He did his secondary education at Colégio São Bento, where he learned his first foreign languages (
Latin,
English,
Spanish,
French). He and his brother
Augusto de Campos, together with
Décio Pignatari, formed the poetic group Noigandres that published the experimental journal of the same name, which would launch the
Brazilian movement of
poesia concreta (concrete poetry). Haroldo received his doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of USP (
Universidade de São Paulo), under the guidance of
Antonio Candido. Haroldo was professor at the Catholic University, PUC-SP, and visiting professor at Yale and the University of Texas at Austin. His biography was included in the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1997 and he was awarded the Premio Octavio Paz de Poesia y Ensayo, Mexico, in 1999. In addition to his vast repertory of original poetry and literary essays, Haroldo translated some of the most important
literature of the Western tradition into
Portuguese, such as
Homer's
Iliad, prose by
James Joyce and poetry by
Mallarmé. When he died he left
unfinished a translation of
Dante's
Commedia, a manuscript that
Umberto Eco had a chance to read, which compelled him to say that "Haroldo de Campos is the best Dante translator in the world". Translation, according to Haroldo de Campos, is much more than moving text from one language to another. Elements of the structure of the poem, like rhythm and sound combinations (rhyme, echoes, assonance, etc.) are often more important than semantics per se. His translations include poetry, Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Hebrew texts. He translated, major names of world literature, such as Goethe (German),
Ezra Pound, James Joyce (English), Mayakovsky (Russian), Mallarmé (French), Dante (Italian) and
Octavio Paz (Spanish). On stage, his works have been performed by three actors:
Giulia Gam (1989,
Cena da Origem, directed by
Bia Lessa),
Bete Coelho (1997,
Graal: Retrato de um Fausto Quando Jovem, by Gerald Thomas) and
Luiz Päetow (2015,
Puzzle, by Felipe Hirsch). == Bibliography ==