ABSTRACT
For the fashionably active, and those longing for the unknown, travel is the perfect medium of transformation. Travel has exerted the most powerful pull on writers and artists seeking new territories of the imagination. The reasons why artists travel are as varied as their passions. During the journey, the poets read their latest work to each other, and it was during the long train ride, the land hurtling past him, that Mário composed his path-breaking ode 'Noturno de Belo Horizonte' ('Night train to Belo Horizonte'). Not surprisingly, antropofagia forms a vital topos in contemporary Brazilian life and letters. The 'manifesto antropófago' is vested with totemic meaning. As the history of the discoveries demonstrates, the wayward cannibal has served an odd mixture of cynicism and idealism. Like travellers discovering that the possession of space is only illusory, antropofagic strategists find that imaginary and ideologic spheres are sealed into the system they seek to transform.
