“Não vi teu rosto...” : as imagens da morte e o desconhecido em Dora Ferreira da Silva

Abstract

In order to explore the theme of death, which will also be related to the poetic making, Dora Ferreira da Silva works with specific images in several poems, sometimes bringing mythical characters as theme agents, such as Orpheus and Persephone. An example occurs when she addresses the issue of metalanguage within the poetic text. In that sense, the myth of Orpheus will recur in her work. The fact that Dora has translated Jung's work, whose thinking is guided by unconscious emanations, stressed the symbolic weight of her poems. As reported in interviews, the poet, who lived in São Paulo, begins to write under the influence of her father, who also wrote poems. However, she did not get to know him because of his early death. Thus, strongly marked by the unknown, as she herself said in interviews, Dora works with the question of death in several poems, in which antithetical elements make up, outlining a different way of looking death. In one of the first poems dedicated to her father, she says, "Não vi teu rosto./ Mas teu poder a cada manhã nascia / para morrer nos carros de ouro do crepúsculo." Thus, we try to investigate what images the writer refers to talk about the theme of death. Thinking about it, I try to establish the relationship between the cycles of death, life, poetry and myth of Persephone, and observe how the cycle of death / life, Persephone, occurs in Orpheus / Eurydice. For the development of this theme, it was necessary to read Dora essays about the mystical poets to understand the need for integration with the darkness, to view the relationship between light and shadow in her poems. Similarly, it was important to rescue the theories of Gilbert Durand, both when theorizes Diurnal and Nocturnal regime, and to analyze what he calls the latent and open to talk about the presence of myth in literature. In the relationship between the opposites, in the following verses of the poem “Ao sol”, “Naufragas na noite/ em pompas de luz e imensidade”, there is an example in which light and darkness are in conjunction as a source of the poem. Thus, the poetry of Dora Ferreira da Silva can be seen in this perspective, light and shadows symbols because to talk about the sun she had to talk about the night. The research is also based on the poetry of mitonas of Octavio Paz, Emil Staiger and Ana Maria Lisboa de Melo.