O engenheiro Gadda e o doutor Guimarães Rosa: dois alquimistas a maquinar com a língua

Abstract

Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) and João Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967) are two very different writers: different the country, different the social background, different the cultural environment in which they grow and form, different the motivation that pushes to write. However, they have a great passion in common: the experimentation and linguistic innovation that become style and form of their own work. Of the two authors, are examined here two of their most significant novels: La cognizione del dolore , composed by Gadda between 1938 and 1941 and published first in installments in the magazine Letteratura and then by Einaudi, unfinished, in 1963; and Grande sertão: veredas, considered the magnum opus of Guimarães Rosa, published in 1956. What unites these two novels, masterpieces of the twentieth century, is precisely the plurilinguism which, cross and delight of their fortune, so different but yet similar, becomes the philosopher’s stone of the linguistic research of the two writers, the only one capable of restoring, in the case of Gadda, and redeeming, in that of Guimarães Rosa, the language and the society of their time.