Ideogram and the “pensée sauvage”: the art and science of “yãmîy maxakali”

Abstract

This article is about a tradicional oral poetic genre of Maxakali indigenous people from Minas Gerais. It presents the “transcriação”, as stablished by Haroldo de Campos, as a purpose of translation for the indigenous songpoems from Maxakali language to the Portuguese language. It suggests that those songpoems, or yãmîy, as they are called in maxakali language, have an ideogramic method of composition, in relation to the Ezra Pound’s ideogramic theory. It compares the yãmîy to another tradicional oral genre: the African oriki, studied and translated by Antônio Risério in Brazil. At last does an intersection between Theory of Literature and Anthropology, specifically on the Lévi-Strauss concept of pensée sauvage, in order to recognize the scientific character of this kind of text.