Fleeting Eurydice – Andresen’s nymph

Abstract

Being the title of several poems by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Eurydice represents a important trope for the discussion about language and writing undertaken in Andresen's poetics. In its metaphorical conception, the character represents the poet's failure in the quest for poetry, which cannot be achieved as an ideal fulfilment and becomes the poem itself: a staging of effort and loss - the attempt to capture the bird of reality, in Sophia's own words in ‘Arte poética III’. As Maurice Blanchot observes, “(...) only in song does Orpheus have power over Eurydice, but even in song, Eurydice is already lost”. In this sense, it is necessary to lose Eurydice and Eurydice will always be lost. In the path of this reflection, we wonder if it would be possible to understand Eurydice as a representation of the Nymph, Aby Warburg's allegorical character that Georges Didi-Huberman understands as a theoretical allegory, a fundamental image of the German art historian's conception of survival: fleeting, foreign, ‘the heroine of the “ephemeral movements of hair and clothes”. It is therefore worth trying to understand how this Nymph runs through Sophia's work and what her presence seems to indicate about her poetics.