et al. A crônica: o gênero, sua fixação e suas transfor-
mações no Brasil (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 1992), 13–19.
6. The poeta maldito (“cursed poet,” poète maudit in French), is a term used
to refer to poets who assume a countercultural lifestyle, often including
self-destructive habits such as drug use, to distance themselves from a
society that they view as alienating and restrictive to the individual by way
of its norms and mores. The concept also encompasses the myth of the
creative genius who finds an especially fertile terrain in the milieu charac-
terized by insanity, crime, violence, misery, and melancholy—one that fre-
quently results in early death or suicide. The rejection of norms also often
manifests in the refusal to subscribe to any institutionalized ideology.
Disobedience as moral conceit, as exemplified in the myth of Antigone, is
another characteristic of the poeta maldito. I consider the writing of Lima
Barreto and Hilda Hilst to be maldita.
7. Candido, A crônica, 13–19.
8. “In the contemporary lexicon, one word, perhaps more than any other,
has characterized the last three decades of neoliberal expansion.” City:
Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 16.5 (2012):
595–606.
9. These factors arguably also impact the reception of literary works. The
scant penetration of Lima Barreto and Hilda Hilst into the public con-
sciousness continues today with no measurable change, as one would
expect in a country with a limited reading public. However, their impor-
tance, particularly for critics, has undergone a significant change. In
contemporary society, one must remember, readers are trained to be
entertained by amenities, even futilities, imposing the values of exchange
in which the disposable, the practical, and the facile prevail.
10. For Bataille, “failure” is associated with a desire for transgression, with the
risk of the unknown, with the experience of not knowing. To fail as a risk,
as the search for new forms.
11. The trilogy also includes “Tadeu (da razão)” [Tadeu (of Reason)] and
“Matamoros (da fantasia)” [Matasmoros (of Fantasy)].
12. Hilda Hilst, Com os meus olhos de cão e outras novelas (São Paulo:
Brasiliense, 1986), 222.
13. “Verde-amarelo” means green-yellow, the colors of the Brazilian national
flag.
14. Hilst, Com os meus olhos de cão e outras novelas, 209.
15. Hilst, 1986, 224.
16. Weverson Dedalto, “Muros de linguagem em Rútilo Nada, de Hilda
Hilst,” Contexto 18 (2010): 132.
18. Ibid., 221.
19. Hilst, 1986, 210–211.
20. Hilda Hilst, interview by Leo Gibson Ribeiro, Jornal da Tarde. São Paulo,
March 15, 1980.
21. Hilst, 1986, 227
22. Idelber Avelar, Alegorias da derrota: A ficção pós-ditatorial e o trabalho do
luto na América Latina (Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG, 2003), 85.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 67.
26. José Castello, Inventário das sombras (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1999),
107–108.
27. Hilda Hilst, Rútilo Nada: A obscena Senhora D. Qadós (Campinas: Pontes,
1993), 130.
28. Hilda Hilst, Letters from a Seducer, trans. John Keene (Calicoon, NY:
Nightboat Books, 2014), 50.
29. Hilst, Com os meus olhos de cão, 13–14. With My Dog-Eyes, trans. Adam
Morris (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014).
30. Eliane Robert Moraes 1999, “Da medida estilhaçada,” in Hilda Hilst:
Cadernos de literatura brasileira, 8 ed. Antonio Fernando de Franceschi
(São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Sales, 1999), 118.
31. Ibid.
32. Deneval Siqueira Azevedo Filho. A bela, a fera e a santa sem saia – ensaios
sobre Hilda Hilst (Vitória: GM/PPGL/Ufes, 2007), 38–39. Cf. Leo
Gilson Ribeiro (1999), 88.
33. Moraes, “Da medida estilhaçada,” 180.
Author Biography
Deneval Siqueira Azevedo Filho holds a Bachelor’s degree in architecture
from USU and in Portuguese and English Literature from Uniflu (1985). He
earned his Masters and Doctorate in Literary Theory and History from IEL/
Unicamp (1999). He is Research Associate Professor at Nassau College, State
University of New York; Research Associate Professor at Fairfield University,
Connecticut; and Professor at the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo. His
work focuses on literary theory, Brazilian literature and culture, and the intersec-
tions between history and criticism. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Comparative
Literature and Cultural Studies at Harpur College of the Arts, State University of
New York at Binghamton (2001), and a postdoctoral fellow in Literature, Art,
and Culture at the Hispanic Research Center at Arizona State University. He is a
member of the Academia Campista de Letras. He is the author of Desarraigados
– ensaios (Uprootings: Essays, Edufes, 1995), De cantos, de fotografias, de (in)
vocação, do obsceno e dos palcos (On Song, Photography, (In)vocations, the
Obscene, and Stages, Edufes, 1999), Holocausto das Fadas – a trilogia obscena e
o carmelo bufólico de Hilda Hilst (Holocaust of the Fairies: The Obscene Trilogy
and Hilda Hilst’s Convent of Jest, Annablume/Edufes, 2002), Lira dos sete dedos
– a poética de Valdo Motta (Seven-Fingered Lyre: The Poetry of Valdo Motta,
2002), Anjos Cadentes – a poética de Bernadette Lyra (Falling Angels: The Poetry
of Bernadette Lyra, ACL, 2006), A bela, a fera e a santa sem saia – ensaios
sobre Hilda Hilst (Beauty, the Beast, and the Saint Without Her Skirt, PPGL/
UFES/Edgeites, 2007), Os bandidos na mesa do café (Bandits on the Coffee
Table, Edufes, 2012) Edited Masculinidades Excluídas (Excluded Masculinities,
Flor&Cultura, 2007), Bandid@s na pista – ensaios homoculturais (Bandits on
Cruising, 2008), A Multiplicidade das linguagens híbridas na ficção de Nuno
Ramos (Multiplicity of Hybrid Languages in the Fiction of Nuno Ramos, Arte &
Ciência, 2012), and Por um (im)possível (anti)cânone contemporâneo – literatura,
artes plásticas, cineme e música (Toward an (Im)possible Contemporary (Anti)
canon, Arte & Ciência, 2014).
When “the Life of Sentiments Is Extremely
Bourgeois”: Ideal Love and Nonconformism
in the Love Poems of Hilda Hilst
Alva Martínez Teixeiro
Fico perplexa como uma criança ao notar que mesmo no amor tem-se que ter bom
senso e senso de medida. Ah, a vida dos sentimentos é extremamente burguesa.
—Clarice Lispector1
Abstract  The common misconception in studies of Hilda Hilst is that

her work can be divided into two stages, the work before her foray into
“pornographic” aesthetics and the work that followed this supposed
pivot. Yet when read as a whole, Hilst’s poetic production reveals a
remarkable unity owing to the author’s sustained and consistent engage-
ment with erotic themes. This chapter explains the evolution of Hilst’s
poetic personae and the poet’s renovation of classical, Renaissance, and
modern tropes of love poetry, which she used to imbue her erotic poetry
with spiritual and philosophical significance.
A. M. Teixeiro (*) 
Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
e-mail: alvamteixeiro@campus.ul.pt

116 A. M. Teixeiro
Keywords  Hilda Hilst · Brazilian · Love · Erotic poetry
Apparently to some critics, the early work of Hilda Hilst’s prolific

and multiform production—poetry we conventionally classify as love
poetry or erotic love poetry—distinguishes itself from the rest of
Hilst’s literary production with complete clarity.2 The division is thus
affirmed by the journalist and researcher Cremilda de Araújo Medina:
“[Hilst’s] questioning did not abandon her and if, at first, she wrote
for love and exaltation, shortly thereafter she descended into the
depths of catharsis.”3
However, an attentive reading of this amorously inspired poetry
demonstrates that when viewed holistically, Hilst’s literary project is not
formed by symmetric and independent entities. Rather, it is a dynamic
collection based on integration, dialog, and intersections, as well as on
the deep exploration of certain fixed ideas, disquiets, and intuitions.
Thus, the difference between these two poetic moments resides with
their intensity and not exactly their poetic value, as Nelly Novaes Coelho
has already signaled.4
So by analyzing the diverse ways in which Hilst deploys amorous
discourse—that is, analyzing her rhetorical system and the stylistic par-
ticularities that form the prevailing network of signs that govern her par-
ticular semantic universe, one which places convention and transgression
in tension—we can establish, as I will do in the following pages, a tan-
gential approach to one of the most central functions of Hilst’s work:
her treatment of the complex literary universe of the character, or in this
specific case, the speaker in crisis. Questioning the meaning of life in vain,
the speaker finds that bereft of love and ideas, life itself often appears
void of meaning, much like the human condition.
Following Michaux’s concept of remuement, this chapter conse-
quently aims to interpret certain angles of Hilst’s extensive and singular
poetic production, establish the literary value of amorous thought, and
offer proof of the different critical, interrogative, and assertive values that
Hilst’s collected poetic work gradually acquires through its versatility. I
begin with the poetry commonly considered her “love poems.”
Throughout its diverse poetic itinerary, Hilst’s love poetry revolves
around the asymmetry of “I love but am not loved”—that is, unre-
quited, difficult, or impossible loves. They are poems voiced with a
WHEN “THE LIFE OF SENTIMENTS IS EXTREMELY BOURGEOIS” 117
particular understanding of love, at times inspired by forms and conven-

tions of love poems from across the poetic tradition, all in the quest for
enhanced expression and clarity.
Thus, and in parallel with the rhetorical and symbolic particularity
present in works such as Balada do festival (Festival Ballad, 1955) or
Cantares de perda e predileção (Songs of Loss and Predilection, 1983),
Hilst rewrites the very parameters of lived experience and amorous
reflection by recuperating historical referents. This is especially the case
in her books Trovas de muito amor para um amado senhor (Ballads of
Much Love for a Beloved Gentleman, 1960) and Júbilo, memória, novi-
ciado da paixão (Jubilation, Memory, an Apprenticeship in Passion,
1974). For example, she recuperates the medieval Galician-Portuguese
cantiga, or ballad, “with apparent simplicity” and uses “the fin’amor as
her backdrop,”5 as well as Renaissance forms such as “medida velha” and
particularly the Petrarchan “medida nova,” departing from the poetic
conceptions of Bernardim Ribeiro and Luís de Camões. At the same
time, certain compositions from Ode fragmentária (Fragmentary Ode,
1961) and other works demonstrate the influence of classical poetry on
Hilst’s project of representing and reshaping her understanding of love,
that is, the understanding of a subject who defines herself, significantly,
as the tripartite “Woman/Bard/Troubadour.”6
Between this innovative discursivity and its ad hoc poetic-ideological
appropriations, both modernizing and reminiscent, Hilst raises a poetic
voice and a poetic reality that are both different from and consistent
with a unique body of poems about the dialectic of the feminine erotic
and the idealization of feminine love, as well as the dialectic between the
physical world and the world of ideas. With respect to the first of these,
in his editor’s note preceding the collection of essays Por que ler Hilda
Hilst (Reasons to Read Hilda Hilst), Alcir Pécora describes that dialectic
as follows:
Her stylistic movement tends to the sublime, notwithstanding the con-

trasting traces of lowliness, and sets the bar of this desire for metaphysical
aspiration, which emulates the poetic models of erotic poetry a lo divino,
imitating the sixteenth-century mystical poetry of the Iberian peninsula, in
which the lover is taken as an analogy of a desire for transcendence.7
Amid this confusion of aesthetic surface, poetic forms, and influence,

a unity subordinates this apparent variability, as each composition is
118 A. M. Teixeiro
integrated into a unified, nonfragmentary context through Hilst’s use of

a series of constant elements. First among these, as already discussed, is
the asymmetry between the lover and the object of unrequited love—
we might describe this nonreciprocal category as a poetry of l’amur, a
Lacanian Witz in the sense that l’amour est un mur—as well as the iden-
tifying marks and particularities that are linked to or derived from this
unbalanced love.
The first of these is the presence of a woman as the lyrical subject of
this amorous poetry. Although this female figure at times corresponds
with one of the archetypes of the tradition, that of the cantiga de amigo
in the Peninsular lyric tradition (literally, “song of a friend”), she is an
emancipated lyric subject. Her voice is possessed of an admirable free-
dom of choice. For if at times she adopts a reverential, Petrarchan atti-
tude with respect to her beloved, she does not remain within the limits
of poetry standardized by the past, nor within present conventions. This
is demonstrated in Hilst’s process of ironic distancing from the figure of
the conventional, bourgeois lady in her poems—the commonsense lover
that Lispector remembers when she laments the “extremely bourgeois”
social expectations that govern women’s love lives.
This new woman does not love with exclusivity: Hilst opts for
modernizing the attitude of the Camõesian subject who sings to var-
ious beloveds, and converts her song into a “fascination of lovers and
friends.”8 As we shall see, this artistic practice transforms seduction into
transcendence.
Hilst seeks to reincarnate the lyric subject of the Rilkean myth of
the “great passionate,”9 the lover seduced by passion. Like Rilke, Hilst
is interested in seduction for its subtle feminine perspective and for the
song of the greatness of love found “in the glorious burning that swears
it will forever desire, for the rest of its existence, the Seduced.”10
This lineage of love arises from the impulses born of bodily parts, the
“vortex” (“voragem”)11 provoked by centripetal necessity—passive and
absorbent of desire, but also of suffering and despair—that surpasses
conventions, in a love song often based on the uncontrolled nature of
love: “It’s this hunger for you, this infinite love/A word that turns to
lava in my throat.”12
These are the instincts of flesh and disorderly appetites that partially
subjugate the lyric voice. And for this reason, carnality dominates a part
of the metaphoric system in compositions bestowed with great expressive

density. This source of Hilst’s symbolism, with its goal of exalting indi-
vidual values of poetry, allows unconventional physical elements, such as
flesh and nerves, to emerge: “Take me. Your mouth of linen across my
mouth/Austere. Take me NOW, BEFORE/Before the flesh dissolves
into blood.”13
This woman, emancipated with respect to amorous relations, is dar-
ing. But given the reference to her asymmetrical love, she is also very
fragile. Though audacious and irreverent, she remains an expectant sub-
ject, dependent on the other. And it is for this reason that she conceives
the poem as a lyrical explication of the mental universe of the self and of
feelings of suffering, martyrdom, and longing, extending Spiller’s vision
of the Sonnet as a “forensic instrument” (“instrumento forense”)14 to all
the other meters she uses in her love poems.
Thus, across her different compositions, the reader encounters a
considerable diversity of attitudes, from the lover’s self-denying dedi-
cation to a more imperative and firm posture. These stances reveal the
speaker to be in possession of a strong ethos, as in the first poems of
Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão, where she asks precisely whether
her friend would not prefer a “more peaceful friend,”15 less constant in
her amorous song, or, in a powerful amplification and multiplication of
emotional representations, a friend less vengeful than the attitude that
presides over many of Hilst’s poems.
Indeed, the attitudes of someone who feels offended or wounded find
their poetic target in the lover, the source of the second constant that
holds Hilst’s compositional unity together: “the appellative structure
that principally singles out the lover in an argumentative line in which we
preponderantly observe an exposition of the grievances provoked by the
unrequited love.”16
As it emerges, this antagonism, derived from the negation of love by
the beloved, evens out texts that are of a radically different nature in
terms of the various attitudes of the feminine lyrical subject that voices
them. While the place of the thesis is occupied by these different atti-
tudes of the lyric persona, the antithesis is always given by the “definition
of the elusive and indifferent lover.”17
The object of the song is an indifferent subject, characterized as
“frigid,” “elusive,” and “fugitive.”18 He is portrayed with a symbolism
120 A. M. Teixeiro
that underscores his disinterest, with ears that “were like holes in a
conch, / twisted / in the despair of not wanting to hear.”19
Nevertheless, in spite of the variety of its amorous object, Hilst’s
poetry proves itself to be more attentive to an analysis of the subject’s
interiority than to the enunciation and particularization of its objects.
Crucially, all their names signal a sort of void: they exist not far from illu-
sion, a mirage of duality.
The song of failed love is presented through recurring motifs that
allow the reader to admire the gradation and the complementarity
that characterize each of the poems in relation to the others: the lyric
subject affirms the condition of love understood as cruelty, deceit,
and pain, surmising that even her beloved’s attitude is a “radiance of
sadism.”20 These motifs are noticeable particularly in the tempestu-
ous and violent slant of Hilst’s poetry when it faces the impossibilia of
being possessed by the lover, as expressed in the Cantares de perda e
predileção.
Love can make a martyr of the subject. Such a love eliminates all the
lover’s strength and vitality, occasionally enlisting death as its ally. This
song of the relation between love and death is present from the very first
collection Hilst published, Presságio (Presage, 1950), and is articulated
partially around the absence of and the hope for the beloved. But this
alliance between love and death likewise resumes a topos that has been
developed since the time of troubadour poetry, dolce stil novo, in addition
to the Camõesian legacy.
Another possible unfolding of this tragic vision of love derives from
the extension of the image of love conceived as a Camõesian battle, but
now with an even more combative attitude, one distanced from the con-
ventions of love poems that require the poet to feel honored for being
conquered by his lady. This new posture is defended, to give just one
example, in the compositional form of “Quase bucólicas,” (“Nearly
bucolics”), which affirms that we are no longer in times of trumpets at
dawn but rather a time “Before, of bayonets at the walls.”21 But there
is no pretense or illusion that the poet’s end will be fatal, in spite of
the violent—and far from conventionally Camõesian—poetic song that
is present in Cantares de perda e predileção. To prevent her hands from
committing the final act, the poet advises her lover: “Let us wrap the
blades and mirrors / In thick folded wools. / And from prolonged dis-
grace, our resentment.”22
Thus, in spite of the fragility and precarity of this love, the lyric subject
decides to postpone any fatal conclusion, whether this be the death of the
beloved or the assumed impossibility of the amorous relation. This is why,
in opposition to lived experiences and memories of actual loves, a third
time frame emerges: the future. It causes the song to acquire a pejorative
tone, enunciating an imagined happiness that, illusorily, the poetic voice
wishes to actualize. Thus comforted by this illusion of plenitude, Hilst
complicates this new perspective of love that arrives at desire, paradoxi-
cally, in the absence of requited love. To make eternal the pleasure of hop-
ing, she yearns for the continuity of the absence, the immobility of this
new universe, fundamentally verbal and founded on illusion. She for this
reason asks Dionísio (Dionysus)—one of the names that, in accordance
with classical conventions, are used to conceal the name of her beloved—
that he not come to her: “Because it’s better to dream of your rough-
ness / And taste reconquest every night / Thinking: yes, tomorrow he
will come.” So she instead spends her nights preparing “Aroma and body.
And a verse each night / Fashioning itself from your wise absence.”23
Likewise, the lover finds a second solution for her irresolution in
the speculative and undefined sublimation of a love-fiction that is con-
cerned with the grandiose construction of a Platonic ideal of love, and
not simply with its baleful practice. In this sense, Hilst approaches the
Camõesian stylistic influence—and the tension between spirituality and
carnality practiced by the author of Os Lusíadas. This line has also been
explored by other Brazilian poets, much as Vinícius de Moraes had done
in his “Soneto de fidelidade” (“Sonnet to Fidelity”).
In any case, the profound contradictions expressed by the poetic
persona by way of the various experiences of love mentioned here cre-
ate tension between fascination with love as an ideal, the deceptions of
love as a feeling, and the tenacious attraction of carnal love. These con-
tradictions lead to a tragic conception of love, but one that lends itself
to a tragic vision of the world and of the dominant mode of existence
expressed in Hilst’s work.
In Hilst’s poetry, a confrontation with the deceptive reality of love
inspires a “code of conduct” when facing failure, as well as a complex,
rich, and often paradoxical symbolic and rhetorical system based on dis-
content, dissatisfaction, and contumacious steadfastness—and therefore,
a fragile firmness—that are perfectly suited to the song of the fraught
religious search conducted by the lyric subject. As Eliane Cristina Cintra
has signaled, “This desire, which is the lack of all desires, seeks out
122 A. M. Teixeiro
corporeality in the poetic word. Poetry thus becomes the place of Desire,
a space frequented by sensorial and sensual images that are disturbed by
the Other—the unattainable, the ineffable.”24
The dialectic and the rhetoric of love allow the poet to establish a
terrible parallelism between the silence of her lover and the silence of
another subject, one even more sought-out and distant in Hilst’s work.
This is God, an absent or silent figure in her afflictive spirituality. God
dominates, almost absolutely, many of the characters and voices that are
present in her writing. These beings reach, at a certain moment in their
lives, a place where there are no more answers and, although many of
them are aided by some type of revelation, others never attain the sec-
ond stage, helplessly remaining in oscillation between their intuition of a
theory of the absolute and their fear of the void, that shapeless abyss that
envelops them with its impossibility of being known.
In keeping with this almost unbearable spiritual tension, the lyric
voice is dominated, in this line of Hilst’s poetry, by a direct feeling of
God, what Miguel de Unamuno called “a feeling of hunger for God,
of a lack of God.”25 The subject cannot exist without God, but think-
ing about God is for the subject an act of composing a discourse of
absence.26 This is because the absent referent, withdrawn or even inex-
istent, deprives the subject of any correspondence. The poet writes, “I’m
alone if I think that you exist. / […] / And equally alone if you don’t
exist.”27
Thus, man’s only truth, in the sense of failure that Bataille describes
in the relationship between God and the human being, is to be a sup-
plication without response, inhabiting the most absolute moral solitude.
Ignored by uncertain skies, the subject experiences a radicalization of her
anguish, provoked by her consciousness of the contingency and incoher-
ence of passions at times human, at others divine.
Thus, with the intuition to seek intimacy with the divine, this poetry
recuperates and deploys the hallmarks of an interrupted poetic tradi-
tion that is nevertheless of great importance in Iberian poetry and later,
Ibero-American poetry: the mystic’s fascinated opening into the territory
of love, in search of a correspondence that departs from a spirituality per-
ceived on the plane of affect. The lyric voice is therefore situated in a
position of amorous devotion that is familiar to her:
Finding ourselves before a desire that is articulated as a love that

ascends, by degree, toward the Platonic level of the Good and toward
transcendental knowledge, the subject adopts her own imaginary lexicon

of courtly love, in order to use it to better transmit, by means of metaphor,
the anxiety, the desire for communion and for penetrating into sacred ter-
ritory, and with this achieved, force the indifferent “lover” to feel.28
From this point, the exposition of paradoxical feeling provoked by the

lover’s experience of unilateral affect can develop, as is typical in love
poetry, a flexible posture. Once more, veneration and devoted and hope-
ful confession all inhere within a more impetuous posture.
In Hilst’s poetry, the focus on relationships with an elusive divinity
likely has its origin in the decade of the 1960s. In that period her work
experienced an awakening of an “earthly consciousness that has its roots
in Rilke’s existential mysticism and in the enslaving feeling of the world
expressed by Kazantzakis.”29 The latter’s thought determined Hilst’s
poetic opening to the theory that God requires man to preserve his exist-
ence. This theory is manifested, for example, by the firm lyric voice in
the Trajetória poética do ser 1963–1966 (The Poetic Trajectory of Being,
1963–1966), from Poemas malditos, gozosos e devotos (Damned, Joyful,
and Devout Poems, 1984), where Poem XVII opens with the following
apostrophe: “I think you grow / When I think. And I say without cere-
mony / That you live because I think.”30 This thesis is even more appar-
ent in the collection Sobre a tua grande face (Upon Your Great Visage,
1986).
Amid this iconoclastic and experimental exercise in subversion,
decomposition, and reconstruction of aesthetic experience through the
lover’s lyricism, attention is able to displace itself from emotions to des-
perate desire, allowing the poet’s discourse to resume the erotic dimen-
sion of love poetry, now placed at the service of the erotic possibilities
of religious fervor. Ever since classical Greek literature, these possibilities
are present in the relations between poetry and mysticism with respect to
the forbidden access to the divine, as Hilst relates in her story “Qadós”:
and Qadós’s beak plunges in, pure eschatology is what you give to those
who seek you and it must be repeated how Teresa Cepeda y Ahumada,
who saw you as a man and she as woman, saved herself for you: you have
few friends, my lord.31
Such matters have nothing to do, however, with choice. As Alcir Pécora
suggests in the introduction to the Poemas malditos, the way of the
124 A. M. Teixeiro
body is the only knowledge that remains: “that of ‘the woman who only
knows man.’ And if male sexuality is the path she is condemned to take
on her search for God, nothing on it can be translated as a lascivious act
independent from the search for transcendence.”32
This recuperation of the mystic connection between puritanism and
its apparent opposite, libertinism, is present, for example, in Sobre a
tua grande face, where the subject affirms: “Whatever happens, I must
tell you you’re DESIRED, / Without hesitation, shame, or timidities.
Because it’s better to show / Insolence in verse, than to lie with cer-
tainty”.33 Likewise, at a higher level of induction, the Hilstian subject of
Poemas malditos, gozosos e devotos hopes to strip God, capture him, and
conquer his body. The speaker thus presents herself as a temptress-like
subject, always seeking a way to stimulate the “lavas of desire.”34
Nevertheless, this attempt is revealed to be impossible, which means
that occasionally, the subject seeks alleviation in the conventions of the
lover’s praxis to which she had appealed for assistance: “If I win you, my
God, will my soul empty out? / If it happens to me with men, why not
with God?”35
The motive for this new failure resides in the fact that, as we know,
mystic experience, aside from being intuitive, is passive and infused.
As with the love poems, then, the insistence and vigor of the beloved
is shown to be sterile, as the lyric voice finally affirms that she contin-
ues “vast and inflexible,” “Desiring a passing desire / Of an irate and
obsessive Hunger.”36 From this doubly failed experience, on the planes
of earthly and divine love, she infers a radical conclusion: for this Hilstian
lyrical voice, incapable of silence or forgetting the “incorporeal” desire
that tantalizes her,37 whether from the religious or profane source of her
song, there is only one corresponded love. This is a love fit for a noncon-
forming, lucid, transgressive, and tormented subject: as we will see, this
is the love of death.
The essential lack analysed in the preceding pages concentrates and
irradiates the lines of meaning in a large number of Hilst’s texts. We
obviously find ourselves before a literature dominated by a catastrophic
condition, frequently oriented toward fundamental metaphysical ques-
tions explored in the writer’s work: the uselessness and absurdity of
lives with no spiritual comfort, through either love or religion, aban-
doned to transitory existence, preparing themselves for death, at every
moment anticipating the “Death-Time” that “comes with its thin
blade.”38
However, this impious consciousness of fleetingness and deception,

allied with the frustration provoked by various experiences of failed love,
nevertheless ends up guiding the lyric voice—guiding her, as we saw,
through the ethic imperative to refuse to deny the deceptions of life,
in pursuit of the consolation of accepting the only guaranteed alliance,
which until then she had agonically refused: the final tryst with death.
In this way, the unbearable lightness of the duration of life—
expressed, for example, either by humor in Hilst’s stories, by tragedy in
the prose she wrote in the 1970s and 1980s, or by the dramatic dialec-
tic of love on display in Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão—becomes
a placid ascension thanks to the full acceptance of her final destiny, of
which the author offered a new interpretation in her work Da morte.
Odes mínimas (On Death. Minimal Odes, 1980).
Here once more is the power of the lover’s discourse: transgressive
power, but also a power that is emboldening and animating with its ide-
alizing dimension. In the first place, by setting profane and divine love in
opposition, the loving death song can be interpreted as a transgression, a
revolt on the part of this desperate subject. But in fact, it surpasses mere
iconoclastic protest. In this collection of poems, one of the most serious,
pondered, and misapprehended problems in Hilst poetry is considered
from an original and unexpected perspective. The unknown, the fear and
uncertainty that surround death, are substituted by a positive approach
that derives from the idealizing power of the lover’s understanding. The
lyric voice displaces those questions without definite response regarding
Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country” in favor of the speaker’s apprecia-
tion of the only proven, safe, and unquestionable truth of existence: “A
poet and his death / Are alive and one / In the world of men.”39
All this suggests the subject’s interest in death. The speaker experi-
ences another way of relating to omnipresent death, one centered in
affect and which articulates its imagination of death with an interesting
turn toward the territory of love and of anticipated encounter, this time
much more certain to occur.
No longer comforted by the illusions of plenitude found in mystic and
love poetry, but rather by this other certainty, Hilst eternalizes the pleas-
ure of waiting through a sensual and erotic imaginary. She uses these
images to transmit, through metaphor, her role, which although passive
is now more favorable than before. She enjoys, for the first time, an inex-
orable alliance:
126 A. M. Teixeiro
Millennia ago I knew you

And I never know you.
We, consorts of time
Beloved death
I kiss your flank
Your teeth
I walk with your fate paced
I mount you. I try.40
In this assumed intimacy with death, the theme of memento mori

advances toward imago mortis, the imagined figuration of death, as
designated by terms like “negra cavalinha,”—the little black horse she
addresses in poem XXVIII. This is a poetic exercise that transmits the
feeling of waiting for someone who will certainly fulfill the moment of
encounter and yearned-for epiphany found in mystic and love poetry:
“Turgid-minimal / How will you come, my death?”41
This is the poet’s less conventional vision of death, one that paradoxi-
cally brings the speaker closer to the lyric mode. As Michael Hamburger
has affirmed, “lyrical poetry, by its very nature, has always been less con-
cerned with continuous, historical or epochal time, with chronos, than
with kairos.”42
Finally, thanks to love, this lyric subject, who has fed herself on a radi-
cal lack, finds an unexpected fusion of plentitude after arriving at the end
of her vital and poetic paths. This fusion is not only individual; it is also
an artistic encounter with a healthy irrationalism, a mythopoetic state
that contemporary man has abandoned in the name of progress. Thomas
Love Peacock expresses this idea in his brief and provocative essay Four
Ages of Poetry (1820), in an eloquent and elucidating way. With respect
to the applicability of his ideas to the Hilstian lover’s discourse, we might
summarize Peacock as saying that the poet today is a semisavage within a
civilized community.
The figure of a poet who arises as Hilst’s own projected silhouette
is everywhere in her work. This figure is possessed of a universalizing
tenor and, because it is an idealization, characteristics more vague than
those of an alter-ego. It moves beyond a second-person aphasia of the
“we,” as demonstrated by an annotation on page 6 of the unpublished
“Notebook 3.4” titled “Mythology,”43 where the author underscores the
“sacred task not only of lived experience, which is shared by all,” but that
of the “priest, the artist.”44
This poet and this sacred task are those that, between the quête and
the enquête, we can clearly identify in Hilst’s varied amorous discourse,
which, thanks to what Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda has called “savage
sensibility” (“sensibilidade selvagem”),45 allows us to introduce a signifi-
cant and perturbing set of intuitions with respect to the cruelty, precari-
ousness, and absurdity of the human existence. Hilst implicitly generates
an entire literary corpus and vision from the dark and abysmal reality sur-
rounding man’s “alienated” nature.
This is not simply the case with respect to the compositions that
express a certain irony that reveals the various indices for the profound
disconnect between ideas, like that of love, and social experience—and
here we would do well to recall, in this sense, the references in this love
poetry to a bourgeois man who is constantly occupied by his banal exist-
ence. It is also the case, in a much more essential way, when it comes
to the critical will that remains preoccupied with the human condition—
with the blindness of modern society, with its inability to perceive the
true problems of man satisfied in his own superficiality—centered now
on the concepts of dereliction, time, and finitude.
The poet Hilda Hilst is a “semibarbarian” and “near-outsider” who,
in spite of contemporary cynicism, still sings and aspires to ideal love
with indocility and audacity. From the center of human social space, she
embraces, through transgressive feelings of love, the true meaning of
human incarnation, vehemently denied by the asepsis that presides over
contemporary logic, and even by a supposedly iconoclastic erotic-love
discourse now rendered banal: to be not only beings of flesh, but also of
spirit and mortality.
Translated by Adam Morris.
Notes
1. This essay takes its title from a 1968 column in the Jornal do Brasil, col-
lected in Clarice Lispector, A descoberta do mundo. Rio de Janeiro: Nova
Fronteira, 1984.
2. See also Eliane Robert Moraes’s Chapter “Figurations of Eros in Hilda
Hilst” in this book.
3. “As interrogações não a deixam e se, no começo, fez literatura para
o amor e a exaltação, pouco depois desceu às profundezas da catarse.”
Cremilda de Araújo Medina, A posse da terra – Escritor brasileiro hoje
128 A. M. Teixeiro
(Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda/Secretaria do Estado de São

Paulo, 1985), 240.
4. Nelly Novaes Coelho, “Da poesia,” Cadernos de literatura brasileira 8
(1999), 73.
5. Carlos Paulo Martínez Pereiro, “Mudam-s’os tempos e muda-s’o al – A
varia actualización da poesía trobadoresca no Brasil e na Galiza,” in
Cantigas trovadorescas – Da Idade Média aos nossos dias, ed. Graça
Videira Lopes and Manuele Masino (Lisboa: IEM-UNL/Textus, 2014),
108–109.
6. “Mulher/Vate/Trovador.” Hilda Hilst, Exercícios (São Paulo: Editora
Globo, 2002), 178.
7. “O seu movimento estilístico, que tende ao sublime, ainda que contra-
posto a traços de rebaixamento, estabelece as balizas de um desejo de
aspiração metafísica, que emula modelos poéticos de erotismo a lo divino,
à imitação da poesia mística seiscentista da península ibérica, nas quais o
amante é tomado como análogo de um desejo de transcendência.” Alcir
Pécora, “Nota do organizador,” in Por que ler Hilda Hilst (São Paulo:
8. “fascinação de amantes e amigos.” Hilda Hilst, Júbilo, memória, noviciado
da paixão (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2003), 126.
9. Fidel Vidal, Arte na esquizofrenia e outros excesos (Santiago de
Compostela: Laiovento, 2008), 40.
10. “está na ardencia gloriosa que xa para sempre vai devecer, durante todo o
resto da súa existencia, á Seducida.” Ibid.
11. Hilst, Júbilo, memória, 52.
12. “É essa fome de ti, esse amor infinito/Palavra que se faz lava na gar-
ganta.” Hilst, Júbilo, memória, 43.
13. “Toma–me. A tua boca de linho sobre a minha boca/Austera. Toma-me
AGORA, ANTES/Antes que a carnadura se desfaça em sangue […].”
14. Maria Micaela Dias Pereira Ramon Moreira, Os sonetos amorosos de
Camões—Estudo tipológico (Braga: Centro de Estudos Humanísticos/
Universidade do Minho, 1998), 27.
15. “amiga mais pacífica.” Hilst, Júbilo, memória, 22.
16. “la estructura apelativa que elige principalmente al amante en una línea
argumentativa en la cual observamos, de modo preponderante, una
exposición de los agravios provocados por el amor no correspondido.”
Alva Martínez Teixeiro, “La actualización de la concepción amorosa tar-
domedieval y renacentista portuguesa en la poesía de Hilda Hilst,” in
Diálogos Ibéricos e Iberoamericanos. Actas del VI Congreso Internacional de
ALEPH (Lisboa: ALEPH/CEC-UL/AEH, 2010), 644.
17. “definição do amado esquivo e indiferente.” Pécora, Alcir,“Nota do
organizador,” in Hilda Hilst, Júbilo, memória, noviciado da paixão (São
Paulo: Editora Globo, 2003), 12.
18. “frígido, esquivo”; “fugitivo.” Hilst, Júbilo, memória, 86.

19. “eram buracos de concha, /retorcidos/no desespero de não querer
ouvir.” Hilda Hilst, Baladas (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2003a), 28.
20. “brilhos do teu sadismo.” Hilda Hilst, Cantares (São Paulo: Editora
Globo, 2002), 79.
21. “Antes, da baioneta nas muradas.” Hilst, Exercícios, 126.
22. “Envolveremos as facas e os espelhos/Nas lãs dobradas, grossas. /E de
alongadas nódoas, o ressentimento.” Hilst, Cantares, 44.
23. “Porque é melhor sonhar tua rudeza/E sorver reconquista a cada noite/
Pensando: amanhã sim, virá”; “Aroma e corpo. E o verso a cada noite/Se
fazendo de tua sábia ausência.” Hilst, Júbilo, memória, 59.
24. “Esse desejo, que é falta como todos os desejos, busca na palavra poética
sua corporeidade. A poesia torna-se, assim, o lugar do Desejo, espaço
freqüentado por imagens sensoriais e sensuais que se inquietam pelo
Outro – o inalcançável, o inefável.” Eliane Cristina Cintra, “A poética
do desejo,” in Roteiro poético de Hilda Hilst, ed. Eliane Cristina Cintra
and Enivalda Nunes Freitas Souza (Uberlândia: Editora da Universidade
Federal de Uberlândia, 2009), 43.
25. “un sentimiento de hambre de Dios, de carencia de Dios.” Miguel de
Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1939), 142.
26. Alcir Pécora, “Nota do organizador,” in Hilda Hilst, Poemas malditos,
gozosos e devotos (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2005), 12.
27. “Estou sozinha se penso que tu existes. /[…]/E igualmente sozinha se
tu não existes.” Hilda Hilst, Poemas malditos, gozosos e devotos (São Paulo:
28. “Ao estarmos perante um desejo que se articula como um amor ascen-
sional ao modo platónico, de degraus para o Bem e para o conheci-
mento transcendente, o sujeito adopta uma imagética própria do amor
cortês, para com ela melhor transmitir, por meio da metáfora, o anseio,
o desejo de comunhão e de penetrar no território do sagrado e, com esta
demanda, sensibilizar o ‘amado’ indiferente.” Alva Martinez Teixeiro,
“Além dos limites do pensamento – A experiência mística na escrita de
Hilda Hilst,” Fólio. Revista de letras 3, no. 2 (2011), 33.
29. “consciência terrestre que tem nas raízes o misticismo existencial de Rilke
e o avassalante sentimento do mundo de Kazantzakis.” Coelho, “Da poe-
sia,” 71.
30. “Penso que tu mesmo creces/Quando te penso. E digo sem cerimônias/
Que vives porque te penso.” Hilst, Poemas malditos, 53.
31. “e o bico de Qadós vai afundando, pura escatologia é o que dás àqueles
que te buscam e deve repetir como dona Tereza Cepeda y Ahumada que
te via homem e ela mulher e porisso contigo conversava: tens tão poucos
amigos, meu senhor.” Hilda Hilst, Ficções (São Paulo: Quíron, 1977), 97.
130 A. M. Teixeiro
32. “o da ‘mulher que só sabe o homem’. E se a sexualidade do homem é a

via que está condenada a trilhar em sua busca de Deus, nada aí se tra-
duz como lascívia autonomizada de sua busca de transcendência.” Alcir
Pécora, “Nota do organizador,” in Hilda Hilst, Poemas malditos, gozosos e
devotos (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2005), 10–11.
33. “O que me vem, devo dizer-te DESEJADO, /Sem recuo, pejo ou timi-
dezes. Porque é mais certo mostrar/Insolência no verso, do que mentir
decerto.” Hilda Hilst, Do desejo (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2004), 112.
34. “lavas do desejo.” Hilst, Poemas malditos, 45.
35. “Se te ganhase, meu Deus, minh’alma se esvaziaria?/Se a mim me aconte-
ceu com os homens, por que não com Deus?” Ibid.
36. “vasta e inflexível”, “Desejando um desejo vizinhante/De uma Fome
irada e obsessiva.” Hilst, Do desejo, 22.
37. Ibid., 26.
38. “Tempo-Morte”; Ibid., 72: “passa com a sua fina faca.” Hilda Hilst, Da
morte. Odes mínimas (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2003), 74.
39. “Um poeta e sua morte/Estão vivos e unidos/No mundo dos homens.”
Hilst, Da morte, 66.
40. “Há milênios te sei/E nunca te conheço. /Nós, consortes do tempo/
Amada morte/Beijo-te o flanco/Os dentes/Caminho cadente a tua sorte/
A minha. Te cavalgo. Tento.” Ibid., 31.
41. “Túrgida-mínima/Como virás, morte minha?” Ibid., 33.
42. Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry—Tensions in Modern Poetry from
Baudelaire to the 1960s (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), 65.
43. Hilda Hilst, “Mitologia.” Caderno 3.4. Manuscript. Box 3 of the Hilda
Hilst Archive at the Centro de Documentação Alexandre Eulálio
(CEDAE) at the Universidade de Campinas (SP).
44. “tarefa sacral não só vivencial como o comum das pessoas”; “sacerdote o
artista [sic].”
45. Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, “Ensaio introdutório,” in AA.VV.:
Puentes/Pontes – Antología bilingüe/Antologia bilíngüe (Buenos Aires:
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003), 285.
Author Biography
Alva Martínez Teixeiro (b. A Coruña, Galicia, Spain, 1982), holds a doctorate
in Brazilian literature from the Universidade da Coruña (2010); her thesis was
titled A obra literária de Hilda Hilst e a categoria do obsceno: o erótico-pornográf-
ico, o social e o espirtitual (“The Literary Work of Hilda Hilst and the Category
of the Obscene: The Erotic-Pornographic, the Social, and the Spiritual”) and
was awarded Prémio Extraordinário. She is professor of Brazilian Literature and
Culture at the University of Lisbon. She researches Brazilian literature as well
as Galician and Portuguese literature, including a focus on interartistic con-

temporary works, especially between art and literature. She is the author of
Maktub – Da retórica na ficção de Raduan Nassar (Maktub: On Rhetoric in the
Fiction of Raduan Nassar, 2006), A pretensa nostalxia da autoridade – Unha
interpretación parcelar d’O porco de pé de Vicente Risco (The Alleged Nostalgia
of Authority: Notes Toward an Interpretation of Vicente Risco’s The Standing
Pig; Ramón Piñero Prize, 2007), O herói incómodo – Utopia e pessimismo no
teatro de Hilda Hilst (The Uncomfortable Hero: Utopia and Pessimism in the
Theater of Hilda Hilst, 2009), and Nenhum vestígio de impureza – Da necessi-
dade estética na ética e na poética de Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (No
Trace of Impurity: On Aesthetic Necessity in the Ethics and Poetry of Sophia
de Mello Breyner Andresen, 2013). With Dirk-Michael Hennrich and Giancarlo
de Aguiar, she edited the collection Vicente e Dora Ferreira da Silva – Uma
vocação poético-filosófica (Vicente e Dora Ferreira da Silva: A Poetic-Philosphical
Vocation, 2015). In 2014, her essay “A linha de sombra de uma suspeita lição
de zoologia – Do animal e do humano na narrativa de Lygia Fagundes Telles”
(“The Shadow Line of a Suspect Lesson in Zoology: On the Animal and the
Human in the Narrative Work of Lygia Fagundes Telles”) received the Itamaraty
Prize at the Fourth International Monograph Contest of the Brazilian Ministry
of External Relations.
PART IV
Hilst in Translation
Translating Brazil’s Marquise de Sade
John Keene
I do not wish to undermine the dexterity of my translators—I have heard they are
competent—it is that the things I am trying to say are internal.
– Renee Gladman, The Ravickians
Life? An obscene adventure of great lucidity.

– Hilda Hilst, The Obscene Madame D
Abstract  Hilda Hilst’s “obscene tetralogy” is a meditation on the work

of mediation between the divine and the terrestrial that literature is
tasked with performing. The intrusion of market-based considerations
into the office of the writer, she believed, had corrupted this duty. This
deeply frustrated Hilst, who satirized this bastardization of the craft. In
Letters from a Seducer, Hilst plays with the pornographic, as a mode, as
a discourse, and as a register. This chapter explores the poetic and dis-
cursive effects of this play, which in classic Hilstian fashion combines the
sacred with the profane, beauty with abjection, and truth with deceit.
J. Keene (*) 
Rutgers University, Newark, US
e-mail: johnkeene@earthlink.net

136 J. Keene
Keywords  Translation · Language · Idiom · Brazil · Literature Women’s

writing · Sexuality · Pornography
The Anarchist of Genres

When Hilda Hilst, born Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst, died in 2004 in
Campinas, Brazil, she was not unknown to readers and critics in Brazil,
or even overseas. The 73-year-old author, one of her country’s and Latin
America’s most significant and innovative writers, had published 41 vol-
umes of poetry, plays, fiction, and anthologized collections. In addition,
she received numerous literary prizes for her work, including several
important awards—among them the Jabuti Prize, one of Brazil’s most
distinguished literary honors, given in a range of categories, as well as
several awards from the Association of Brazilian Art Critics, in poetry
and fiction. Her work also had been translated into French, Spanish,
Italian, German, and to a very limited degree, English. Perhaps an even
greater testimony to her importance, at least in Brazil, was that in 2001,
Globo Editora, the publishing arm of the Brazilian media conglomer-
ate, decided to purchase the rights to and reissue nearly all of her work,
much of which had appeared under the aegis of small, independent pub-
lishers—some featuring illustrations by artists who were friends of hers.
Yet it is also fair to say that while her death merited attention, it was
more likely in conjunction with the notoriety that had attended her work
and life for three decades, but which attached specifically to a quartet
of works published toward of the end of her life, known as the “por-
nographic tetralogy.” These comprised two works of fiction published in
1990, O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby (Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook) and
Contos d’escárnio: Textos grotescos (Tales of Mockery: Grotesque Texts);
the novel Cartas de um sedutor (Letters from a Seducer) in 1991; and
the final text, Bufólicas (Bufolics), a collection of profane poems, in
1992. As Alcir Pécora, who would edit her collection for Globo Editora,
put it, “Although the author had achieved great personal notoriety, on
account of an uncommon intelligence, an exuberant temperament, and
a readiness of spirit capable of surprising the agendas of interviewers, it
seems fair to me to repeat here what she herself said, complaining: her
work, of a rare breadth and variety, still is largely unknown.”1
Hilst’s main obituary in the Folha de São Paulo, the major newspaper
of Brazil’s largest and most important city, as well as its literary capital,
TRANSLATING BRAZIL’S MARQUISE DE SADE 137
specifically singles out O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby for its “teor por-
nográfico” (“pornographic tenor”).2 A second article on the author
published in the same paper in conjunction with her death, and titled
“Poetry of Hilda Hilst inspired scholars and popular composers,” gives
a few biographical details about her, and lists a few of her books of
poetry and fiction. This article expounds again only on O caderno rosa,
which it states in echo of the phrase from the other article, “cause[d]
astonishment among critics for its pornographic tenor,” also noting that
Bufólicas was a book of “pornographic poetry.”3 In a third Folha de São
Paulo obituary article that included commentaries by leading Brazilian
writers and critics, including her close friend, the acclaimed writer
Lygia Fagundes Telles, the blurbs praise her as a person and author,
but perhaps most apt is what the writer and screenwriter Marçal Aquino
observes: “Hilda Hilst is one of those cases of a writer whose work is not
recognized. And where it is known it is recognized. Her works are there
for Brazil to get to know.”4
It was this lack of recognition, in part, that led Hilst to shift into the
literary mode that begins with O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby. As Luisa
Destri and Cristiano Diniz note, Hilst viewed the changes in her work
as a means to reach a larger audience beyond the fairly small but atten-
tive following she had been gathering since her earliest publications in
the 1950s—a cult-like following she playfully labeled a “species of the
KGB.”5 Around the same time she began publishing the tetralogy, she
also contracted to write a weekly entry for the Correio Popular, in the
mass media form of the crônica—a genre much akin to today’s blog
commentaries. Crônicas treat a range of subjects and are informal, writ-
ten in any style or form. It was a genre notably pursued as well by her
literary predecessor Clarice Lispector in the 1970s.6 With both O cad-
erno and her crônica pieces, which ran from 1992 to 1995, Hilst sparked
public controversy that would linger after her death, and color not just
popular understanding of her work, but a great deal of critical interpre-
tation of her entire oeuvre as well. Yet, it was not just a succès de scandale
that Hilst hoped to provoke. As Destri and Diniz point out
Anchored in the formulations of D. H. Lawrence with respect to obscene

literature—only through texts that provoked shock could it be possi-
ble to knock out the lies that sustain society—she justified the publica-
tion of O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby through her desire to “wake up the
reader.” She hoped, in creating a scandal, to shake him, make him gain
138 J. Keene
consciousness, remove him from the latent state of his petit-bourgeois life,
obediently inserted in the most conventional patterns.7
The shift derived not only from a desire to reach readers, but also trans-
form them: “I thought that I could not leave the person sleeping; I
needed to shake up everything and all frivolity, the futility of every day.”8
In a simple formulation she used that took on great resonance as critics
modified it, sometimes negatively and dismissively, she said of herself and
her work from this period, “A santa tirou a saia,” or in English, “The
saint took off her dress.”9 She also considered this new work to be not
so distant from much of the popular literature of her era: “All through
my life,” she writes in Contos d’escárnio, “I have read so much filth that I
resolved to write my own.” Hilst described these four works in particu-
lar, and all of her literary production going forward, as “bandalheiras,”
or “trifles,” not unlike those newspaper texts: “From here forward I am
only going to write great and, I hope, adorable trifles.”10 It should be
obvious, as I will show, that these texts, including Letters from a Seducer,
the process of my translation of which is the subject of this chapter, were
and are anything but frivolous or trifling.
Pécora gives several reasons why the public image of Hilst as an
“eccentric type,” and of her writing as transgressive above any other
quality, have prevailed over deeper familiarity or study of other aspects
of her work. I will return to several of these aspects when I describe the
challenges of translating Hilst. Among them are what Pécora describes as
the “liberal comportment of Hilst in the face of the moralistic provincial-
ism of the middle class.” She was born into a family, the Almeida Prados,
that were among the elites in the region around Jaú, the São Paulo state
city of her birth, and began her career in the 1950s among São Paulo’s
high society, but essentially belonged to Brazil’s upper middle class.
Pécora enumerates several other factors, such as the author’s physical
beauty in her youth, which overwhelmed discussion of her writing, and
even merited commentary after her death. He notes the distance that her
art kept, from start to finish, from Brazil’s widespread modernist values,
especially in São Paulo, which was the capital of Brazilian modernism in
the 1920s and thereafter (it was where painter Emilio de Cavalcanti and
writer Mário de Andrade proclaimed Brazil’s famous “Week of Modern
Art” in 1922), and in its avoidance of any focus on literary “national”
content, which, Pécora says, “simply did not concern her.” There was
also the difficulty of reading her texts, especially her prose, given its
demands of literary, philosophical, and almost scientific erudition, which
Pécora suggests achieved the effect of generating a highly idiosyncratic
“final vocabulary,” to use Richard Rorty’s term. Hilst’s almost reclu-
sive isolation at Casa do Sol, her country estate near Campinas, from
the early 1970s onward, kept her away from Brazil’s centers of intellec-
tual life. There was her prodigious production in diverse literary genres
and her mixture of them within each text, which occurs in Letters from
a Seducer as in many of her other works from the 1960s. And, as I have
noted, her aesthetic strategy, which was a means for calling attention to
her work through what Pécora labels a foundation “in the pornographic
register.” This upset both mainstream critics and the norms and conven-
tions espoused by the Brazilian academy.11
Perhaps as confounding for some, and to my mind, intriguing, is one
particular aspect of Hilst’s art that Pécora alludes to when he describes
the formal complexity of her texts, which can appear forbidding to an
uncommitted reader. As Pécora notes, however, when he turns his
undergraduate students on to her work, they take to it with enthusiasm.
I am speaking specifically of what he calls the “anarchy of genres” that
proliferate in her fictional texts. She started as a poet, shifting to play-
writing in the late 1960s, and published her first, short prose work in
1969—moving almost completely into what we might loosely term fic-
tion, though with periodic returns to poetry, from the 1970s onwards.
In Letters From a Seducer, it is not just poetry and fiction that make
appearances, but other forms and discourses as well. To quote Pécora’s
description of her books,
Saying it better, the texts are constructed with a base in the use of canon-
ical matrices from different genres of tradition, like, for example, biblical
songs, the Gallic-Portuguese ballad, the Petrarchan song, Spanish mystical
poetry, the Arcadian idyll, the libertine epistolary novel, etc. This imita-
tion of the past never is with archaeological purity, but, on the contrary,
is submitted to the mediation of decisive literary phenomena of the 20th
century: the sublime imagery of Rilke, the stream of consciousness (fluxo
de consciência) of Joyce, the minimalist setting of Beckett, the sensational-
ism of Pessoa, to refer only to the block of international writers most easily
recognized through her writings, alongside Becker and Bataille.”12
140 J. Keene
The fusion of these genres and discourses, coupled with Hilst’s almost
dizzying linguistic register, bounteous vocabulary, and laser-cutting wit,
can make for challenging reading, to put it mildly.
Letters from a Seducer

I now want to anatomize Letters from a Seducer, situating it formally
and contextually, before I discuss some specifics of my translation pro-
cess and some of the hurdles I faced. Letters from a Seducer was origi-
nally published in 1991, by the São Paulo publisher Paulicéia Editora,
and reissued by Globo in 2001. Running some 172 pages in the original
Portuguese, the novel splits roughly into three parts, the whole a post-
modern confection of the highest order, as I hope to make clear. The
first is an undated, delocalized epistolary narrative, comprising a series
of letters, written by a wealthy, socially awkward, psychologically obses-
sive young man named Karl, to his older sister Cordélia, whose responses
throughout we never see, but can only infer based on Karl’s citation of
them, and which only intermittently provide us with information about
their past. When recounting his experiences at the country club or regal-
ing his sister about his seduction of a young male mechanic, he is impor-
tuning his sister to return to their ancestral estate so that he may once
again have sex with her, questioning whether she slept with their late
father, exploring the sex lives of any and all around him, and speculating
about a certain Iohannis, a groundskeeper who lives with Cordélia. In
any case, as we come to see, Karl is a highly unreliable narrator, given
to gossip, flights of fancy, mythomania, and relentless, almost incoherent
invocations of literary texts, which he leads the reader to believe he has
read. Amid this forest of citations, Karl engages in a constant projection
of his emotional inadequacies with his sister. Cordélia, an opening poem
tells us, has fled to the countryside, and may or may not be in a convent
(though Karl uses the term “cloister”), whose address she will not pro-
vide to Karl. But it is not until we finish his letters that we understand
the reasons why she has removed herself from his sphere, the world of
their perverse, elite upbringing.
The format of the letters mirrors the libertine epistolary tradi-
tion of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially the style of
Choderlos de Laclos’s exemplary Les liaisons dangereuses, published
in 1782, a novel that details an exchange between the Marquise de
Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, former lovers and amorous rivals
who use seduction and sex as a method, tool, and weapon to system-
atically destroy the lives of others, while deriving great pleasure in the
process. As with Le liaisons dangereuses, in Letters from a Seducer there
are numerous ellipses, lacunae, and repetitions, in terms of information,
temporality and incident; the reader must construct the story through
what Karl’s letters reveal and conceal, their shifts in voice, tone, and plot,
their alternating foci, and their cues and feints. Knowledge is constituted
on the foundation of lack, which is to say, on and as desire and its artic-
ulation within and as the story, in the moving temporal frame of the nar-
rative. What becomes clear by the end of Hilst’s Letters from a Seducer,
as with Choderlos de Laclos’s novel, is that she has undertaken a moral
reading of aristocratic decadence, with the protagonists paying a serious
price—the gravest in the case of one of them in Les liaisons dangereuses—
for their actions.
After Karl’s letters, the narrative shifts to the perspective mostly of
Stamatius, or “Tiu,” whose name derives from the Latin verb “to stop,”
while also referencing a Christian martyr, Stamatius of Volos, Thessaly,
whom the Ottoman authorities attempted to forcibly convert to Islam,
but who publicly declared himself a Christian and was beheaded by
sword in Constantinople in 1680. Stamatius opens the novel by pro-
viding a preface to Karl’s letters, before mostly disappearing until after
Karl’s section ends. Thereupon the reader encounters Stamatius’s col-
lection of narratives, which constitute the second main section of the
book and consist first of a series of stories, successively titled “Horrível”
(Horrible), “Besteira” (Tomfoolery), “Sábado” (Saturday/Sabbath), and
“Triste” (“Sad”), followed by two further sections that mix genres, “De
outros ocos” (Of Other Hollows) and “Novos antropofágicos” (New
Cannibalisms). These winnow the narration down to its bare bones,
sometimes in a clinical and dialogic mode not unlike the nouveau roman
style of Nathalie Sarraute. Almost in inverse proportion to the ampli-
tude of the exchanges between Karl and Cordélia, the reader learns only
snippets about Stamatius’s life, though as with Karl, there is no stand-
ard realist backstory, little contextualization for who Stamatius is or why
he’s behaving as he does, but only inferences, glimpses, and suggestions,
from which the reader must weave a biosocial frame in which to situ-
ate his tales. A few basics become clear: Stamatius was a social associate
of Karl’s, perhaps from the same milieu, but has surrendered nearly all
material aspects of his former life for the sake of his art, represented by
142 J. Keene
the obsessive storytelling—the flipside of Karl’s letter writing—by which

the second and major portion of the novel unfolds.
Stamatius lives—subsists, really—on the beach or similar marginal,
liminal spaces, scavenging for food and books with his current lover
Eulália, her name deriving from the Greek “eu-lalia,” meaning “well-spo-
ken,” from the Greek root eu-, meaning well, and lalia from the verb
lalein, meaning “to speak, utter, make a sound.” Hilst is using “Eulália”
ironically, because this character not only is rather terse in her speech,
but also given to a vernacular form of Brazilian Portuguese. The dialogic
quality of this section arises as much from Stamatius’s texts alone as from
what transpires between him and the not so well-spoken Eulália. While
Karl in his letters spends most of his time relating or recounting sexual
affairs, which may or may not have happened, Stamatius/Tiu finds him-
self having to fend off Eulália’s desire for domestic intimacy—and domes-
ticity itself, as she has adopted a conventional, heteronormative gender
position so as to enable her beloved’s writing. Each of Stamatius’s four
initial stories, which include passages that foreground the dialogic nature
of his (and Hilst’s) storytelling, illustrates a theme or idea, usually quite
horrifying and graphic, with an edge of humor. The running joke—and
the entire novel brims with ironies, wit and a rapier-sharp humor—is that
Eulália not only finds these disturbing stories boring, which very likely is
the antithesis of an average reader’s response, but cannot even compre-
hend them, though it is her request for Stamatius’s storytelling that spurs
him to produce them. Throughout, Eulália seems incapable of intellec-
tually understanding much of what Stamatius is talking about—a failure
that mirrors the emotional and intellectual gaps in the relationships he
narrates, as well as his sense of Karl’s faulty apprehension of him—yet
Hilst makes clear that Eulália understands him. To put it another way, she
intuitively understands his deep desire to write, to tell, to know, as well
as to maintain a basic sociality that makes art and life possible, and has
organized her life around his needs.
Many of the taboos of contemporary American literature or even cul-
ture, as we know them, commonly and legally, are nonfunctional here.
Hilst destabilizes a number of other frameworks, which is to say, the
kinds of “final vocabularies,” to use Rorty’s term as invoked by Pécora,
through which we order our ideas about society. Among the ques-
tions Hilst raises in the text are: what is a “family”? A “relationship”? A
“lover”? A “brother” or “sister”? What are parents, and how should we
understand our relationships to and with them? What are the limits of
knowledge, and might narrative—such as we encounter in Choderlos de

Laclos, or Sade, or in the Hilst of Letters and the rest of the tetralogy—
take us to the very edge, and even over? Moreover, though the text’s
author is a woman, she relentlessly sends up the phallogocentrist order
by rendering the very concept of male-centered construction of mean-
ing, embodied in the characters and writings both of Karl and Stamatius,
as perched on the edge of an abyss of hysteria and absurdity, at times
allowing it to tumble in on itself.
This essay’s title invokes the Marquis de Sade, and here I want to
point out where I see Hilst’s novel in relation to Sade’s work, particu-
larly the twinned narratives Justine and Juliette, the former Sade’s 1791
masterpiece about a pre-Revolutionary, formerly virtuous young woman
who is defending herself, through an account of her past, as she is about
to face severe punishment and death, and the latter, his sequel, of sorts,
written between 1797 and 1801, which concerns Justine’s sister, a nym-
phomaniac antiheroine and exemplar of libertinage, who acts outside of
any network of morality contemporary to that period or today, embed-
ding herself within a network of libertine sociality that does not exist for
Justine. In Letters from a Seducer, Hilst never mentions Sade, but if one
considers its moral orientation, and the text as an ethical practice, one
can situate it within the genealogy of works that Sade makes possible, in
that instead of moral resolution in the case of Karl and Cordélia, what we
are left with is knowledge. The exchange between the two, the cruelties
and insults Karl doles out, and his almost pathetic quest for love, point
us not in the direction of bourgeois domestic resolution, nor in a neatly
tied up aristocratic game of debaucheries whose chief parties will walk
away in pleasure and jouissance. Instead, as with Stamatius and Eulália,
the novel’s postmodern form and strategies, as one might say partially of
Sade, and its will to know—rather than expressivity or the validation of
some preexisting idea of the good, the true, and the real—are the ulti-
mate goals of the act and art of the writing. Knowledge, which is to say
the truth that develops in the process of life and art—not a Platonic or
socially established good, not a model of the moral life, not the uphold-
ing of some legitimated mold or set of values but of a more contingent,
radical, and perhaps new way of seeing and understanding the world—is
the end result. Hilst suggests (here I link her to Sade) that it requires
the postmodern obscene, the register of the pornographic, if not por-
nography itself—for rarely in this or most of Hilst’s works, suffused as
they are with the obscene, is the goal the immediate and instrumental
144 J. Keene
satisfaction of carnal desire, to take up one philosophical definition of

pornography—in combination with those matrices of discourses Pécora
describes, to defamiliarize us and shake us out of our complacencies. She
aims to bring us moments, as Immanuel Kant might have argued, of the
dynamical sublime, a horror and delight that provokes a reckoning, of
the kind that conventional narrative, conventional modernist, and even
much postmodernist prose fiction, usually cannot offer. Throughout
Letters from a Seducer, a work akin to both to the work of Choderlos and
especially Sade, Hilst upholds Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dictum that “ethics
and aesthetics are one.”
Translating Letters from a Seducer

Now I turn to address several hurdles in translating Hilst’s novel, some
of which point to the readings and arguments I have just advanced, and
some to other aspects of the novel that are unique to the text itself. I
should indicate the most basic and banal point, which is the challenge
posed by differences between English and Portuguese prose, and in
Hilst’s case, Brazilian Portuguese, with ample bits of Hilstian Portuguese
that cannot be found in any online or print dictionary, and which neces-
sitated a bit of backwards reengineering to figure out what her neolo-
gisms, distortions, and puns could possibly mean. (Indeed, in one case,
I asked a native Brazilian writer who had studied literature what Hilst
meant, and he had no clues to offer nor any recommendations on where
I might find one.) Brazilian Portuguese, which has some distinctive sty-
listic differences from the more condensed European Portuguese, such
as more syntactic flexibility, can be in its simplest written form sometimes
not so difficult to render into English. Yet with Hilst’s novel it created a
number of difficulties.
One very basic challenge that appears in the first section, and recurs
throughout, is Hilst’s use of the words negão and negona, which are
extremely common in Brazilian Portuguese. As in Spanish and several
other Romance languages, Portuguese makes extensive use of augmen-
tatives and diminutives. And as in Spanish, the word negro means black;
and, as with other Latin American and American countries where slavery
flourished, the word negro, however inflected, carries political and social
implications. Just as Spanish speakers will say negrito/negrita, sometimes
meaning “black” but often in a positive, affectionate sense, Portuguese
speakers will say negão in a general, affectionate way, equating to “big
guy,” or “baby.” Yet Brazilian Portuguese also sometimes drops the “r,”
from “negro,” creating the word nego, which means “black man, black
guy.” Given this added layer along with Brazil’s history, and how Hilst at
times plays with race itself in the book, I had to think carefully whenever
these words popped up—especially “negona,” which is what Tiu calls
Eulália, and which intimates not just race but class.
Perhaps the most interesting challenge I encountered, which makes
its appearance on the novel’s first full page of prose—though this first
instance was relatively simple—also had to do with vocabulary. As Alcir
Pécora notes, in Letters of a Seducer, Hilst deploys a vocabulary of sexual
terms—some quite common to a Brazilian ear, others quite rare beyond
specific regional precincts, others perhaps uncommon but discernible
given their metaphorical resonances—so extensive, particularly for the
male and female genitalia, the anus, and for sexual acts, that it would
make most pornographers, even Brazilian ones, blush. Though English
has a larger general vocabulary than Portuguese, its store of sexual lan-
guage is relatively impoverished. Even including words English might
have left behind in prior centuries, words borrowed from other lan-
guages or registers (such as various national and intranational idioms of
Spanish, or Yiddish, or Black Vernacular) that most American speakers,
writers, and translators might use, English still cannot match Brazilian
Portuguese. Hilst gives her reader, and thus her translator, a thorough
workout, with the effect that at a certain point, I began to wonder if
nearly everything I was translating did not have multiple layers of sexual
innuendo woven into it.
In some cases, it was impossible to capture her subtleties. To give one
example, in one of his letters, Karl says to his sister Cordélia, trying to
provoke her by denigrating what he takes to be her boring life:
Que bordas panos de prato e toalhinhas para as quermesses de caridade das

aldeias vizinhas? Aldeias? Mas estás onde afinal?
I translated this as:
That you embroider silver cloths and little tablecloths for charity bazaars in
the surrounding villages? Villages? But where are you anyway?
This is okay as it stands, but it misses—completely—the double mean-

ing of the Portuguese term “quermesse” (charity bazaar), which we have
146 J. Keene
in the less common English term “kermess,” used almost exclusively to

refer to the annual fairs and festivals held in the Benelux countries, or to
similar country fairs elsewhere, often with a religious underpinning. Hilst
does intend this meaning, as the root of the Portuguese term and the
English one both refer back to the Dutch kerc, meaning church + misse,
meaning mass (Portuguese, like English, deriving the word via French),
but what no English term captures is that “quermesse” in Portuguese
also means “high-class group sex,” or “high-class orgy.” So here the
word captures a particular Hilstian irony: the socialite is writing to his
devout, semicloistered sister, commenting snarkily on her charitable
activities, yet in essence, he is also asking if she is being turned out by
people of her same class.
In other cases, I created a linguistic matrix of my own so as to main-
tain consistency, to the extent possible, wherever Hilst riffed on particu-
lar body parts or acts. To give another example, Hilst writes, in a section
in which Tiu is narrating a story to Eulália:
As mulheres são famintas por carícias, e muito pouca gente siririca a

Maldita. Entendeste?
I translated this as:
Women are starving for caresses, and few people diddle the Damned One.
Did you understand?
Here, “siririca” means masturbate, but in Brazilian Portuguese it also has

a very different connotation, recognizable to people especially living in
the northeast of the country. It derives from Tupi, an indigenous lan-
guage, meaning the Menticirrhus americanus, a common type of fish, as
well as a “hook” for fishing. The various English names for this fish—
“sea smelt,” “sea whiting,” and so on—neither come close to capturing
the multiple meanings of the Portuguese, which Hilst transforms from a
noun to a verb, nor could any of these substitute for the sense conveyed
by the English verb. All I could do was attempt to echo the music, in a
form appropriate to English.
One other major challenge involves the rhythmic and poetic qualities
of Hilst’s language. As Pécora notes, Hilst’s training as a poet, and her
specific poetic practice in the 1960s in particular, which involved drawing

from those matrices of older Iberian and Iberian-American forms—includ-
ing the mystical verse of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Saint John of the
Cross, as well as her predilection for reading and performing her poetry to
visitors to Casa do Sol in a European Portuguese accent that she learned
to perfect from her mother, who was an immigrant from Portugal—
means that often the prose possesses distinctive musical effects that, if one
is utterly faithful to the meaning of the source text, cannot be conveyed
directly or faithfully in English. The burden, then, is to find an approxi-
mate English music that reproduces an effect similar to, if not exactly like,
Hilst’s prose, while also bringing the sense of the Portuguese into English
as much as possible. For example, Stamatius criticizes his own indolence:
E deveria ter procurado os cocos e os palmitos. Mas fico a escrever com

este único toco e quando acabar o toco troco um coco por outro toco de
lápis lá na venda do Boi (tem esse nome porque um boi passou certa vez
por ali e peidou grosso). Vendem cachaça pagoça maria-mole carne-seca
latas de massa. Então deveria ter ido a cata dos cocos, dos palmitos, e não
fui. Continuo dizendo o que não queria. Minhas unhas. Curtinhas e imun-
das. E as dos pés? que bom, estão limpas.
In the Portuguese, Hilst plays off the root word “oco” (hollow) that
Stamatius will reprise several pages later when he says that he will go
into other hollows, which is to say, delve deeper into his consciousness.
She does so using a series of words that carry this root word and sound
forward with varying meanings. A Portuguese reader or speaker would
immediately hear the punning repetition of “oco” in the tongue-twist-
ing rhymes (“cocos,” “toco,” “troco,” “único,” “outro,” “coco,” etc.),
while also noting the playful, highly poetic assonance (“palmitos” and
“fico”; “lápis,” “lá,” and “ali”; “cachaça” and “pagoça”; “porque” and
“o que,” etc.) and consonance (the hard “c” sounds in “coco…toco”…
“carne-seca-cata,” etc.). Though prose, it sings in the ear like poetry.
There is no way, however, to carry Hilst’s exact semantic resonances and
sonorities directly over into English. To translate this passage requires
that the translator find an approximate sonority in English.
My translation, which acknowledges the loss of “oco” but draws upon
English’s capacity for rhyme, assonance, and consonance, is:
148 J. Keene
And I should have looked for coconuts and palm hearts. But I’m here
writing with this lone stump and when I stop I’ll swap a coconut for
another pencil stub over there at the Ox shop (so named because an ox
passed through there once and let out a huge fart). They sell cachaça pea-
nut fudge maria-mole dried meat tin cans of sauce. But I should have gone
to gather up coconuts, palm hearts, and I didn’t. I keep talking about what
I don’t want. My fingernails. Tiny and filthy. And my toenails? good to say,
they are clean.
In another passage, the final one in the book, the language achieves a
lyricism that could easily be that of poetry, were the lines broken into
stanzas, again matched with an example of Hilst’s masterful homophonic
punning (“adeuses…deuses”) and a vibrant rhythmic pulse:
Era telúrico e único. Sonhava. Sonhava adeuses e sombras. Sonhava

deuses. Era cruel porque desde sempre foi desesperado. Encontrou um
homem-anjo. Para que vivessem juntos, na Terra, para sempre, ele cor-
tou-lhe as asas. O outro matou-se, mergulhando nas águas. Estou vivo até
hoje. Estou velho. Às noites bebo muito e olho as estrelas. Muitas vezes,
escrevo. Aí repenso aquele, o hálito de neve, a desesperança. Deito-me.
Austero, sonho que semeio favas negras e asas sobre uma terra escura, às
vezes madrepérola.
My translation:
He was telluric and unique. He was dreaming. He dreamt of goodbyes

and shadows. He dreamt of gods. He was cruel because he had always
been desperate. He encountered a human-angel. So that they might live
together, on Earth, forever, he cut off his wings. The other killed himself,
plunging into the waters. I am still alive today. I’m old. At night I drink
a lot and look at the stars. Often, I write. Then I reconsider that one, the
snowy breath, the desperation. I lie down. Austerely, I dream that I sow
black beans and wings across a dark, sometimes mother-of-pearl, earth.
Finally, I’d like to note Hilst’s postmodernist eschewal of clear distinc-

tions between genres, her complex use of differing registers, voices, and
discourses, toward the creation of a “final language” that destabilizes, in
key ways, any simple understanding of any of the registers, voices, and
discourses in the poem. I am thinking here in part of Jahan Ramazani’s
exploration of the use of multiple discourses and registers in postcolonial
African Diasporic poetry,13 and it is clear that Hilst is doing some-

thing quite similar, whereby the language of seventeenth-century lib-
ertine prose, the discourse of popular genres such as romance, horror,
pulp, and pornographic literature, older modes of fabulism, the essayis-
tic commentary of her crônicas, and the shifting dialectical relationship
between writer and reader, are recombined and fitted, like mosaic pieces,
within each section. The jarring juxtaposition of these different voices—
sometimes producing an effect not so different from the experience, I
imagine, of hearing Hilst’s recordings of paranormal voices as part of her
“transcommunication” efforts,14 a project she undertook with utter seri-
ousness at the Casa do Sol during the 1970s, only reinforcing her rep-
utation for eccentricity—can make it sometimes seem that even a very
good rendering of Hilst still sounds off. As I proceeded through my
translation with the Brazilian publisher, I learned to accept these strange
passages as true to Hilst, and hope the English language reader will
appreciate them as much as many Brazilian and readers around the world
are beginning to. Beyond the controversy remains one of the most orig-
inal writers of her or any era, ever worthy of rediscovery: as she writes in
With My Dog Eyes, “I am rising, wet like fog.”
Notes
1. The original reads: “Embora a autora tenha alcançado grande notorie-
dade pessoal, por conta de uma inteligência incomum, de um tempera-
mento exuberante, e de uma prontidão de espírito capaz de surpreender
as pautas de entrevistas, me parece justo repetir aqui o que ela própria
dizia, queixosa: a sua obra, de rara extensão e variedade, ainda é larga-
mente desconhecida.” Alcir Pécora, from “Nota do organizador,” in
Por que ler Hilda Hilst, Alcir Pécora, editor, (São Paulo: Editora Globo,
2005), 8. Unless otherwise noted, translations from the Portuguese are
the author’s.
2. “Morre escritora Hilda Hilst; enterro será às 16 h em Campinas,” Folha de
São Paulo, January 4, 2004. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ilus-
trada/ult90u41160.shtml.
3. “Poesias de Hilda Hilst inspiraram eruditos e compositores populares,”
Folha de São Paulo, January 4, 2004. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/
folha/ilustrada/ult90u41162.shtml.
4. “Leia repercussão sobre a morte de Hilda Hilst,” Folha de São Paulo,
January 4, 2004. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ilustrada/ult
90u41165.shtml.
150 J. Keene
5. Pécora, 52.
6. c.f.: Clarice Lispector, Descoberto do mundo (São Paulo: Rocco Editora,
2008). Translated into English as Selected Crônicas, trans. Giovanni
Pontiero (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1996).
7. Por que ler Hilda Hilst, 52.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 32.
10. Ibid.
11. “Nota do organizador,” passim.
12. Ibid., 11.
13. c.f. Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009); and also Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song,
and the Dialogue of Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
14. Adam Morris discusses this in his introduction to Hilda Hilst, With My
Dog Eyes, trans. Adam Morris (New York: Melville House, 2014), 5.
Author Biography
John Keene is the author of the novel Annotations (New Directions); the art-
text collection Seismosis (1913 Press) with artist Christopher Stackhouse; the
short fiction collection Counternarratives (New Directions), which received a
2016 American Book Award, a 2016 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and the
inaugural 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses (UK); the art-
text collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner, GRIND (ITI Press);
and the poetry chapbook Playland (Seven Kitchens Press). He has also pub-
lished a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer
(Nightboat Books/A Bolha Editora‚ 2014), and has exhibited his artwork in
Brooklyn and Berlin. A longtime member of the Dark Room Writers Collective
and a graduate fellow of Cave Canem, he currently serves on the board of the
African Poetry Book Fund, and teaches in the departments of English and
African American and African Studies, which he chairs, and also is a core faculty
member in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark.
Derelict of Duty
Nathanaël
OS SENTIMENTOS vastos não têm nome.

– Hilda Hilst
Je plonge, j’arrache avec mes ongles, là, à l’intérieur.
– Danielle Collobert1
Abstract  If obscenity were to claim any parentage to obsolescence, it

might be through an inexact filiation illicited through an apprehension
of language that might be qualified as untoward. Certainly, to insinuate
myself, as I have done, into a work of Lusophone disobedience, with-
out language, and wearing myself into its verb, is precisely the sort of
act that might encourage the distribution of various punishments. These
capital pains borrow directly from French, the language by which I came
to translate Hilda Hilst from Portuguese.
Keywords  Hilst · Translation · Kurosawa · Atomic · Extinction · Agora
Nathanaël (*) 
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA

152 Nathanaël
If obscenity were to claim any parentage to obsolescence, it might be

through an inexact filiation illicited through an apprehension of language
that might be qualified as untoward. Certainly, to insinuate myself, as I
have done, and did do‚ into a work of Lusophone disobedience, without
language, as it were, wearing myself into its verb, is precisely the sort of
act that might encourage the distribution of various punishments—pains,
I might say—capital pains, to borrow directly from French, the language
by which I came, not without complicity, to translate Hilda Hilst from
Portuguese, at the close of an unread summer in a city of rains, at the
edge of no place at all. The inverted cellar as it were opened to unnamed
skies, where Madame D’s agonia ransacked the inert innards of a person
with no eu to speak of. It is out of that particular moment, a summer of
dereliction, abandonment, and dishonesty, that D’s letter started its slow
way to English, and not without violent abandon!
A narrative, even erring and errant, into the dissuasive efforts of trans-
lation, can only obfuscate the enervated itineraries that led somehow2 to
my becoming the vessel thrown onto that particularly encrypted shore.
It is not mappable, any more than the route leading down the stairs
between the voice of Ehud’s frustrated entreaties and Madame D’s cup-
board, her chosen dwelling place‚ a world. Like the parchment that dis-
integrates in water, dispersing its direction, it finds a way nonetheless to
hammer violently at a door.
E agora?
, come let’s go to sleep, yes, let’s go to sleep, what is Time like, Ehud, in the hole
where you are now dead?
– Madame D
Fancying the translational dilemma that accompanies the Freudian agora

against which none who emerges from the twentieth century has been
successfully inoculated, with its suggestions of interiority as internment,
and aghast proximities, positing a disquieting strangeness3 against an
asynchronous disturbance,4 it is possible (necessary) to walk the confines
of this particular duress‚ in order to arrive at an appropriately strait-jack-
eted resiliency such as exists in the scripting of the letter D.
Agora, the windswept marketplace, a kind of urban desertion, is none
other than the public square‚ theatre of a gallows circumscribed by each
DERELICT OF DUTY 153
of four directions (but why stop at four‚ the circle is incommensurable

with finitude)—call it la place publique, forum, or assembly, what pro-
poses itself as the (treacherous) scene of democracy unseats the diasporic
discomfiture of sensation‚ sensate being. Agora is not mere locus but
indisputable tempus. A gathering of anguishes subsumed into political
gravitas, with its morbid delinquencies.
In the dictionary of meanings, the Portuguese agora is (almost)
as innocuous as the German heute, brought out of its familiarity by
Malina,5 where the presentness of today is proposed as an exclusive sig-
nifier of suicide: self-murder. Why return to this declaration, if not to
point obliquely at the significance of an agoric double exposure, evident
in the superimposition of the Greek term,6 later inflected by Freud’s
diagnosis of alienation, over the Portuguese agora: now.
The composite is revelatory of cultural sedimentation, historical bed-
wetting, and lyrical disembodiment. Any trace of a trace is owable to the
fervent over-inscription of human felony—the fellowship of morbidity.
What is now in the time of translation, in the field notes of a voice
afflicted with the ability to hear itself resonate, past promiscuous win-
dowsills and into the underpants of simple-minded, prickly-groined
conventicles.
I offer the following as testimony:
(2010)
[…]
This summer will have taken the form of a decision.
[…]
It really is the end of a world, and I feel as though I am posted in Siberia

or Singapore, in a strange sing-songy compound where the children carry
guns in the form of balloons but the next boat out of here isn’t for another
month.
[…]
It’s impossible, and I carry a sort of terror or detachment, a retinal distur-

bance that superimposes forms and moments.
[…]
154 Nathanaël
Does it ever occur to psychoanalysis to say no? It seems to me just as

important to recognize the hidden text as it is to resolve not to read it.
[…]
To cross the border toward your country is to leave the body of my sister,
to take possession of something that escapes me. But what violence, to tear
her body from mine, where it is lodged, with the other bodies gathered
there.
[…]
Your face, for example.
[…]
Must I be the one to survive, not only the book, but never?
[…]7
Translation is a form of castigation. Of language foremost, and of itself

of course. In the now-time of translation, beyond its morbid measure-
ments, recombined into entreating narratives of diplomatic traversal, it
points to the orgiastic cowardice of extinction, with wistful inexactitude.
If translation is belated (Benjamin), it is also apprehensive (Ortega
y Gasset): it anticipates itself. It is its fore-knowledge which is so
calamitous.
It is obsequious and fragile, and so brutal.
Now is time unbemoaned. Translation is its foment. Por agora.
A Capital Snare
It is no good admitting to one’s inconsistencies. It makes for meager
parable and disingenuous apology. Nonetheless, if Madame D arrived at
English in a strait-jacket unamenable to divagation, it is precisely what
gagged and blindfolded her text that made it legible.
If only more of us wore our skins out.
é você (R.G.A.)
Wearing glasses was not for the purpose of seeing things more clearly.
– Sagawa Chika, tr. Sawako Nakayasu
Coming to A obscena Senhora D by way of L’obscène Madame D, it is imme-

diately clear that the effort demanded of us is a dispersive more than a dis-
cursive one. Perhaps it is that the emotional demand implicates a language in
the flesh—kneaded, knotted, and bruised—that belies comprehension. What
I mean is that a translator’s pretense to fluency is corrected when faced with
the evidence of exclusion. The multiplication of versions decorticates the
so-called original to the point of burning out the incumbent text—like the
radioactive blast that photographs the city while annihilating it.8 The sub-
sisting layers of civilization, exposed under attack, reveal themselves to be
vacant craters, as wide as worlds, and uninvested (screaming). If we walk
there, we agree to our own admonishment, and the horror induced by stray
hairs. Oxygen is two parts matter. And dirty rainfall. In the third instance, a
distortion occurs, which simultaneously renders visible all three languages at
once, by virtue of none of them arriving at themselves.
With intermittence, and delay, we look at looking.9
—past oceans,
and shadow-pictures.*
*
The instrument that measures the intensity and duration of sunshine was
once referred to as a radiograph. The relay between object and image relies
on an exchange of rays between bodies (that are at once reflective and
absorptive), confounding, in the process the distinction between desire and
Antigone, such that the “shadow-picture of a hand,” for example, not only
accounts for the hand, but destroys it once and for all, so that its identifica-
tion relies absolutely on its annulment.
There is a sky for everything. An upturned bank of refractive solar panels
in the Mojave Desert incinerates birds in flight. “A sun black with stupor.”10
“What the Birds Knew”

Agora is a permanent remove. A storm advancing against a force of
inveterate stillness. A severed head planted on the sharpened post of
a new kind of madness. (New for having seen it before.) Who is it in
the press that calls on me?11 Translation is the ravaged soothsayer, saying
backwards what is.
156 Nathanaël
In the rainswept agora, now is ever, for the time of its rending, what-
ever the face settled into its war.
The muscle that follows is a muscle of grief.
– Rachel Gontijo Araújo
To have released Kurosawa Akira’s film in English under the title I Live
in Fear was already an act of treason. Ikimono no kiroku (1955) casts
Mifune Toshiro as the body of dread. An otherwise (societally) manacled
dread that underwrites the delirium of reason in an atomic tail wind.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki come the Soviet land blasts, and Bikini
Atoll, roiling radioactive cumulus over northern Japan, eradicating the
certitude of concrete bunkers sunken in sand. Nakajima Kiichi imagines
Brasil as promised land, an isolatable else without fallout, onto which he
casts the intractable die—fire and stone’s throw. Love of the unknown.
The failure of his projection owes as much to Nakajima’s acuity as it
does to his bad temper, in a word: disbelief. The imagined become unim-
aginable, in a juridical heavy hand that secludes him behind the carceral
bars of an asylum, the man can only strike ghosts in the form of people
subsumed into docility. The sun that burns the planet is as much fabrica-
tion as it is an incontrovertible truth of the body exposed. Not fear but a
Record of a Living Being.
Madame D is a latter-day Nakajima.
Her recess is equivalent to the old man’s window: the contour of an
actual document12 becomes illegible in the blinding light of the body’s
twin conscience and consciousness, resiliated under fervent dictatorship.
As for us, we are her bystanders.
Notes
1. Danielle Collobert, Meurtre, in (Œuvres I. ©Paris: Éditions P.O.L.,
2004). p. 111. Quoted with permission.
2. It is no accident unless friendship is an accident (of course it is), and in
this instance, owes everything to the prescience of Rachel Gontijo Araújo,
who, through the untimely channels of a most unreliable international
post, placed, as it were, the book in the hand that would come to reach
for those particularly damaged skies. By which I mean: birdlike, forlorn.
3. L’inquiétante étrangeté—only one of the proposed translations for das

Unheimlichkeit that accosts the agora in bedridden garb, masked and
insatiate, a dull cavern, or exasperated expanse.
4. Italian’s rejoinder to das Unheimlichkeit is il perturbante, language
that bears an intensity that neither the unhomely nor uncanny will ever
approximate, multiplying the channels of disorientation, and exceed-
ing the scope of its verve, further destabilizing the edifice of versions,
allowing for the incursion of dissimilarities in volume and mass to
become visible (imaginable as bodies, in various stages of undress—or
decomposition).
5. Ingeborg Bachmann.
6. In term, one cannot but concede the terminus, beyond which every
imagined thing gropes past itself into unconceding juris-diction.
7. Nathanaël. The Middle Notebookes (Brooklyn: Nightboat Books, 2015).
8. Say “city” so as not to have to think beings.
9. I say looking and not reading in the way one must step back at times in
order to see better what is near. If one begins with the pretext that the
glass is never clear, then one begins to escape (maybe) the trappings of
occidental ideology of intelligibility, which lead invariably to a tendency
toward correction. Where grammar fails the text is precisely where such a
tendency must be identified, then rejected. From there, the best one can
do is to cast one’s lot.
10. The Obscene Madame D.
11. William S.
12. “…le document était toujours traité comme le langage d’une voix main-
tenant réduite au silence,—sa trace fragile, mais par chance déchiffrable.”
Michel Foucault (…the document was always treated as the language of a
voice now reduced to silence,—its trace fragile, but by chance deciphera-
ble. Trans. N.).
Author Biography
Nathanaël is the (self-)translating author of more than a score of books writ-
ten in English or French, including N’existe (2017) Feder (2016), The Middle
Notebookes (2015), Asclepias: The Milkweeds (2015), and Sotto l’immagine
(2014). Extrinsic translations, which include works by Édouard Glissant, Hervé
Guibert, Danielle Collobert, and Catherine Mavrikakis, have been recognized by
various awards, including fellowships from the PEN American Center and the
Centre National du Livre de France. Nathanaël’s translation of A obscena Senhora
D, undertaken in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo, marked the first
English-language publication of a book-length work by Hilst.
Hilst on Hilst: Excerpts from Interviews
with the Author, 1952–2003
Hilda Hilst
These interviews were originally collected and published in Fico Besta Quando
Me Entendem: Entrevistas Com Hilda Hilst, Cristiano Diniz, Ed. São Paulo:
Biblioteca Azul, 2013. Translated to English by Adam Morris.
Abstract  The editors of Essays on Hilda Hilst: Between Brazil and World

Literature offer a selection of interviews in which Hilst discusses her poetry,
theater, and fiction; her views of spirituality and phenomenology; and the
reception of her critical work in the context of Brazilian and world literature.
Keywords  Interview · Hilda · Hilst · Poetry · Theater · Inspiration
19521
My poems are born because they need to be born. They’re born of non-
conformity. Of the desire to surpass the Void. Sentimental emotions
rarely inspire my poetry, which almost always emerges from a larger
Hilda Hilst (Deceased)

Campinas, Brazil

160 H. HILST
problem—the problem of death, but not death in the metaphysical sense

of whatever might happen after the fact. What gives birth to my poems is
a refusal to accept that one day life will dilute, and with it, love, the emo-
tions in dreams and all that potential energy that lives inside us.
19692
We live in a world in which people wish to communicate in an urgent
and terrible way. I’ve experienced this. But poetry wasn’t enough for me.
Poetry suffers a terrible waste. Poets say things, but the print runs, aside
from being small, don’t sell. So I took up theater. I attempted to con-
serve in my plays certain dignities of language. I consider the theater an
elite art form, but not in the snobbish sense of the word. What I mean
is that when someone enters a theater he should sense a different atmos-
phere than he would in the cinema. A theater auditorium should be
almost like a temple. Anyone who deeply questions things is a religious
being. I tried to do this with all my plays.
1975
People are always asking why writers write, so then I get to thinking of all
the motivations that might compel a person to write. And I think that the
root of that in me is the desire to be loved, a lust for life. Maybe it’s also
a need to live through fleeting moments with intensity, a hidden force
that compels us to discover the secret of things. An imperious need to
go deep into our own cores, a passionate stand in the face of existence,
a compassion for human beings, for animals, for plants. In my play O
Verdugo [The Executioner], a character says that everything moves her: a
bone, the ashes of things, the corner of a room—everything is a reason to
be moved, to question, to ask what is never fully answered. For me, the
act of writing sometimes reveals insecurities, because the writer is a frag-
ile, insecure, anxious being who looks for answers to all life’s mysteries.
A lot of writers talk about the joy that the act of writing brings them.
For me writing provokes a distress, downright fear. It’s more or less the
feeling you get before going in for an operation. The morning of that
day puts a dark chill inside you. I’m astounded when I hear people say
they take pleasure in writing. For me it’s suffering, a suffering that I can’t
escape, and which terrifies me. I think writing is more about persisting,
HILST ON HILST: EXCERPTS FROM INTERVIEWS WITH THE AUTHOR … 161
existing outside ourselves, in others. It reminds me of a poem by Edna

St. Vincent Millay, in which she says, “Read me, do not let me die.”
The truth is that, facing death, no one is actually resigned to it. This is
why I think what compels me to write is the will to surpass myself, to go
beyond my wretched, finite condition.
There are people who say to me, “You need to keep your feet on
the ground,” or, “Your writing isn’t grounded,”—that sort of thing.
But what does it mean to be grounded? Do they mean to say I need
to be “attuned” to the earth? This gets me thinking that it’s better to
have your feel on the splendid surface of the brain, to be attentive to
the poetry that exists in everything and which isn’t always clearly com-
prehensible. Poetry, the work of art—they’re no man’s land, dark cor-
ners that require sensitivities “attuned” to our own in order for us to see
them illuminated. This is why so many poets and writers remain misun-
derstood for so long. Rimbaud and Joyce, for example, are in this cate-
gory. Because it’s useless to keep saying that poets and writers need to
be natural when they’re actually different, more attentive—they capture
the things and emotional states that others don’t see or feel. Because
they know there’s sacredness in everything. There’s a knowledge of the
matrix of things, a sort of dark pressure operating from within so that
the moment of revelation may emerge. So, I don’t understand it—many
people talk about how difficult it is to understand my prose work. But
everything is difficult, isn’t it? There’s a character of mine who says,
“Look, everything is difficult. Belch, right now. See?—you can’t. Scratch
the middle of your back—see, you can’t do it. It’s difficult, isn’t it?
Moving sideways while seated is extremely difficult, isn’t it?” So if you’re
writing by trying to “re-baptize” the word in some way, considering
your own flesh removed from all references is also very difficult, isn’t it?
I want to be read in depth and not as a distraction, because I don’t read
anyone else’s work to distract myself, but rather to understand, to com-
municate. I don’t want to be distracted. I think that’s the last thing that
you should ever ask of a writer: little novels to read on the tram, in the
car, on an airplane. It seems like people want to escape themselves in this
way, that they’re afraid of ideas, of the metaphysical expanse of a text, of
questioning, anyway… Stories—why? The newspapers are full of them.
So why look for them in books?
162 H. HILST
19773
I think that every effort I made in sequence—my theater, my fiction—
were attempts at approximation. A movement in the direction of the
other. But something tragic happened, because it was a complete failure,
the distance is still very far. As though communication ought to remain
impossible. In my plays, I try to transmit this way of feeling, of existing,
that I have in life. It’s an account of self-knowledge. And people think I
want to transmit an idea, the shape of an idea that can’t assemble itself.
In one of my plays I made concessions: the language is very clear. But
nothing happened. And with regard to my fiction work, all the commen-
tary is the same: that I write in Sanskrit. I can’t say that I deal with this
very well. It’s strange, but even though I’m a poet—and I know that I
am—I came to think that I wasn’t. I asked Anatol Rosenfeld, whom I
liked very much: “Why are people always thinking that I write only for
the erudite? I speak so clearly. I even talk about ass.” And he said to me:
“But your ass is terribly intellectual, Hilda.” I was despairing. I said to
myself: since nothing’s happening anyway, I want to write in my own
way, whatever I feel like. But I don’t understand, I don’t understand.
Regarding Agda, for instance, some people said they didn’t understand
anything about it from beginning to end. Which seems absurd to me.
Nonetheless, I write with words, with words from the Portuguese lan-
guage. And it’s the rhythm, principally, that’s important. It seems like
this is something that everyone can feel. There’s only one person, Nelly
Novaes Coelho, who knew how to speak about my book Kadosh. I owe
it to her that this text was introduced to American universities—it reas-
sured me. I felt like what I’d done wasn’t completely absurd. Finally, an
echo, I told myself, finally some resonance…Rhythm, in Agda, corre-
sponds to a denuding process. When you begin with this kind of effort,
this regressive process, and carry this regression to its extreme, and
when you give yourself to it completely, you can only await an answer
to appear before you, an answer from the Other. I can’t detach myself to
that degree, can’t give up these links to those who are like me. It could
never happen. And I’m accused of obscurantism at the same time I direct
this invitation to the Other.
[…]
All my texts can be summarized by this type of proposal: a sequence
of instances, a sequence of flashes, as though I were photographing the
vision I have of the Other, my vision of you. My collected works has only
one ambition: to display this vision of the Other.
19804
How will we be able, in the pages of a newspaper, to define a literary
endeavor that, in my view, can never stop being deeply ethical? The first
thing that I have to say, and you know this well, Léo, is that no writer sits
down to say, “Now I’m going to write a hermetic piece.” That’s crazy. It
just doesn’t happen! What does happen is that I am motivated to write
by an ethic compulsion, which in my opinion is the only important task
of a writer: remaining uncompromised. To me, refusing to go along with
the lies imposed all around us is a visceral attitude of the heart, the soul,
and the mind of the writer. The writer is the one who says, “No”: “No,
I will not participate in a well-armed scam to dupe the people.” At the
moment when I or any other writer resolves to say, to verbalize what
we think and feel, to express it before the Other, for the Other—that is,
the reader who attempts to read what I write—the writing undergoes an
essential transformation. […] An ethical transformation that leads to the
political: language and syntax become, intrinsically, political acts of non-
conformity with that which surrounds us and attempts to entangle us in
deception—in its seductive, shrewd, and well-armed lie.
[…] maybe after getting to know himself, this recipient of my mes-
sage of self-liberation will no longer tolerate the rupture with his prior
world, full of taboos and repressions, but one in which he could survive.
What if the full discovery of himself is a larger discovery than he can han-
dle? What if [literature] takes him to a level of intense self-discovery that
reveals itself to be intolerable for him?
[…]
Perhaps the best thing about my work, or rather, the most satisfy-
ing, would be the level of intensity that my characters attain. It wasn’t
by accident that I chose for my last book, Ficções, an epigraph from the
writer José Luís Mora Fuentes, who said, “Intensity, this was all I knew
how to do.” What I want is to “catch” the instant and not remain in
that moribund state of the soul, nor in that awful word that the philos-
opher Jankélévitch uses: amavissi [sic], the profound nostalgia d’avoir
un jour aimé (to have once loved). You will always have nostalgia for
164 H. HILST
having experienced, having been, having loved. To this you oppose a

state of passion without limits—it’s a complete magnetism, an intense
fervor. Why? Because in the process of passion, the notions of time, life,
instants—all are transfigured. My work is that instant, a second before
the arrow is released, the tension in the bow, the extreme tension, the
sun striking at the instant of the cut, and the swiftness of a knife that
with one sudden slash slices your neck.
19815
All this about the act of writing seemed to me for a long time to be
something very important. Let’s say that writing was a way I could con-
tribute to something, by which I mean, well, some sort of modification
or a kind of discovery within someone. Later on, you know, after fifty
years and everything else, inside myself I’m beginning to consider the
very validity of literature within a structure where the economic factor is
the most important, where power is exercised by politicians, you know,
and I recall what Henry Miller said once about what he thought of poli-
tics: a dirty, rotten, venal, corrupt, useless thing, you know? Totally use-
less. Seeing as we live in a time, in a century, in a moment when power is
held within circles where the written word can only enter with difficulty,
I think that the writer is becoming less and less important and thus, as a
consequence, so is the critic. Recently people even got annoyed with me
because I recalled that someone had said that the poet, and by extension
the writer, is useless and worth even less than a dead horse. So everyone
got really annoyed, the writers got really annoyed, right? But in this con-
temporary era I think that the written word, and the power the written
word used to have, decreases every day—in other words, whatever was
sacred, man’s rootedness, everything close to our concepts of the sacred.
But when I say sacred I don’t mean the exultation of the holy host,
that’s not what I mean, you know? The very sacred root of man is linked
to this unsayable thing that he doesn’t know. These things are being
lost…So, I don’t know, now I wonder about it, I really don’t believe in
the force of written word anymore, you know? I think that it got to a
total point of deterioration, of degeneration. The truth, anyway, is that I
don’t think that any writer is going to change man’s demented structure,
in other words, everything that’s happening on planet Earth, you know?
It’s such an immense absurdity.
19866
The other day, I don’t know where, I heard someone say that they wrote
because of their weakness, their personal weakness. I felt extremely
attracted to this. My God, it’s true! People always ask me why I write,
and a word that I hadn’t remembered, perhaps out of self-respect, is the
word “weakness.” The act of writing is a sensation of weakness rather
than strength. It’s a necessity so great that you have to see yourself
reflected in something, to know that someone is like you—you say well,
I’m writing, could it be that someone else is feeling what I’m feeling? A
need not to feel so isolated, because ever since I was a girl I always felt
inside me something different from others. A huge compassion that I felt
for people, for animals, for the world, for life. I would look at things
and the thought would come over me: what a shame, everything is so
astonishing, so beautiful, but later that tree will wither, the leaves will
fall, the dog that’s alive and beautiful here will soon be old and then will
die, and I, too, with everything that I imagine, think, and feel, I will
also end. I didn’t have sufficient strength, for instance, to hear about the
news, about illness, death, and misfortune, with any kind of dignity. I
was immediately bowled over, I became sick upon seeing that things no
longer existed, were no longer there. There was a stone there and now
it’s gone, but what happened to the stone?
[…]
When people ask me why I write in a way that other people can’t under-
stand, and about why everything is so complex, I tell them, but, my
God, it’s the process of life that’s so complex! I wouldn’t know how to
simplify this process to make it more comprehensible. It’s my own diffi-
cult process of existing that brings out this avalanche of words, some of
them a bit too baroque, and that mixes everything up. Because I think
that life overflows—it can’t be contained in some tidy teacup! So if you
fill a chalice and everything overflows, spills onto you, you get dirty, and
it’s of no use to make a nice, pleasant, pretty design. Usually, I talk about
normal things with other people, because I think that my worries are of a
seriousness that affects me so deeply that I can’t go around talking about
these feelings with other people. Many people say to me, “You seem like
such a jolly person, you cuss every other word, you fall down laughing,
and then your books are so desperate…” And so it’s only through the
book and the characters that you can show how far you’ve managed to
swim, to what depth you’ve managed to dive. I desire others to know
166 H. HILST
that there’s a tortuous path inside each one of us, and that you do
everything to express yourself in order to find brothers and sisters, and
at times you fail. So many times, the people whom I’d earnestly hoped
would understand my work say to me: “Hilda, unfortunately I couldn’t
really tell what it was about.” So I guess there are gradations of emo-
tions and perhaps I’m a person with an almost desperate intensity, and an
equally desperate lucidity. The writer is always speaking himself, revealing
himself in various, multiple ways through his characters. Every character
forms a part of you and you narrate yourself through each one. There are
times when you’re the icy one, the distanced one, the passionate one, the
childish one, the naïve one, the fool, the nut, and all of them together.
And the ways of speaking are also different. I have a great love for lan-
guage, for my language, which I find very beautiful.
19877
Order has always been very important to me. I wanted a certain geome-
try, this excited me, I found it beautiful. At the same time, there was the
huge disorder inside human beings and inside myself. I wanted to know
the root of this disorder. The concept of things also amazed me. For
example, you say “thing”—but what is a thing? Things are everything
and nothing. So some thing happens inside me to put me in a specific
position for writing. Along with this thing comes what you felt, what
you loved, read, and the ballast of schooling, of culture. Because it’s no
use saying, “No, writing has to be spontaneous.” Any damn fool can be
spontaneous.8 So I think literature comes from this conflict between the
order that you want and the disorder that you have.
[…]
Perhaps [my fiction] came out of this accumulation of disorder. An
accumulation of emotions. It all started with this will to order. Poetry is
related to mathematics because the words have to have meter, a rhythm.
So after the social upheaval of ’67 and ’68 here in Brazil, I began to
feel this urge to express myself to the Other. With poetry, I couldn’t get
through any more. My will to order couldn’t be contained by poetry. So
that’s how all my fiction emerged.
[…]
Ah, if people had any idea of how transitory…of how brief all this is.
When people start to write, they have a very strong desire to be visible.
This guy is somebody, I’m nobody—this desire to be someone in a shape

recognized by strait-laced society is very strong at the beginning. In
me, it began as a desire to be loved, of being inside the Other—because
the writer is very much motivated by this need to be loved. But later
I started having this specific awareness of the ephemeral. So I said, all
right, with this life that I have on earth, I’m going to do what I know
how to do. And so I make my contribution, but I never again had that
urge to be seen as “with it” or “ahead of the curve.” Because either I go
around laying on the fucking charm day and night, pounding the pave-
ment, going to universities and talking about how I’m the shit, or else
I write. What’s my task? It’s writing. And writing about what I believe:
I’m completely absorbed by every kind of emotion inside man. With the
soul.
19899
When you get to an extreme limit, you start to look for paths to salva-
tion. Many authors have indicated various paths. Alcoholism is one of
them. Another path is saintliness, but it’s already too late to turn this
wreck over to God. Saintliness…it’s best when taken up early. To be holy
is one of man’s nostalgias, but it’s difficult. Another path, an impressive
one, is laughter. In spite of seeming pathetic, it’s one of the paths to
salvation.
[…]
Man pursues a life that does not have much to do with what is most
essential in him, because he is always seeking to negate the final act,
which is death. The only thing of relevance would be for him to
stand facing the infinite, facing himself and God. The word “search”
already contains within it an elitist notion, but that’s exactly what man
seeks, simply because his daily dissatisfaction is itself an eternal will to
self-knowledge. You turn on the radio in the morning, it’s amazing: all
you hear about are bonds and certificates of deposit. The concept of
“money” has become absolutely sacred. Ever since the beginning, man
has done everything to conceal himself behind a mask, to deceive himself
into thinking he’s not a being that goes to his death. He doesn’t want to
think about that.
168 H. HILST
198910
I think that this special time for humanity might also be its most terrible
moment, because man today is capable of destroying the entire planet.
There ought to be a science of limits, of the possibility of non-invention,
of arriving at a point where we can no longer invent anything. Because
otherwise we’ll end up with the most absurd things, the most demented
and terrible things. It seems as though man has come to a moment when
he’s no longer familiar with the science of limits, he no longer knows
how to stop. And so he’s inventing nonstop, even at a time when genetic
engineering will come up with the most blatant absurdities, because
there are no criteria anymore. Man has come to a culminating point of
his despair and of his search for himself, but without having attained any-
thing. I don’t believe that, from here on, there’s any hope, or rather, that
there’s any real path to truth. I simply don’t believe it.
[…]
My theater came out of a time of emergency, in ’67, a time of politi-
cal repression. I felt compelled to communicate immediately with others.
Since there couldn’t be face-to-face communication, I wrote some plays,
all of them symbolic, because I really didn’t want to be taken prisoner, or
tortured, or have them rip out my fingernails….So, I wrote, by analogy,
various plays in which anyone would understand the things I could have
otherwise said in public protest. I wrote eight plays, and then I stopped.
It was just in the emergency of those times that I desired this immedi-
ate contact with people. But it didn’t work. People go to the theater to
enjoy themselves; no one goes to the theater to think. The business is
not based on doing things that way…getting people to think. Now they
have those radios that you can wear in your ear all the time, so that you
don’t have to think, and everyone walks around the street with one—
well this gives you an idea of the quality of theater that people are seek-
ing out these days. Man invented this device and put it in his ear and
now he no longer “hears” anything. Before, it was possible to walk down
the street, thinking. Now everyone lives in such tremendous fear of
thinking that people use these devices to drown out anything they might
dare to think. It’s the type of civilization in which the individual is afraid
of listening to himself, at all times.
199111
People get panicked when you speak frankly about sex. What do you
think a man and a woman say to each other in bed? He’s not going to
say that phrase that I’m always repeating: “Let me kiss your rosy orchid”
[laughter]. Well, if there’s a text that’s used in bed, in which words for
things below the belt are referred to by their natural names, then why
this dreadful fear? The other day a girl came in here who couldn’t stand
to hear the word pussy. She was auditorily uncomfortable. I became so
indignant about it that I just kept saying pussy the whole entire time.
She covered her ears and left.
199312
[I keep] twenty-seven dogs. They’re little mutts. Deep down, I have
the impression that I feel as helpless as they do before this turmoil both
inside me and outside me, which is never resolved. And dogs represent
very well this kind of helplessness. I identify with the figure of the vic-
tim, the animal victim. I identify with the horses drawing carts, I get very
emotional when I see them there, alone, imprisoned. I think that man
inhabits this mystery, and can’t explain this mystery of helplessness that
dogs symbolize so precisely.
[…]
I think that the writer is almost always completely present in the thing
he writes. Clearly, there are moments that aren’t part of his life, but I
believe that the writer is totalized in what he writes, and I don’t think
this is something particular to me. You go about unfolding your possi-
ble personalities, the characters have everything to do with a part of the
writer that was carried to an extreme evil, or beauty, or perfection. In the
novel The Obscene Madame D, for example, I’ve observed that the main
character is similar to me, although I am not devastated to the same
intensity that she is. Let’s say that I’ve managed to move through daily
life, which is something she couldn’t do. And since my work is always
a limit situation, it addresses some the most dangerous moments for a
human being, Senhora D ends up dead, and has a pretty tragic life, full
of questions. As a matter of fact, did you know? There are 394 questions
in that text.
170 H. HILST
199413
I have a very good friend called Job who’s a prospector. For twen-
ty-five years he has looked for diamonds, precious stones, riches—but
hasn’t found anything. The other day we were discussing the similari-
ties between us, and I recalled that story from the anthropologist Marcel
Mauss about an Amerindian festival called potlatch. The best transla-
tion for this Amerindian word is “the power of loss.” In a potlatch, the
Amerindians would display their riches, jewels, trophies, and then set
fire to it all—they’d simply destroy it. For them, the more riches some-
one destroyed, the more power they held. They did the opposite of rich
people today, who never stop buying things, but who never use up the
things they buy. Can you imagine Antônio Emírio buying a mansion
only to burn it?14
Interviewer: What does the potlatch myth have to do with your
writing?
HH: Everything. I’ve been writing for thirty years and I’ve pub-
lished almost thirty books. I’m continually displaying my riches, giving
over the best that I have, but everyone just throws away what I offer
them. With time I acquired this “power of loss” that Mauss observed
in the Amerindians. Job and I have the same fate. I can’t get used to
it. I console myself with by thinking of that phrase of Chesterton’s, it
says something like: “A man might be too fat in one place and too thin
in another.” My writing is thin for some, but fat for others. This is my
uniqueness.
199415
It would be great if there were some Maecenas. Businessmen who took
an interest in my work. I need a sensitive businessman to buy a book
project of mine, to be offered as a gift at the end of the year. I collected
fifty of my poems about love. It’s called Do amor – poesia escolhida (On
Love – Selected Poems). I proposed this, incidentally, to a friend of
mine, a banker in São Paulo. He replied: “You’re such a fool, Hilda. No
one reads poetry anymore. And banks weren’t created to put out books
of poems.” Then I said, “But you were so sensitive…” [In years past,
Hilda was a muse and enfant terrible of high society, through which she
circulated on the arms of businessmen, today in their sixties and sev-
enties.] I won’t say his name, because that wouldn’t go over well. He
responded, “These days I’m only sensitive after nine o’clock at night.”
So then I really felt like asking: “And if I suck your dick at ten, would
you get sensitive?” I published a crônica in which I told this story in
the Correio Popular de Campinas, where I write a Sunday column. The
bankers must all detest my poetry, because they live off the opposite of
poetry: money. It’s all they think about.
[…]
Regarding readership…I can tell you a very interesting story. Once I
went to a bookstore in Campinas to buy one of my books to give as a
present. I didn’t say who I was. I asked if the bookseller had a copy of
Com os meus olhos de cão (With My Dog-Eyes). He asked me: “Do you
read that woman, ma’am? She’s only read by professors. It’s amazing…
but we don’t have that book. From the sounds of it she fights so much
with the editors that we never have her books.” So then, Dante Casarini
[Hilda’s close friend and ex-husband], came over and asked, “You’re
going to buy your own book? Why don’t you ask the publisher for one?”
Then the man took my hands and kissed them, completely amazed. “So
you’re the woman who only the professors read…” It was very funny.
199816
I don’t understand the critics at all. Critics write such difficult things
about my work, the total opposite of what would help people under-
stand. It seems like they obscure everything. For years I wrote like crazy
without anyone understanding. I know who I am as a writer. I know per-
fectly well what kind of writer I am. But whether people read and under-
stand me is not for me to say.
[…]
What I wrote is so beautiful…I read it and I’m dumbstruck. How is it
possible to have made something so gorgeous and have no one under-
stand it? The time comes, when you get older, when you start to become
indifferent to things, nothing matters to you anymore. Not even fame. I
get to thinking about that passage in the Odyssey where Ulysses is in the
cave and the Cyclops asks, “Who are you?” And he tells him, “Nobody,
my name is Nobody.” That’s what I feel like: nobody, nobody. An astrol-
oger friend of mine said that in another life I was a whore. I think that’s
why in this life I’ve remained obscure, because in the past I was very
well-known as a whore [laughs].
172 H. HILST
199917
But now it [poetry] won’t come anymore. And it won’t come because I
don’t want it anymore. Like I said before, I’ve already written gorgeous
things. To hell with whoever doesn’t understand it. I don’t have any-
thing to do with it anymore. I don’t think that I live in a world that’s
mine. I must have fallen here by accident. I don’t understand why I
came to be born here on Earth. With extremely rare exceptions, I don’t
have anything to do with this world.
200118
I don’t know anything about my work. I only know that I wrote it. For
fifty years I could write all that I wanted to write. I never stopped, even
though people said that nobody read my work. Even I can’t explain what
I did. I wanted to be like Joyce, who knew how to talk about his Ulysses.
Everyone who writes in a different way is asked for explanations. But, for
me, everything comes from above. I’m only its interpreter. Of course I
made a huge effort, I worked a lot, but poetry is a divine talent, inexpli-
cable. We get sick, no, not sick, we get excited, fevered. It’s immediate.
Later everything comes along gradually, as a continuation of the initial
inspiration. It’s like the first verse of Cantares do sem nome e de partida
(Songs of the Nameless and of Departure): “May this love not blind me
and not follow me,”—it appeared just like that, out of nowhere…
200319
Interviewer: What is it like for a poet to witness another war, at the dawn
of this new millennium?
HH: It’s awful. Sometimes I think like Arthur Koestler, who believed
that only through some kind of mutation could man surpass his present
state of savagery and cruelty.
Notes
1. Silveira, Alcântara. “Palestra com Hilda Hilst.” Jornal de Letras, Rio de
Janeiro, February 1952.
2. Helena, Regina. “Hilda Hilst: suas peças vão acontecer.” Correio Popular,
Campinas, 1969.
3. Pisa, Clelia, and Maryvonne Lapouge Petorelli. Brasileiras: voix, écrits du

Brésil. Paris: Des Femmes, 1977.
4. Ribeiro, Léo Gilson. “Tu não te moves de ti, uma narrativa tripla de Hilda
Hilst.” O Estado de S. Paulo, São Paulo, 16 March 1980.
5. Neto, Juvenal, et al. “Hilda Hilst: fragmentos de uma entrevista.”
Pirâmide. Revista de Vanguarda, Cultura e Arte, FFLCH-USP, São
Paulo, 1981.
6. Mascaro, Sônia de Amorim. “Hilda Hilst, uma conversa emocionada
sobre a vida, a morte, o amor e o ato de escrever.” O Estado de S. Paulo,
São Paulo, 21 June 1986.
7. Abreu, Caio Fernando. “Deus pode ser um flamejante sorvete de cereja.”
Leia, São Paulo, January 1987.
8. Hilst is here repeating a maxim from Ezra Pound that she was fond of
quoting.
9. Salomão, Marici. “‘Amavisse’, o último livro sério da autora Hilda Hilst.”
Correio Popular, Campinas, 7 May 1989.
10. Coelho, Nelly Novaes. “Um diálogo com Hilda Hilst.” In: Coelho, N. N.
et al. Feminino singular: a participação da mulher na literatura brasileira
contemporânea. São Paulo: GRD; (Rio Claro, SP: Arquivo Municipal,
1989).
11. Rimi, Hussein. “Palavras abaixo da cintura.” Interview, São Paulo, n. 136,
April 1991.
12. Mafra, Inês. “Hilda Hilst: um coração em segredo.” Nicolau, Curitiba, n.
51, Year vii, November–December 1993.
13. Castello, José. “Potlatch, a maldição de Hilda Hilst.” O Estado de S.
Paulo, São Paulo, 30 October 1994.
14. Antônio Emírio de Moraes (1928–2014) was chairman of Votorantim, a
Brazilian conglomerate founded by his father. He was one of the wealthi-
est individuals in Latin America at the time of this interview.
15. Cardoso, Beatriz. “A obscena senhora Hilst.” Interview, São Paulo,
October 1994.
16. Zeni, Bruno. “Hilda Hilst.” Cult, São Paulo, n. 12, pp. 6–13, July 1998.
17. “Das sombras – entrevista.” Cadernos de literatura brasileira. Instituto
Moreira Salles, São Paulo, n. 8, October 1999.
18. Weintraub, Fabio, Sérgio Cohn, Ilana Gorban, and Marina Weiss.
“Os dentes da loucura.” Suplemento Literário de Minas Gerais, Belo
Horizonte, n. 70, April 2001.
19. Gouvea, Leila. “Entrevista – Hilda Hilst.” D.O. Leitura, ano 21, n. 5,
May 2003.
Index
A Crônica, 67, 69, 72, 73, 96, 97, 112,

Amavisse, 5, 10, 60, 66, 72, 79, 137, 149, 150, 171
83–86, 88, 173
Animality, 83
As aves da noite, 3, 36, 38, 43, 45, E
51–53, 55 Eroticism, 20, 61, 101
B G
Bataille, George, 7, 8, 60, 66, 67, 80, Gender, 21, 142
82, 99, 113, 122, 139 Genre, 20, 36, 40, 61, 65, 76, 77, 81,
Baudelaire, Charles, 77, 106, 130 85, 97, 109–111, 137, 139, 140,
Becker, Ernest, 79, 139 148
Beckett, Samuel, 7, 35, 51, 139 Gnosticism, 10, 76–79, 82, 85, 87,
Bourgeois values, critique of, 10, 98 88, 91
God, 22, 26, 27, 35–37, 45, 46, 50,
65–67, 71, 72, 75, 79, 82, 84,
C 87, 88, 101, 109, 122–124, 148,
Camus, Albert, 75, 78, 80, 82, 86, 165, 167
88, 89
Censorship, 6, 47
Chesterton, G.K., 8, 170 H
Contos d’Escárnio, Textos Grotescos, 5, History, 22, 28, 38, 44, 76, 96–102,
6, 61, 73, 138 104, 105, 145
Coup d’état, Brazilian, 10 Holocaust, 38
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 175

Literatures of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56318-3
176 Index
Human condition, 7, 76, 77, 82, 83, Metaphysics, 10, 41–43, 61, 62, 79,
88, 116, 127 87, 88
death, 9, 21, 34, 35, 46, 49, 50, 63,
64, 69, 70, 72, 105, 110, 120,
121, 124–126, 136–138, 143, N
160, 165, 167 Nation and nationalism, 98, 100
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 34, 44, 80, 104
I
Ideology, 21, 44, 117 O
Obscene Madame D, The, 4, 9, 61, 68,
71, 73, 82, 98, 136, 157, 169
J Obscenity, 10, 82, 83, 88, 110, 111,
James, William, 76, 77, 80 152
Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 79, 82, 83, 90, Ohno, Massao, 6, 90
163 O visitante, 3, 4, 10, 19–22, 28
Joyce, James, 7, 76, 139, 161, 172
P
K Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 10, 19, 20, 25, 28
Kardec, Alan, 89 Poète maudit, 78, 112
Kierkegaard, Søren, 80 Poetics, 37, 41, 43, 51, 64, 107, 150
Proust, Marcel, 80, 105
L
Letters from a Seducer, 5, 9, 69, 98, R
106, 113, 138–141, 143, 144 Religion, 77, 78, 80, 87, 88, 91, 124
Lispector, Clarice, 1, 9, 28, 29, 89, Rimbaud, Arthur, 72, 77, 161
115, 118, 127, 137, 150 Russell, Bertrand, 80, 83, 87, 88, 91,
Lorca, Federico García, 21, 29 110
Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook, 70, 71
S
M Sexuality, 20, 21, 29, 81, 110, 124
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 105 queer, 10, 20–24, 26, 28
Mathematics, 71, 78, 83, 85–87, 110, Spiritualism, 76, 77, 89
166 Spirituality, 6, 121, 122
Metaphysical, 10, 36, 40, 41, 61, 64,
65, 71, 76, 79, 83, 87, 88, 117,
124, 160, 161
Index 177
T W
Theater, 3–5, 10, 12, 20, 28, 34, 35, With My Dog-Eyes, 5, 9, 10, 67, 69,
37–44, 47, 52, 53, 60, 61, 77, 71–74, 78–80, 83, 85, 87, 89,
96, 160, 162, 168 90, 98, 113, 171
Translation, 2, 8, 9, 11, 53, 73, 74, Woolf, Virginia, 105
79, 104, 112, 138, 140, 147–
149, 152–155, 157, 170
Tu não te moves de ti, 21

(Literatures of The Americas) Adam Morris, Bruno Carvalho - Essays On Hilda Hilst-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Literatures of The Americas) Adam Morris, Bruno Carvalho - Essays On Hilda Hilst-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS

Series Editor: Norma E. Cantú

Between Brazil and

“Essentially unknown outside her native Brazil, Hilda Hilst is regarded in

More information about this series at

Essays on Hilda Hilst

Literatures of the Americas

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937914

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

Introduction: Who’s Afraid of Hilda Hilst? An Author

Part I Hilst on Stage

A Brazilian Teorema: Queering the Family in Hilda Hilst’s

Is the Word Alive? An Inquiry into Poetics and

Part II Obscenity and the Human Condition

Figurations of Eros in Hilda Hilst 59

Hilda Hilst, Metaphysician 75

Part III Hilst in National and Global Context

A Nation on the Ground Floor: The Face of Brazil,

When “the Life of Sentiments Is Extremely Bourgeois”:

Part IV Hilst in Translation

Translating Brazil’s Marquise de Sade 135

Derelict of Duty 151

Hilst on Hilst: Excerpts from Interviews with the Author,

About the Editors

Adam Morris is a writer, translator, and scholar. He has translated

Institute, the Programs in Latin American Studies and Urban Studies,

Deneval Siqueira de Azevedo Filho Universidade Federal Do Espírito

Adam Morris and Bruno Carvalho

Abstract Among Brazilian writers, scholars, and critics, Hilda Hilst

© The Author(s) 2018 1

provocative and sometimes hermetic, her literature elicits a constant ten-

Keywords Modernism · Theater · Brazil · Poetry · Obscene

Although Hilst’s extraordinary erudition and uncommon d ­ evotion to lit-

poems, Presságio (Presage), was published in 1950. Another volume of

Notwithstanding her remarkable literary achievement, Hilst remained

In Hilst’s own estimation, she belonged in the company of other out-

Hilst might have judged herself comparable to James Joyce or Samuel

Hilst, a differential desire supersedes a deferential attitude. In 1986 she

Despite Hilst’s constant remonstrations, her talents would indeed

unanimously acclaimed Brazilian contemporaries such as Clarice

As Hilst continues to capture the attention of a broader international

In the final pair of essays, two of Hilst’s translators, John

BIBLIOGRAPHY: HILDA HILST

Contes sarcastiques – fragments érotiques. Trans. Maryvonne Lapouge-Pettorelli.

David William Foster

Abstract Hilst’s plays were written between 1967 and 1969, when

Keywords Hilda Hilst · Queer theater · Pier Paolo Pasolini

© The Author(s) 2018 19

period from the point of view of prevailing left-wing resistant ideologies:

the impending surprise arrival of Corcunda, whom he says he has met on

MARIA (serious and ironic):

The things you say!17

Nevertheless, Ana hectors her daughter about fulfilling her matrimonial

MARIA (sternly): You never conformed to old age (approaching her)

MARIA (coming in to arrange the table):

So many useless words.

MAN (getting up):

So much the better it was Ana and not me.

A flower for a man, can you imagine?

The wife might start to wonder

Abstract  Among Brazilian writers, scholars, and critics, Hilda Hilst

Keywords  Modernism · Theater · Brazil · Poetry · Obscene

Although Hilst’s extraordinary erudition and uncommon d evotion to lit-

Abstract  Hilst’s plays were written between 1967 and 1969, when

Keywords  Hilda Hilst · Queer theater · Pier Paolo Pasolini

25. “MARIA: O satanás do encanto! É o que tu vês /(aponta Ana) Nessa que

Abstract  Hilst’s play As aves da noite (Nightbirds 1969) stages the

Keywords  Hilst · Theater · Poetry · Lyric

Poetics and Theater: A Form for Hearing,

In the Supposed Carcass of a Mollusk

JEWELLER (to the poet): Go on… this could give us

5. Silviano Santiago’s observations on postmodernity will not be explored in

Abstract  This chapter explores Hilda Hilst’s complex eroticism, which