Our New CLAIS Fellow Max Hidalgo & His Love for Haroldo do Campos
Max Hidalgo Nácher is Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at Universitat de Barcelona (UB). He graduated in Journalism, and in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the UB, and completed a master’s degree in Lettres, Arts et Pensée Contemporaine at the Université Paris VII (Denis Diderot), under the supervision of Julia Kristeva. He earned his PhD from the UB in 2013 with his dissertation El problema de la escritura en el campo intelectual francés (1945-1975) under the supervision of Nora Catelli. He has undertaken research investigations at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario (2013), Universidade de São Paulo (2015 and 2017), Harvard University (2016), Fundação Haroldo de Campos (2018) and École Normale Supérieure (2021.) Along with Fernando Larraz and Paula Simón, he has codirected the journal Puentes de crítica literaria y cultural. His research encompasses the poetics of Modernism, the circulation of Literary Theory since the second half of the 20th century, and the writing of exiled republicans from the 1939 Spanish Civil War.
What was your pathway to visiting Yale and what will you be working on here?
I came to Yale thanks to the José Castillejo Grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. This grant will allow me to focus on a research entitled “Haroldo de Campos’ intellectual networks and the circulation of literary theory: travels, correspondences, textual constellations” about the Brazilian poet and critic Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003). Since 2017, I have been working in his library (composed of 21,000 volumes written in 36 languages) and reconstructing his intellectual networks: Max Bense, Umberto Eco, Roman Jakobson, Julia Kristeva, Severo Sarduy. Haroldo de Campos cultivated epistolary writing and was always willing to connect with writers and intellectuals at the forefront of their respective national spaces.
Can you tell us a bit more on Haroldo de Campos?
He is a fascinating figure I came across almost by chance, participating in a congress on Roland Barthes in São Paulo in 2015. Browsing his library, I discovered that he was an avid reader of literary theory who, from ideas linked to anthropophagy (Oswald de Andrade) and deconstruction (Derrida), proposed a rereading of the Brazilian literary tradition and a revaluation of the Baroque.
What do you find more fascinating about him?
Figures like him make us question our geographical and temporal imagination and rethink the space of World literature. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, “the international circulation of ideas”.
Can you give us an overview of your project?
My research has three main axes: the study of Haroldo de Campos’ library, the reconstruction of his intellectual networks, and the study of the problem of translation in his work. Haroldo was a translator of poetry. He translated from English, Russian, Italian, Latin, Provençal, Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew. My project is part of a more general investigation on the circulation of literary theory from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, especially in the French, Spanish, Argentinean and Brazilian contexts. The study of these questions allows us to question our temporal and geographical imagination and propose new ways of thinking about history and the archive.
Why did you decide to come to Yale?
The main reason is the presence of Professor K. David Jackson, one of the world leading specialists on Haroldo de Campos. Professor Jackson organized a meeting at Yale in 1999 dedicated to him on his seventieth birthday. Second, the archives and bibliographic holdings Yale keeps. The Beinecke Library possesses crucial documents, such as his correspondence with Ezra Pound and other authors; the magazines Noigandres (1952-1962), and other documents of interest related to him and his brother Augusto de Campos. In addition, Yale keeps the correspondence between Haroldo de Campos and Emir Rodriguez Monegal, a former professor at Yale.