Manuel Bandeira’s poem “A Morte Absoluta” (“Consummate Death”), first published in Portuguese in 1940 and newly translated by Candace Slater in 2018, contemplates the relationship between death and oblivion.
The piece concludes with:
To die without leaving a furrow, a trace, a shadow,
the memory of a shadow
in any heart, in any mind, in any skin.
To die so completely
that one day on seeing your name on paper
they’ll have to ask, ‘Who was he?’ …
To die more completely still
—without even leaving so much as that name.
Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.
© 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College
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