Grande Sertão Veredas: Décio Pignatari sobre Guimarães Rosa

Interview given by Décio Pignatari about the work of Guimarães Rosa. Décio Pignatari (Jundiaí, August 20, 1927 – São Paulo, December 2, 2012) was a Brazilian advertising executive, poet, actor, essayist, professor, and translator. Since the 1950s, he experimented with poetic language, incorporating visual resources and the fragmentation of words. These verbal adventures culminated in Concretism, an aesthetic movement he founded along with Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, with whom he edited the magazines Noigandres and Invenção and published the Theory of Concrete Poetry (1965). As a communication theorist, he translated works by Marshall McLuhan and published the essay Information, Language and Communication (1968). His poetic work is collected in Poetry Because it is Poetry (1977). Décio Pignatari published translations of Dante Alighieri, Goethe, and Shakespeare, among others, collected in Retrato do Amor quando Jovem (1990) and 231 poems. He published his first book of poetry in 1950, "Carrossel," the collection of short stories O Rosto da Memória (1988), and the novel Panteros (1992), in addition to a work for the theater, *Céu de Lona*. He holds a Bachelor of Laws degree from the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo, class of 1954.