Língua de onça: onomatopeia e legibilidade em “Meu tio o Iauaretê”, de Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

This essay starts from a correlation established by Gianfranco Contini and Giorgio Agamben in the poetry of Giovanni Pascoli between the use of a “dead language” and of onomatopoeic words. This correlation is taken as a departing point for addressing the problem of legibility in the short story “Meu tio Iauaretê”. It is argued that the indistinc- tion of Tupi and onomatopoeic speech in the narrator’s animal language is an extreme experiment to be read within the larger frame of Guimarães Rosa’s poetics of illegibility.