LITERARY AFTERNOON WITH RENATO SUTTANA

By Emanuel Esdras Gualberto

"Anarchic in content, rigorous in form." This is one of the ways in which the poetry of professor, writer and translator Renato Suttana was described, who on October 21st participated as a guest in the Literary Afternoon of PET Letras UFGD. Suttana is the author of several books, essays and publications, and this afternoon we had a very rich dialogue with him about his productions and his creative process.

In some of his works, political criticism is highlighted, such as in Bichos Politicos, Fauna & Cia and Na Glote. As much as the poems make clear his dissatisfaction with the political crisis of recent years, the author reveals that he always wears many masks when writing. Masks are the great love of the most profound poets, who wisely use them to bring their personal imaginations to life. As they deepen their reflection on poetry, they are able to mix, invent and build new specific resources to make it. Even though surrounding the same themes and concerns, other new animals are born from the author's intertextuality.

In the early 90's, he began to use animals in his poems, emphasizing perceptions of their characteristics. In 2005, with the aim of contributing to the literary education of students in the Guarapuava Letters course, he put together the poems and created the book Bichos. Soon after, many other animals were already part of his productions, and in a way of trying to deconstruct this invasion, he writes Bichos Imaginários, which, as well analyzed by Robson (2020), in his work Bichos de Pensamento: the meditative lyric of Renato Suttana , are poem animals, which only exist as the language can say them. That is, language bugs, born from the author's intertextuality. For him, transcribing them as a poem is a way of saying what one is. Here is the human animal.

When asked about his references and reading history by Professor Célia, the poet remembers that he started in the universe of reading when he was still a teenager, reading comic books. Poetry appeared in his life in a “disturbing way” through the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who left him dazzled by the possibility of written expression, which until that moment he had not tried. After that, he moved to Brazilian literature with Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and the most recent ones, Francisco Carvalho, Alberto da Cunha Melo, José Régio, Carvalho Junior and Emmanuel Santiago. Still in Portuguese poetry, he discovered Mário de Sá Carneiro, of which he became a great fan and a regular reader, giving him due credit this afternoon for helping him realize that meter is not a rule, but of a rhythm that drives the poem's movement. As Quintana said, “this is why poems have rhythm, so that we can breathe. Anyone who writes a poem saves a drowning man.”

In time, we still had the satisfaction of receiving, donated by the professor, five books of his authorship for our collection and five more (the same titles) for us to draw. Namely, the titles: Animals, Economy lesson, Out of reach, Necessary forgetting and Hard lesson. We closed the meeting by thanking the distinguished presence of Professor Suttana, congratulating him on his birthday celebrated recently and on the motion of recognition at the City Council of Dourados. It was certainly a very rich meeting for our training and for our time at PET. We were able to get to know better the trajectory of a close professor, with literary experience, a story to tell, and a poetic gaze that does not escape the beauty of the monotony of life.