Keep the ridgeline, not the fainting plains

Brazilian Competition for Feature and Medium-length

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1. Manter a linha da cordilheira Sem o desmaio da planície | Keep the ridgeline, not the fainting plains
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2. Walter Carvalho

Since his debut with the book “Word” (Palavra) in 1963, that put him on the top of the country’s literature, the poet from Rio de Janeiro Armando Freitas Filho refuses the reverence. He writes as if he is fishing for his findings, manuscripts in big notebooks that leave a large open room for the almost endless corrections. Confessed admirer of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto – “the ‘Fla-Flu’ of brazilian poetry”, according to him – Armando believes that poetry “is a chamber art, not symphonic” and that it “does not cure, but increases the wounds”, while the poet wants everyday to deny the certainty of death.