An Expedition to Patanal and the Poetic and Scientific Records of Guimarães Rosa and Hilgard Sternberg: Traces, Presence, Ambience and Landscape

Abstract

The article discusses scientific and artistic methodologies, for literary and geographical purposes, adopted by the writer João Guimarães Rosa and the geographer Hilgard Sternberg during an expedition in which both took part, roading the Pantanal, in 1947. The expedition, which had the purpose of mapping the area where the Brazilian Capital District would be relocated to, is scarcely archived and hardly appears in the biographies and chronologies of the writer and the geographer. In this article I approach a speech by Guimarães Rosa made at the time of his filiation to the Brazilian Society of Geographers (SBG), and the "Lists of facts to be observed in geographic field works" by professor geographer Hilgard Sternberg, concerning ideias of field study, geography, poetry and landscape, present in the documents, to confront them with  ideas of ambience, based on the understanding of Stimmung by Hans Ulricht Gumbrech and  presence by Martin Seel. Records resulting from field practices, present in field notebooks and sketches, will be related to the idea of ​​"incarnated words" - a kind of writing permeated by trails, through which we can glimpse bodies, gestures, ambiences and landscapes of a past situation of travelling.