Abstract: The Brazilian Concretist Poet, scholar, and translator, Haroldo de Campos, was long engaged in reading and transcreating, creatively, classical Chinese poetry, and made some major contributions to the theoretical development of the Western ideogrammic poetics. What he did is a singular case that has not been fully cultivated by Chinese literary scholars so far. Under the influence of Concretist Poetics, Linguistic Semiotics, and the theory of transcreation (transcriação), Haroldo developed his own criteria for the translation of classical Chinese poetry and practiced his “re-imagination” of the rhythm, artistic conception, sound, and imagery in Chinese poetry. An illustration based on his transcreations of Li Shangyin's “Jin Se,” “Ode 20” from Shijing, and Mao Zedong's “Yellow Crane Tower” may not only provide a glimpse into the correlation between Haroldo's translation and his reading, creative works, and theories of language and translation, but also reveal several fundamental issues about the aesthetics and translation of classical Chinese poetry.

Key words: Haroldo de Campos, transcreation, classical Chinese poetry, ideogrammic poetics, concrete poetry