Paulicéia Desvairada

Paulicéia Desvairada (from the Portuguese, literally "Untapped São Paulo", often translated as "Hallucinated City") is a collection of poems by Mário de Andrade, published in 1922. It was Andrade's second poetry collection, and his most controversial and influential. Andrade's free use of meter introduced revolutionary European modernist ideas into Brazilian poetry, which was previously strictly formal.

"Paulicéia" is a nickname for São Paulo, the city of Andrade's birth and the city in which the book was published. Within individual poems in the collection, Andrade occasionally refers to the city as "Paulicéia." Jack E. Tomlins's translation, the only one in English, is titled Hallucinated City. The collection takes place in São Paulo and is tied to the city in myriad ways, both artistically and historically. It grew directly out of Andrade's experiences at the center of the São Paulo arts scene in the year leading up to 1922, the watershed year of the Brazilian Modernist movement of which Andrade was the chief literary figure. In the mythology of the book Andrade himself created, it grew out of a transcendently alienating experience Andrade had in 1920: his family's anger over his purchase of a (in their view) blasphemous sculpture by Victor Brecheret. There is no doubt that Brecheret and the other young artists and writers in Andrade's circle—chiefly Oswald de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and Menotti del Picchia—influenced the development of the book. It was written, much like the parallel modernist masterpiece The Waste Land, backwards: Andrade explains in the preface that he began with a very long, hastily written, and rather unstructured work which was then gradually whittled down into its final state.

The book consists of 22 short poems, each a single image of a segment of São Paulo life, followed by a long poem "As Enfibraturas do Ipiranga" ("The Moral Fibrature of the Ipiranga"), described as "A Profane Oratorio" and complete with specific but impossible stage directions: "All of the 550,000 singers quickly clear their throats and take exaggeratedly deep breaths" (81). Andrade read several of these poems during the Week of Modern Art (Semana de Arte Moderna) in February, 1922, which he organized in collaboration with Di Cavalcanti, Malfatti, and several others. He also read an essay, written after the poems were completed, describing their theoretical basis in retrospect; this essay was published as an introduction to the collection, with the tongue-in-cheek title "Extremely Interesting Preface."

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