III - Neo-Realism And Beyond

The military uprising of 1974, that reinstated Freedom in Portugal, gave new impulse to a few resistant poets, who in the past had rallied around a collection published by the review Vértice, in Coimbra, under the title Novo Cancioneiro (1941-1944). None of the ten poets integrated in the collection has survived until the present day. At the start of the revolution, seven were still alive, and accepted as highest references of neo-realistic poetry: Fernando Namora, Mário Dionísio, João José Cochofel, Joaquim Namorado, Manuel da Fonseca, Carlos de Oliveira and Sidónio Muralha. Three had already died: Francisco José Tenreiro, Álvaro Feijó and Políbio Gomes dos Santos. Mention must also be made of José Gomes Ferreira, whose contribution had been invited and who would always consider himself a member of the group.

Neo-realism at that time was the nominal mask for socialist realism, to put the censors off the scent. All those poets were bound together by a Marxist-oriented social purpose, but at the same time each of them was to adopt a different attitude in front of the aesthetic imperatives of writing. Fernando Namora would never abdicate the psychologistic component that came to him from presencist affinities which he assumed. Manuel da Fonseca would forever stay close to the people, singing its needs and its pains with verses of commanding density and formal purification. Carlos de Oliveira would refine his known taste for the rigorous and stinging word, building a unique work which for some has "drunk" something out of Poesia 61, while others maintain that the influence went to the contrary; João José Cochofel "an aristocrat in sympathy with the people" was to be an intimate, crepuscular and sober voice, affirming itself best in his essays. José Gomes Ferreira, the poet of everyday urban life and pompous metaphors, the happy manager of dialectics between individual ego and social ego, changed his course to the irreverent vernacularism which with he questions reality from the standpoint of direct observation, thus becoming extremely popular. Joaquim Namorado most clearly felt the weight of the program of societal transformation to which he devoted himself, in literature as in life, and Mário Dionísio, who had been the intellectual and theoretician of the movement in the first phase, would scatter his talent away from poetry, writing essays, chronicles, criticism, tales and novels.

From this enlarged group of the Novo Cancioneiro, only Joaquim Namorado and José Gomes Ferreira were "militant poets" on April 25. Cochofel did not expose himself much, Carlos de Oliveira, Fernando Namora e Manuel da Fonseca were by this time renowned novelists. Mário Dionísio divided himself between painting, essay-writing, chronicles, after writing a paradigmatic novel that caused some consternation for contradicting what he had postulated in the forties as formally convenient to neo-realistic good conscience and efficiency. Pastoral (1976) by Carlos de Oliveira, Nome para Uma Casa (1984), by Fernando Namora and Terceira Idade (1984) by Mário Dionísio, are the most prominent titles of anthologies of poems signed by the last representatives of a generation of distinguished men that, having begun with poetry, was to realize itself predominantly in prose.

Among the talented poets who appeared in the forties and fifties, several reached April 25 in full creative activity, an activity that was made more impetuous and vibrant by the liberation from censorship.

Some dug their neo-realism deeper down into the tracks of ideology, as Antunes da Silva, Armindo Rodrigues, José Saramago.

Others cultivated neighbourly or intimate relations with a delayed surrealism, and hit the public's eye thanks to the dynamism they impressed into modes of poetical communication that were irreverent and provocative at the time We must mention António Barahona da Fonseca, Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos, Alexandre O'Neill, Egito Gonçalvez, Natália Correia, António José Forte, Mendes de Carvalho, José Carlos Gonzalez, Vergílio Martinho, Helder Macedo, Rui Cinatti, some of them composing the "abjectionist" group of Gêlo, — a literary club that enlivened, in the Lisbon café of the same name, the cultural life of the late fifties).

Others radiated yet away from single- or group- projects into fulgurant lonely rides (Miguel Torga, Jorge de Sena, David Mourão-Ferreira, Sophia de Melo Breyner, Eugénio de Andrade, João Rui de Sousa, António Ramos Rosa and Albano Martins).

They all had good motives to rejoice in the instauration of freedom — including the sort of freedom that most interested them, freedom of expression, that projected them out into the country, eventually to the extent of their true intellectual stature, giving to them, and to their works, the visibility that pulled them out of an unjust — and, in some cases, tragic — silence, in relation to their own people.

It is difficult to single out the best among the names quoted above, as we are dealing with many-facetted creators whom, in some cases, have taken to its ultimate consequences the metaphysical investigation of poetic causality, as António Ramos Rosa, an author given, in this field, to an abundance that has not ceased flowing, and to whom Vergílio Ferreira referred in the following terms: "book after book, poem after poem, this word makes itself scarcer and scarcer until the inexorable and absurd to be fully spoken in silence. A sober word that barely enunciates itself, sends faraway signals to other distant words, trembles undecided on the point of the "pencil" that makes it real — it puts in mind the gestures of sacredness and secret initiation."

Sophia de Melo Breyner explores with her impressively perfectionist precision of drawing the setting of the transparent and solar landscapes of the Hellenic Mediterranean (or of the Portuguese South, which most resembles it) with words outlining them in the full splendour of an imaginary spell-casting of beauty and transparency:

(Geografia, 1961)

Certain inflections of meaning have been pointed out in her work, by which she tended to adhere to tangible reality using a language less affected by aristocratic inflection, but her writing never lost the integrity that makes it a model of stylistic coherence in modern Portuguese poetry.

David Mourão Ferreira crystallized the veneration of the female body as the axial erotic myth in the classical harmony of his writing, with a fully assumed propensity for hedonism.

(Do tempo ao Coração, 1966)

Eugénio Lisboa subtly notes: "all the poetry of David Mourão Ferreira (1927-1996) with all that permanent outburst of radiant bodies, is mined by the undergrounds rivers of an omnipresent anguish: The light produces and marks the shadows as the desert marks and outlines the thirst."

Eugénio de Andrade immerses into verses of the purest water sentiments, affections, passions, loneliness, disenchantment, blended into the matter of things, into the elements of nature and the precarious destiny of the body after its apogee, particularly after Obscuro Domínio (1971), that marked the moment for him to change course in one of the most exciting and encompassing poetic adventures of our Portuguese time.

Jorge de Sena (1920-1978), in bitter dispute against his country, raised a gigantic protest against the exclusion that his time had forced upon him, tainted with radical resentment, an unparalleled case in Lusitanian letters:

Such words did he use about his country, which he could finally claim as his, after the long and degrading exile that took him to many parts of the world, ending up in Santa Barbara (Cal., U.S.A.), where the disconcerting news of the liberating coup reached him. Angel Crespo described him as one of the most cultured men of letters of his time, always complaining about the scant attention his contemporaries gave his work, tormented and watchful. João Barrento called him a mannerist poet-philologist. "A borderline case of identity in alterity", José Augusto Seabra noted of the Masks of Camões. Jorge de Sena is a figure who impresses by excessively affirmating what he denies, by his surplus of conviction, ever displayed in his writings, poetic or not, and by the violent protest of the man who never surrenders to the ignominious outrage of undeserved ostracism.

Along the broad highway of poetry, Jõao Rui de Sousa travels on, in an exuberance of creation, ever true to a lyricism of obscure clarity that never ceases to renew itself.

Miguel Torga (1907-1994), telluric and lonely, indefatigable in his love for those beloved places travelled pari passu with the patience of a pilgrim and the minucy of an investigator of strong sensations, was the modern cantor of his homeland, who suffered its pains and resentments, and captivated its moments of scintillation without ever losing sight of the destiny of a people sacrificed, and yet rising up to defend its existential unity. Fernão de Magalhães Gonçalves, calling him a herald of freedom, identified his orphic itinerary, his cosmic discourse, his sociologic discourse, and his theological discourse: these meaningful lines intersected themselves in "the clandestinity of the mind", in a work rich of significance and topicality.

(Bittern 28.4.77- Diário XII)

Egito Gonçalves is beginning to be a serious case of literary longevity: he has won the Prize of the Portuguese Pen Club, ex-aequo with Armando Silva Carvalho, and got himself consecrated by the ever coveted Grande Prémio de Poesia, of the Portuguese writers' Guild, with his book E no entanto Move-se (1993), that some critics consider "his best verse". His work, however, springs from the early fifties: we find him already there among the collaborators of Árvore, a short-lived review edited by António Ramos Rosa, António Luís Moita, José Terra, Luis Amaro and Raul de Carvalho, that constituted, according to Clara Rocha, "the place of affirmation of a group of poets bound by their generation link and a common understanding of artistic creation."

Beside the founders and Egito Gonçalves, these "pages of poetry" registered the passage of Matilde Rosa Araújo, Sebastião da Gama, Alberto Lacerda, Sophia de Melo Breyner, David Mourão Ferreira, Cristóvam Pavia and Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos.

Egito Gonçalves, who wrote a poetry of surrealistic matrix, is described in the "History of Portuguese Literature", by Óscar Lopes e António José Saraiva, as "the most important case of imagism-surrealism transcending itself, in the first phase of his career, and continuing in the lyrical tradition of love with a score in which, sometimes with extraordinary accuracy and boldness, the exuberance of metaphoric registers and affective timbres blends with the dialectics of absence-presence, longing-desire, possible-impossible wording, of one or two body-bodies and their circumstances." The works of Egito Gonçalves until 1991 have been collected in Péndulo Afectivo, Ed. Afrontamento.

Alexandre O'Neill (1924-1986) a controversial literary figure, who got himself stuck with the labels of "surrealist", "heir of Nicolau Tolentino" (the satirical poet of the 18th Century), poet of the concrete and publicist, among other niceties of ad-hominem endearment aiming to have him duly classified before locking him into the closets of History. O'Neill used the systematically insubordinated verb as an instrument to scratch the idiosyncrasies, the eccentricities and psychological dysfunctions of his contemporaries, satirizing in brief and dry verse, full of efficiency, overflowing with invention, an enormous quantity of urban types, without ever clipping the wings of those expressions that, acquiring their own dynamics, wanted to fly away from the "concrete" frame into which, by sheer force, Alexandre Pinheiro Torres wanted to imprison them, if we are to judge from a little programmatic text included in a book, called precisely Programa para o Concreto (1966). Fernando J.B.Martinho, however, does not walk very far from Pinheiro Torres' verifications when he recognizes that O'Neill "checks himself into critical observation of the real, subjecting it, in the tones of close, lively, conversation, to a vision either tenderly ironical or sometimes malignantly sarcastic, so as to give us, in the radiography or our small ridicules and mediocrities, the exact portrait of the country that we are, instead of freeing day-to-day reality 'towards the surreal zone where must be sought the nullifying of contradictions'..."

Albano Martins is another poet of verbal economy, that in his case has a characteristic incidence of strongly allegoric writing, that carries fascinating symbolical associations, significantly linked to nature and life:

(Com as Flores do Salgueiro - 1995.)

Raul de Carvalho used poetry as a mirror for his timidity, an exhaust for the bitterness of his social marginalization. Serafim Ferreira, one of his biographers, observes than in pain and suffering, "all the poetry of Raul de Carvalho dives and fulfil itself in the destiny of giving shape to an expression so personal and particular, recalling, like Lautréamont, that the poet only consoles mankind". From Luís Amaro (himself the author of delicate intimist poetry who has not published a book since Diário Íntimo, Dádiva e outros poemas, (Iniciativas Editorias, 1975) the now departed fellow of the Árbore group, was to receive the following tribute during the ceremony in his native town of Alvito, on November 23, 1996: "At a determined moment, he discovered, as a way of escape, the sense of humour of the surrealists — and how much, deep inside, he would wish to enter the marginal group, cultured and negativist, of the Lisbon surrealists! But no! His roots never got loose from the native humus, from the true lyrical pattern of his beginning, yet outgrowing it, enriching it with reading, experience, incursions in that artistic field where he moved as on his own ground."

António Gedeão, the poet, and Rómulo de Carvalho, the academic, historian and divulger of Science, are one identical person. The poet made himself known in 1956 with Monumento Perpétuo and in 1964 published Poemas Completos, (Portugália), with a preface by Jorge de Sena. Fernando Guimarães asserts (Jornal de Letras - 6.11.96) that António Gedeão's imagination "might well be closer to baroque expression" and pointing out as "an important aspect of his poetry" the way he uses his ironic figuration. The literary and scientific communities united to render him a significant tribute last year as he reached the age of 90.

Among the poets that appeared in the fifties and still maintain a high standard of productivity, one must highlight Pedro Tamen, whose initial book, Poema para Todos os Dias, 1956, evinces religious preoccupations, as does that of Fernando Echevarría, a contemporary, whose later work evolved into those shapes of subtle and ironic criticism of daily reality, as appears clearly in Hóracio e Coriácio, 1981:

Several other poets who made their debut in the fifties are still publishing more or less regularly; these include: Maria Alberta Menéres, José Carlos Gonzalez, Helder Macedo, Rui Knopfli, Orlando da Costa, José Blanc de Portugal, José Bento, and António Cabral.

Fernando Guimarães, first discovered in 1956, is a remarkable case of the critic/artist of alterity. Besides his critical work published in recent years in the pages of the magazine Cóloquio-Letras and of the Jornal de Letras, he writes verse, already collected in Poesias (1956 à 1988) and has been given the Prize of the Portuguese Writers' Guild and the prize of the Pen Club for his book Anel Débil.