Stones and colors: transfi gurations of blackness and the circular journey in Evocações

Abstract

Through the use of the alchemical principle of transfiguration, the poet Cruz e Sousa combines the polarities of art and life, creator and creature, the African deserts and the icy North Pole, synthesized in images derived from the colorful opal. In the poet’s attempt to transfigure himself, this principle also articulates the poetic subject’s inner journey in the work Evocações, as well as the genre transition from prose poem to poetic prose, oscillating as the colors of twilight. This study focuses on the analysis of the opening prose poem called “Iniciado”, with special emphasis to its first paragraph, which serves as a ciphered prelude to the totality of a diffuse plot, unfolded throughout the 33 texts that comprise the cited book. In this first paragraph, the poetic subject transgresses the strict sequence of alchemical transformations of the Opus Magnum when he moves the final stage of the rubedo to the beginning, and attempts to divert from the primordial phase of the nigredo, hidden in the ending of his aesthetic operation. This inversion is analogous to that of the traveling poet, who escapes from his first