Paulicéia Desvairada

Paulicéia Desvairada (from the Portuguese, literally "Frantic São Paulo", often translated as "Hallucinated City") is a collection of poems by Mário de Andrade, published in 1922.

The book consists of 22 short poems, each a single image of a segment of São Paulo life, followed by a long poem "As Enfibraturas do Ipiranga" ("The Moral Fibrature of the Ipiranga"), described as "A Profane Oratorio" and complete with specific but impossible stage directions: "All of the 550,000 singers quickly clear their throats and take exaggeratedly deep breaths" (81).

The poems, which present neither regular meter nor rhyme and which are primarily not written in complete sentences but rather in short, rhythmic phrases, were greeted with catcalls at the initial reading, though many in the audience still recognized their significance.

"Tristura" ("Sadness") begins: Published later in the same year as the Week of Modern Art, the book's militant sense of artistic innovation is foregrounded, from start to finish.

The dedication is to Mário de Andrade himself, and begins: Responding to the traditional poetic appeal to the classical muses and to God, Andrade places both within himself, and asks himself not to suffer the doubt of Adrien Sixte, a character in a novel by Paul Bourget, Le Disciple, who, as a professor of philosophy, argues calmly and rationally for positivism and naturalism without admitting the stark pessimism of those ideas into his own untroubled life, until a student, taking them perhaps more seriously than he does, acts on them severely, and someone dies.