Abstract
This article analyzes the poems of two Brazilian contemporary poets that revisit Homer’s Odyssey: Leonardo Gandolfi and Ana Martins Marques. The essay looks into how both writers - Gandolfi in its “Piquenique” and Marques in its “Penélope” - seem to recast the Odyssey as a text in which the tension between the historic and the contemporaneous has not yet been resolved. This understanding will lead to a brief examination (through the works of François Hartog, Erich Auerbach, Haroldo de Campos and Marcos Siscar) of the main role performed by Homer’s epic in the notion of literary history and in the concept of history itself. The article’s main objective is to articulate the idea of contemporaneity as a de-authorization of a stabilized concept of history through a reopening of Ulysses’ journey to recover his name.
Keywords:
Odyssey; contemporary poetry; Ana Martins Marques; Leonardo Gandolfi