Author: スエナガ エウニセ Suenaga, Eunice

Annotation: This presentation aims to analyze the unique haiku (haikai) style of a Brazilian poet named Guilherme de Almeida (1890-1969), one of the organizers of the Modern Art Week in São Paulo in 1922, who created his own style of haikai in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite not being the first to introduce the haiku to Brazil, nor the one who first wrote the haiku in Portuguese, he is the most famous one, and consequently contributed enormously for the spreading of this poetry form in the country. In his article titled “My haikais” published in 1937, Almeida showed his great appreciation for the haiku and made efforts to demonstrate why this Japanese verselet can be imported to the Portuguese language literature. He argued that there are several similarities between the Japanese verselet and Portuguese poetry and established strict rules for his haikai writings: a tercet composed of 575 syllables, along with title and rhymes. His proposed rules were followed by many poets, however the concept that the authentic haiku does not have title nor rhyme is progressively becoming widely known after the formation of the group called Grêmio Haikai Ipê in 1987. Thus almost nobody follows Almeida’s rules nowadays. Nonetheless, his efforts to spread haikai in Brazil are widely recognized as highly influential together with other poets who followed him, for instance Haroldo de Campos, Millôr Fernandes, Paulo Leminski and many more.

Keywords: International Haiku, Brazilian Portuguese Haikai, Guilherme de Almeida.

Pages in journal: 186 - 191