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Issue 27
Translation Previews and New Releases

From Secret Poetics, translated by Rebecca Kosick

  • by Hélio Oiticica
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  • September, 2023

The first English-language translation of the “secret” poetry of Hélio Oiticica uncovers a crucial chapter in the development of one of Brazil’s most significant twentieth-century artists.

Between 1964 and 1966, in the first years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems, entitled Secret Poetics, and reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his artistic practice. Despite his global fame as a founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as neoconcretismo, his collaborations with major Brazilian artists and writers (Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Ferreira Gullar, etc.), and his influence across a range of disciplines (including painting, film, installation, and participatory art), Oiticica’s “secret” poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This edition, featuring the original texts in facsimile reproductions along with English translations and accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry to Oiticica’s thinking on participation, sensation, and memory. 

 

Secret Poetics will be published in November 2023 by Winter Editions.

 

From Secret Poetics

 

From Secret Poetics, translated by Rebecca Kosick

 

August 4, 1964

 

The smell,
new touch,
restarting of the senses,
                           absorption,
                           memory,
oh!,

come what may,
             what shall be,
             will become,
             will be
fistful of future,
                                      apprehension.

 

From Secret Poetics, translated by Rebecca Kosick

 

The shadow,
possible re-encounter,
old encounter,
just;
            hey!
                           lost beauty
there’s so much, dear,
needed,
just;
          secret desire
inexpressible,
unspeakable,
just, in the incommunicable.

 

August 4, 1964

 

From Secret Poetics, translated by Rebecca Kosick

 

What was,
stayed,
sediment of memory.

August 5, 1964

 

From Secret Poetics, translated by Rebecca Kosick

 

The spinning,
becoming (unbecoming),
the implication of memory,
remembering,
the forgetting or the unforgetting,
persistence of the past,
future,
the experience of the now,
always being,
                                        oh!
oh what?,
                           the always,
the nothing,
                                        the fire.

 

September 1, 1964

 

From Secret Poetics, translated by Rebecca Kosick

 

Bitter taste of what’s sweet,
I felt,
I feel,
the whip that wounds,
caresses;

pain,
bitterness of the caress,
body that burns —
inside;

memory of pleasure,
leisure of love,
what is,
what will be,
                         oh —
                                      the want
impossible to stop wanting,
making or unmaking,
being;

love
sword that wounds,
sugar that sweetens — ;

bile.

March 30, 1966

 

Secret Poetics by Hélio Oiticica, and translated via Rebecca Kosick, is available via Soberscove Press.
Translated by Rebecca Kosick
  • Hélio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) was among twentieth-century Brazil’s most significant artists, with a multifaceted practice that included painting, sculpture, installation, performance, filmmaking, and writing. Oiticica was a leading member of Grupo Frente (an association of concrete artists) and, in 1959, he co-founded the neoconcrete movement with artists and poets including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Ferreira Gullar. Oiticica was a 1970 Guggenheim Fellow, and today his work is held in collections across the world, including at MoMA and the Tate Modern.

  • Rebecca Kosick

Rebecca Kosick is a poet, translator, and co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute at the University of Bristol (UK), where she is also Senior Lecturer in Comparative Poetry and Poetics. Kosick is the author of the monograph Material Poetics in Hemispheric America (Edinburgh University Press) and the poetry collection Labor Day (Golias Books). Her poems and translations have appeared in literary venues such as The Recluse, Fence, and The Iowa Review. She was born in Michigan.

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