// // João Cabral de Melo Neto was a Brazilian poet, writer, and diplomat. Known as the “engineer of poetry,“ he was part of the third generation of Brazilian modernism: the Generation of 45. Although his affection for the Parnassianism, Melo Neto was one of the predecessors of Surrealism in Brazil, concerned about the life and suffering of Brazilian people, especially those from the northeastern region, where he grew up, such as the difficult lives of farm workers trying to survive in dry lands, while they hope to have a land of their own before death comes. JCMN is considered the most important poet of the post-war generation, and his “The Death and Life of a Severino” (Morte e Vida Severina) poem is agreed to be one of the greatest literary works from Brazil, in which the author portrayed the saga of a northeastern migrant who left the Sertão (dry lands) towards the southern cities in Brazil in pursuit of a better life.

Daily Space (Espaço Jornal in Portuguese) addresses the monotony of man being consumed by work, without enjoying his life. Melo Neto evokes images in his word choices in this poem. The orange represents the sun, which goes down through the day while the shadow eats the orange fruit, until sunset, spreading its color in the reflections of the river and the sea. In the third stanza, the poet portrays a life of simple ambitions, having a partner and food, but fulfilled only in the world of dreams. In the last stanza, the author dialogues with dying in vain, a recurrent theme in his poems.

For João Cabral de Melo Neto, every word has weight, is a stone, must be valid, and must be spoken in order to have meaning. Therefore, four stanzas beginning with the statement “It is mineral” point to the image that, once in written form, everything becomes concrete. Paper is concrete, “flowers, plants, fruits, animals”, that is, living forms that will die, but that are preserved and last for the afterlife when put into a “state of word”. And even abstractions, such as “horizon, name” also gain weight when converted into words.

In the commentary to “Daily Space,” Richard Zenith discusses Cabral's transformatory poetry, “Cabral's project is to re-create the world, taking the things—both abstract and concrete-that are common to all men and turning them around, making them uncommon, conferring on them the dimension they lacked” (452). This idea of recreation and defamiliarization is explored in Adam Phillips essay, “Dead or Alive,” as a way to address the question of aliveness,

Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist literary critic, wrote in his famous essay 'Art as Technique' (1917), 'habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife and the fear of war… [art, through its defamiliarizing practices] exists that one may recover the sensation of life.. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself, and must be prolonged.'… Art, in this sense, unsettles and disrupts preconceptions; it waylays our anticipation, and it does this by increasing the difficulty and length of perceptions; art resists and sabotages our familiar habits of perception (Phillips 2).

Phillips continues by discussing the drive to familiarize and Frued's “destructive drive” as being instincts that lead to the feeling of deathliness, and the idea of language and words being the way that a person can give a nudge to create language anew in aliveness, “but what common sense is, by the same token, reminding us of is that language that is or seems alive can be, or sometimes seems, a comparative rarity; aliveness in language may be in short supply, and so we may wonder what it is in ourselves that might want to deaden language; or to put it the other way around, what is the fear of aliveness in language a fear of?… There is a defense against aliveness in language. And the study of literature, we might say, is always broaching this conflict between the aliveness and deathliness, or deadliness, of language” (5-6).

This conflict between aliveness and deadness in language is something that is at the forefront of the exploration of poetry and translation. While reading “The Scandalous Life of César Moro,” this question of aliveness and deadliness was at the forefront when a fellow classmate said something along the lines of, “I don't think we are supposed to make sense of it, I think by trying to analyze it we are missing the point.” This conflict between literary exploration and preservation of aliveness is a conflict that stands at the forefront of literary criticism, as commented on by Berlin in Roots of Romanticism, “…it is a process of perpetual forward creation, and all schemas, all generalisations, all patterns imposed upon it are forms of distortion, forms of breaking. When Wordsworth said that to dissect is to murder, this is approximately what he meant;” (Berlin 139). This idea makes us consider how we approach poems without murdering them.

The solution I want to explore is the idea of nudging language on an individual level. Phillips contemplates the idea of how people can live a life alive and the question of what might make us feel like we haven't lived or aren't currently living, “Indeed, what the nudge of language-the choosing and creating our language-and the sense of having lived have in common is the sense of having to satisfy what is taken to be an essential individual need; partly of making my language and my life my own, whatever that might mean” (8). Within this idea, he utilizes Winnicott and his paper, “The Use of an Object,” to explore play and how play relates to the “True Self” as, “The noncompliant self of spontaneity and desire and singularity, the self committed to play rather than to adaption or, indeed, to compliance, involves no more and no less than collecting together the details of the experience of aliveness” (11).

In order to put this idea of aliveness into practice, I am choosing to not engage in a close reading of João Cabral de Melo Neto's “Daily Space,” and “Psychology of Composition (VII),” and instead, I am going to share what I wrote directly after reading his poems. As Phillips ends his essay, “What, if anything, is it possible to do to ensure that you are actually living? In the absence of any hard and fast information and advice-and in the absence of any kind of consensus (or shared criteria) about what it is to live and to have lived-all we can do, if we are interested, is ask these questions and see what, if anything, we want to do,” I end this post passing this question off to you. This is what I choose to do to feel alive - to share my thoughts and response to the the poems, by nudging language in a way that preserves my sense of aliveness within.

the march snow storm
stops and the
mourning dove returns
its spot perched
upon the deck
railing overlooking a
man-made yard
every once in a while
their feathers ruffle in
the wind or perhaps
jostle in response
facing outward the
nearly circular
neck continues around
in an impossible
looking way and antoher
feather flick makes
the nearly 360 degree
neck look more
fitting
flying off in an
instant - a
moment of expansion
leaves the dove
looking like an eagle
its broad wings
expand larger
and longer
than you think
a mourning could
spread -
the snow starts
to drip
cold enough to cover
but not to last
just like the instant
of the bird flying away
a longer but still
the same
flight of life
from one state
to another
like when you
watch the moon
you don't see it
moving but as
soon as you
look away its
transformation across
the sky -
a cloud that covers
the sun
for what feels infinite
because you don't
tend to notice
the sun until it
isn't there to
greet you -
….
(excerpt from a much longer poem I wrote in response to “Daily Space” and “Psychology of Composition”)

Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton Univ. Press, 2001.

Miranda, A. (n.d.). João Cabral de Melo Neto. Antônio Miranda. Retrieved March 26, 2025, from http://www.antoniomiranda.com.br/poesia_ingles/joao_cabral_de_melo_neto.html

Phillips, Adam. “Dead or Alive.” Raritan, vol. 42, no. 4, 2023, pp. 1–14.