A fúria de Pedro Eiras: três aproximações

Abstract

What could lead a poet to dialogue openly, and in this day and age, with the (con)sacred work The Divine Comedy by Dante, one of the authors with whom, according to Harold Bloom, contemporary writers would not like to compete. Now, Pedro Eiras, an author who has already proven himself in several discursive registers, from essays to fiction and theater, it was precisely with Dante's magnus opus that he dialogued when he made his debut as a poet, in 2020, with the book Inferno, which would be followed in the two following years by the books Purgatorio and Paradiso, respectively. The reading I propose of this poetic trilogy aims to highlight how it expressly summons some structural aspects of Dante's Commedia, in a gesture of updating the initiatory journey and the characters that underlie it, but to deviate from the theological and teleological sense of the Italian poet's inner pilgrimage, dethroning its principle of messianic hope in the name of an intense attention to the present world. In this sense, I think Pedro Eiras' trilogy ends up representing also a double agonistic confrontation - with Dante and with Bloom - not in the name of aesthetic supremacy, but of the unequivocal affirmation of a compromise between aesthetics and ethics.