TY - JOUR T1 - Egitos e Mesopotâmias, Caldeias e Babilônias JF - Luso-Brazilian Review JO - Luso-Braz Rev SP - 168 LP - 176 DO - 10.3368/lbr.55.2.168 VL - 55 IS - 2 AU - Gustavo Rubim Y1 - 2018/12/01 UR - http://lbr.uwpress.org/content/55/2/168.abstract N2 - This study takes as its point of departure famous remarks written by Murilo Mendes prior to the publishing of Jorge de Lima’s Invenção de Orfeu in 1952 in order to highlight the friction between this long poem and the critical discourse shaped by Brazilian modernism, a movement characterized by the prominence of ethno-literary interpretations that center on the nation and Brazilian national peculiarities. Murilo Mendes emphasizes interpretive difficulties that point to a poetic form that does not deny, fight, or even oppose modernity itself, but that blurs its meanings as far as a criterion of creativity and literary comprehension. Projecting poetry on the one hand as a means unto itself, regardless of a historic point of view, and on the other as complex language experimentation constitute two of the main poetic operations found within Invenção de Orfeu, a poem that obscures what is understood as modernity and thwarts any attempt at orthodox modernist appropriation and its cultural imperatives. ER -