Transmutações da epifania poética em Adélia Prado

Abstract

One of the most characteristic features of Adélia Prado’s poetry is its synthesis of poetry and everyday life through the literary device of epiphany. Traditionally understood as an expression of the “self,” as Massaud Moisés reminds us, poetry is contrasted with narrative prose, which explores the realm of the “non-self” and the external world. This division is overcome in the work of James Joyce, who integrated the “non-self” into lyrical expression through the concept of epiphany. Literary epiphany, inspired by the biblical tradition, unites subject and object in a sudden manifestation of meaning, in which the ordinary becomes a symbol of the extraordinary. In Stephen Hero, James Joyce secularized the epiphanic experience, defining it as a moment of spiritual revelation triggered by trivial events. Epiphany occurs, then, when an ordinary object is illuminated under the observer’s attentive gaze, becoming a bearer of profound meaning. This approach is revisited by Clarice Lispector, in whose texts epiphany appears as a recurring literary device, where small everyday events reveal intense inner truths. Adélia Prado, in turn, transforms this perspective by redirecting epiphany – experienced in the feminine everyday – as a sudden mystic irruption. Through a comparative literature approach, this study aims to highlight how Adélia Prado’s poetry enacts such transformations in the notion of epiphany, wherein poetry emerges as a sýmbolon of the divine.