With shifting borders, the sertão (backlands) seems to adjust to the imaginary plasticity of its time, staging aesthetic, ethical and political disputes in its territory that demarcate it, forging new and ever-fluid borders for the region. This work proposes a critical journey through the symbolic cartography of the sertão, from modernity to contemporaneity, following the path proposed by some writers and a filmmaker who have forged images of the region. The analysis is based on the efforts made by artists who, at different times and in different ways, dared to bring landscape and language together to establish - or purposely blur - an outline and a contour for the sertão. The research begins with the remains of a monumental sertão, woven and torn apart by Euclides da Cunha and Guimarães Rosa. The proposal is to analyze the residues of the writing of Os sertões - or what was lost between notes from marginal texts and an excess of theoretical references - to arrive at the marginalia produced by Guimarães Rosa while reading Euclides greatest work and the travel notes collected by the Minas Gerais author for the writing of Grande sertão: veredas. Read in dialogue, Euclides da Cunha could be the literate traveler to whom Guimarães Rosa s protagonist narrates what was submerged by the republican project of historical silencing, making silence, the unstable and the indomitable heard, in a radical reflection on the limits of thought and language. Pulling on the thread of a sertão made of letters, we investigate authors who have turned this strange interior inside out, foreign to the rest of the country, moving it to the margins of big cities and miserable existences; who strive to circumscribe the emptiness by demarcating it with words, while revealing the structural condition of lack and the impossibility of writing. Clarice Lispector (A hora da estrela), Marilene Felinto (As mulheres de Tijucopapo) and Carolina Maria de Jesus (Quarto de despejo) narrate the marks left by a sertão that arrived on the edge of cities, invaded alleys, rooms and shacks on the outskirts of metropolises, tattooing the bodies and destinies of the heirs of a diaspora. Contradictorily, the same landscape that calls for the demarcation of borders is also an invitation to go beyond, capable of calling into question the delimitation of its margins. In this sense, the Portuguese-Angolan Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (Desmedida - Luanda - São Paulo - São Francisco e volta) and the filmmaker Glauber Rocha (Deus e o diabo na terra do sol) set out to explore a beyond that escapes between the lines, cartographic or symbolic; a space that carries the dimension of the unreachable, an impulse to movement and crossing. Readers of Guimarães Rosa and Euclides da Cunha, both put themselves on the scene, suturing body and language, to produce border - or coastal - works that mark the encounter between hybrid and heterogeneous fields, preserving their singularities. Third margin.