“Aperto-lhe a mão”: Mario de Andrade reads Francisca Júlia and Julia Cortines

Abstract

Mário de Andrade always understood that “by following the old poets, the modernists are so new.” The attentive reader, eager to follow aesthetic resources, appropriating forms and good solutions, leaves marks between the lines and on blank pages, in the footnotes and margins of the many pages where they seek to verify the poetic rigor of Parnassianism. They extract possibilities, reject many others, and make their poetry take shape through dedicated study and an affection for good versification. Approaching the formative readings of the São Paulo writer offers access to a dense and quite interesting framework of poetic matrices, as it reveals the path of a modernist engaged with these readings long after the Week of 1922, as marginal notes dated from that period allow us to affirm. This dialogue invites and greatly unsettles us when we realize the significant exchange established with Francisca Julia and Julia Cortines, fundamental figures in the production of our Parnassianism, although little celebrated at the time — and throughout the years that followed.