Connie Bloomfield, ‘Pornographic Ovid, grotesque translations, and proto-surrealism in nineteenth-century Brazil: Bernardo Guimarães’ A Origem do Mênstruo’

‘Pornographic Ovid, grotesque translations, and proto-surrealism in nineteenth-century Brazil: Bernardo Guimarães’ A Origem do Mênstruo‘

The erotic poem ‘A Origem do Mênstruo’ [The Origin of Menstruation], published in 1875 by the nineteenth-century Brazilian Romantic poet Bernardo Guimarães, claims to be a translation of a translation of a lost Ovidian aetiology, unearthed in the Pompeiian excavations. Whilst this labyrinthine Ovidian reception is fictitious, Guimarães’ poem itself also has an extraordinary reception history: it is fragmented by censorship, passes between marginalised groups, both elite and popular, and survived for almost a century through oral performance and clandestine chapbooks, before being rediscovered by the avant-guard poets and translators of the 20th century as a key precursor to surrealism. In a parodic integration of elements from across Ovid’s corpus to Virgil, Lucretius, and Homer, the poem imparts the origin of menstruation: a comic episode recounting Venus’ unfortunate mishap during some intimate grooming. This peculiar poem, which might at first seem a light-hearted scatological game, is a brilliant fusion of the breadth of Ovid’s work, which, through a political exploration of Guimarães’ own relationship to the Brazilian canon, both directly engages with and disfigures contemporary receptions of the classical tradition. ‘A Origem do Mênstruo’ thus opens an illuminating window onto the subtle postcolonial literary politics of classical literature in nineteenth-century Brazil.