“The house and the star”

Cecília Meireles and the chronicle of a meeting

Abstract

Although the name of Cecília Meireles is first evoked by her poetic work, the author also has a vast prose production, composed of chronicles, essays, articles, conferences, interviews, not yet fully known to the public and critics.This present article intents to investigate one of the versants of cecilian’s chronicles - the travels reports. They are the texts which reveal a peregrine Cecilia Meireles in different places from the world, in contact with different spaces, cultures, folks and experiences. But the author’s travel chronicles can go beyond the simple description of places and reveal to the reader a more lyrical, subjective and reflexive look, presenting itself too as a reflective manner about the own human condition from what is seen. An example of this is the text “The house and the star”, published in the Diário de São Paulo in 1953, in which the visit to the house where the poet Tomás Antônio Gonzaga was born in Portugal triggers a series of reflections on the life of the writer and, more broadly, about his own destiny and human existence.