The nomadic body and the erotic experience in the work of Arnaldo Antunes

Abstract

The study of literature and music is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the interaction between textual and sonic elements in the construction of meaning in works produced within the intersemiotic exchange of these language systems. The poem-music is a type of song resulting from the intersemiotic relationship between literature and music. Examining it allows for an analysis of how the category of literary space reacts and reconfigures meaning when a written poem becomes a song. Arnaldo Antunes’ poetics features a spatiality shaped by the dynamics of nomadism, as the linguistic sign moves across different media, with the poet exploring verbivocovisual elements in all of them. These elements are perceptible in the poem “Me ame”, which was set to music on the album O corpo (2000) under the title “Momento V”. This article investigates the transposition of this poem into a song, observing how the notion of spatiality present in the poem shifts to the musical context, (re)constructing both the erotic meaning and the spatial perception embedded in its linguistic structure. The analysis is based on Gumbrecht (2014), Maffesoli (2001), and Oliveira (2012), demonstrating that when the poem is set to music, its meanings are intensified and expanded, highlighting the impact of musical structure on spatial representation in the poetic experience.