114
J os é
M i g u el
W isni k
The big rabbit pulled out of the top hat was, therefore, the revelation that, in poetry, syntax is semantics, and that the corrosive irony about the disconnected character of the desires takes place, in the poem, by way of a choreography whose underlying order lies in the movement of the phrases and the punctuations. The subordination and coordination, the hypotaxis and parataxis (if we wish to be more technical, but at the same time more specious with the contextual
“The class flows according to its articulations and associations, self-correcting itself in progress, like a waterwheel connected to an unknown spring
”
danger of intimidation), were saying things, in their ways of opposing one another. To cap off the poem’s entirely ironic construction, the only subject, in the first period, whose amorous object was a zero (“Lili who didn’t love anyone”)
appears
at
the
end of the second and last sentence as the subject of the verb of getting married with someone whose name is J. Pinto Fernandes, “who had not entered the story.” Unlike the series of first
names of unfortunate physical people launched into their paratactic diaspora (João, Teresa, Raimundo, Maria...), J. Pinto Fernandes is an abbreviation followed by a double last name, with its connotations of a legal firm or commercial business, while also bearing an insidious phallic suggestion – Pinto* – bereft of lyricism. It is with a certain effort and considerable delay that I am writing here this summary of my already distant first class, even
*
Pinto in Brazilian Portuguese slang can also refer to the male reproductive organ.—Trans.