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Title
Camões, Pimenta and the Improbable Sonnet
Authors
Carlota Simões, Nuno Coelho
Abstract
This article tells the story of a Renaissance sonnet gaining new life, new form and new meaning during the 20th Century.

During the Eighties of last century, the poet Alberto Pimenta took the sonnet Transforma-se o amador na cousa amada (The lover becomes the thing he loves) from Luís de Camões (16th Century), reorganized the letters of each verse of the poem and came up with a new sonnet, Ousa a forma cantor! Mas se da namorada (Dare the form, songster! But if the girlfriend). Who is the author of the second poem? We should say Pimenta, but, ironically, this author did not manage to organize a new verse from the last one of the original poem until he put aside the letters L and C, the initials of the author of the original sonnet. It seems that, in some mysterious and magical way, Luís de Camões came to reclaim the authorship of the second poem as well.

Recently, the designer Nuno Coelho challenged his Design and Multimedia students at the University of Coimbra with a new project: to produce a multimedia transformation of the sonnet of Camões into Pimenta's, and a new breath was given both to poems and their authors.
Keywords
Luís de Camões, Alberto Pimenta, mathematics, literature, multimedia, Oulipo
Milestones
Published: 2014/09/23
Author Details
Carlota Simões
carlota@mat.uc.pt
Coimbra University, Portugal

Nuno Coelho
ncoelho@dei.uc.pt
Coimbra University, Portugal

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