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Danilo de Athayde

Poet, essayist and researcher in comparative literature and science studies

Born in Salvador, Brazil, in 1990, he works between literature and the history and philosophy of science. Noemáfagos, a work of digital poetry and a book in progress, and his doctoral thesis O nome de tudo (The Name of Everything) are being written as a pair and ask, each by its own means, the same question, that of how the universe the science of our time is able to describe can be made visible.

Selected work

  1. Interactive digital poetry

    Noemáfagos

    Twenty-one poems, each with its own gesture.

    published · noemafagos.com, 2026

    Explore the 21 poems

  2. Doctoral thesis

    O nome de tudo

    Dante, Camões, Drummond and the Machine of the Universe.

    being written · defence expected in 2027

  3. Book of poems

    Estar na Grama

    The first book signed Danilo de Athayde.

    published · Patuá, 2024

  4. Journal article

    “A tradição do tempo”

    Contemplative time, from poetry to cinema.

    published · Rebeca, 2025

All work, with the complete archive

Reading

Passages from Noemáfagos. The poems stay in Portuguese; the glosses in the margin are in English and lead into the research.

Errata (note)

ll. 1–12 · Noemáfagos

Portuguese original A poem in the form of a printer’s erratum, in which each correction rewrites a piece of the old picture of the cosmos.

Errata (back to the text)

From Noemáfagos. In the digital work, at noemafagos.com, the reader carries out the corrections.

noemafagos.com/errata

Onde se lê estrelas fixas (note),

leia-se estrelas

(quem se mexia era o adjetivo).

1 fixas (back to the text)

The stars of the eighth sphere, the firmament the machine of the world still showed to Dante and to Camões.

O nome de tudo, part I

Onde se lê epiciclo, risque-se:

epiciclo (note). Riscada, a roda ainda roda.

5 epiciclo (back to the text)

Ptolemy’s wheel, still turning whole in the machine Tethys shows to da Gama in canto X of The Lusiads.

Camões, the máquina transuntiva

Onde se lê flogisto, leia-se oxigênio,

e ponha de cabeça pra baixo o sentido de toda chama.

Mas onde se lê o sol se pôs, por favor, deixe estar.

Onde se lê em sete dias,

leia-se ainda (note).

10 ainda (back to the text)

The passage from the closed, nameable World to the expanding Universe.

O nome de tudo, part II

Onde se lê no centro,

leia-se a bordo (note).

12 a bordo (back to the text)

“O mundo não é um globinho de neve” (The World Is Not a Snow Globe: World, Universe and the Decentring of the Human before the Infinite), Philia, 2023.

Threads machine of the world · onomastrophe · asymptotic realism

Threads

Concepts shared by the poems and the thesis, of different kinds.

  • Historical-literary motif

    machine of the world

    A model of the cosmos as an assembled, intelligible engine, and the cosmopoetic allegory of that model.

    Where to start: O nome de tudo, part I

  • Critical diagnosis

    allegorical scarcity

    The contemporary difficulty of forging figures that can mediate the old ambition of making the whole intelligible, now that every representation of totality is recognized as structurally incomplete.

    Where to start: After the Machine of the World

  • Conceptual operator

    noemaphage

    The figure that discourse fabricates in place of an impossible referent, when the outline of a limit comes to count as content.

    Where to start: O nome de tudo, part II

  • Epistemological and ethical position

    asymptotic realism

    An epistemological and ethical position that follows from inhabiting the asymptotic horizon.

    Where to start: O nome de tudo, part III · being written

All threads