Iconicity, ‘intersemiotic translation’ and the sonnet in the visual poetry of Avelino De Araújo

Although the poetic work of the Brazilian artist Avelino de Araújo has recently attracted the attention of literary criticism, there are only few scholarly studies about the paramount role of iconicity in his non-verbal poetry. It is the main purpose of this paper to examine how iconicity and intersemiotic translation unfold in his visual sonnets. Araújo transforms the canonical poetic form into a postmodern visual experiment, playing with the sonnet’s structural, metrical, and communicative conventions. I open with a brief discussion of the still ambiguous term ‘visual poetry’ in contemporary art and a contextualization of Araújo’s poetry. Then, I explore the role of iconicity and intersemiotic relations between words – the titles – and images in the collection Livro de sonetos (1994). While some poems tackle political, social, and aesthetic topics such as hunger, censorship, segregation and the construction of meaning, other pieces are playful experiments on the sonnet form. Finally, I will look at Araújo’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical sonnet as a successful ‘variation’ of the genre and I briefly refer to the poet’s recent animated sonnets, since, as Greber (2002: 568) notes, “The generic invariance of the sonnet is its variance.”