About “A Visual Finnegans Wake on the Island of Breasil” (poem), by Sérgio Medeiros
Set in the legendary Hy Brazil (or Island of Breasil) of medieval maps, this poetic version of Joyce's latest novel (or novel-poem) dreamily scrolls through the pages of “Finnegans Wake”, written in a frantic English that spreads across multiple languages. (Joyce's language is the true sailor of this work on travel). Medeiros, who is a poet and visual artist, seeks to extract from Joyce's dreamlike pages the hieroglyphic codices that go back to the origins of writing: the ancient Irish tree alphabet, the ancient petroglyphs of different cultures, the archetypal figures of the most secret manuscripts. However, these colorful glyphs that Medeiros discovers and/or reinvents also announce the new writings that are yet to emerge from the nebulous mass (Wittgenstein's expression) that is the world's “mother tongue”.
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