The Poetic Alphabet of Leonor Scliar-Cabral and Noemi Jaffe

Abstract

From Sagração do alfabeto, 2009, by Leonor Scliar-Cabral, to A verdadeira história do alfabeto e alguns verbetes de um dicionário, 2012, by Noemi Jaffe, the letter constitutes a collection of poetic and narrative possibilities. By conceiving the letter as a minimal unit of meaning, the writers are inscribed in a tradition of authors who see in the micro, the magnitudes of the multiple. Scliar-Cabral extracts from the Hebrew alphabet numerous lyrical reverberations, transforming letters into poetry, eclipsing the sense of the unique by expanding the connotations of the letters. Jaffe, in turn, in prose, redefines the meaning of the notion of history by proposing an unusual linearity for each letter of the Latin alphabet. This communication will analyze these two literary paths of Brazilian Literature in the context of contemporary Jewish texts.