Present And Future

One of the singularities of Portuguese poetry connects with the general abscence of critics and essayists exclusively devoted to the subject, which often results in the poets themselves performing both functions. Fernando J.B. Martinho may constitute the most illustrative exception to this rule, as he renounced to publish poetry in a continuous form to mobilize his efforts to keep track of, and throw light on, the production of the last half-century. However, such concentration of powers — that with the advent and generalization of literary studies puts the stress on the institutionalisation of poetry and the consecutive corporate reflexes of the criticism that highlight it — is contributing towards the minimization of the prestige enjoyed by the lyric art as a weapon of disruption and transgression and as a counter-power. This contemporary hegemony of poetry in the heart of the academic institution is closely related to its status as a subject in school syllabuses, carrying as its major consequence the rarefying of the world of lived experience on the side of fabulation, to the advantage of intense exploratory movements around and over the resources of the text. The Universities do not study any more what the poets do: they want the poet to write as they teach. It may not seem pointless to note that some of the poets who most insistently have been courting the crepuscular universe of representation and autonomy of languages, happen to be university professors. However, strangely, it is also from within the University that arose a few calls to the necessity of reverting to realism, be it because the ground swell of text for text's sake, in a certain manner grown exponentially through three nuclear figures (Ramos Rosa, Herberto Helder and Nuno Júdice) yields little space to their "followers", consequently creating uneasiness and crisis as a permanent state of things, or be it because life flows faster outside than inside the Faculties of Letters, if there had not been an earlier justification in the exercises in mimesis of "useful" poetry that prevailed during decades of socio-literary realism, certainly models of rationalist intervention in the progress of societies capable of nurturing a project in which they could recognize their own substantive purposes.

In this academic predisposition to sublimate the production of those writers, who during the last two and a half decades fought for poetry as a impulse to infringe the logical and symbolical co-ordinates, despite other voices who legitimately contended that the realist status was contrary to the rituals celebrating any "aesthetization of utopia" we see that a professor of literature, João Barrento, today elects a poet who as it happens teaches literature, Fernando Pinto do Amaral (both being essayists to whose efficient work this text is fairly indebted) as one of the most representative characters of the newest Portuguese poetry, as consecrating in his verses a melancholy and decadentist frame of mind, with a tendency to mark the emptiness of time and a propensity to exalt "the landscapes of the soul" in places of "our world, our time, and the symbolic places of its precariousness,(terraces and cafés, for instance)", in some way the mouth of the stream of contemporary realism that had been made to flow twenty years earlier by another university professor and poet, Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, proposing what we judge to be sceptical realism. About Magalhães, Barrento writes: "It is practically impossible to read the poetry of a Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, from twenty years ago until now, without realizing that it is exactly this: a ground marked by self-consciousness, crossed by a nostalgia à rebours or malgré soi, entirely made up of small allegories of day-to-day banality, without heroisms, as were yet those of Baudelaire or of Eliot…" Between Magalhães and Pinto do Amaral we find a whole elite group of poets of denial, of absence and of loss that, in different registers, and in discrepancy with the epic past of the subject diluted in great operations of social redemption, now reject the role of the same subject, concerned with what is described, in a book by Manuel Frias Martins as aesthetics of trifles. The minimalist poetry of Helder Moura Pereira will be what best illustrates this concept, but we must go back to 1971 to detect the beginning of the course of João Miguel Fernando Jorge, whom, according to the same Frias Martins, "offers each poem as an act of compromise with the canonical values inscribed in the significance of every word."

(A Beira do Mar de Junho, 1982)

Names like those of António Franco Alexandre, Al Berto, Luis Miguel Nava and Paulo Teixeira are on the front line of the melancholy avant-garde, with their whispers, silences, whimpers or well-educated anti-European protests. We find, however, in discrepancy perhaps with this disenchanted post-modern panorama tainted with resigned anguish, a poetry like that of José Agostinho Baptista whose pessimism, with his touch of the magic and the prophetic, does not exclude connotation with objective reality in thematic displacements that lead him, for instance, to gain inspiration from Mexican culture to sign some of his texts. António Torrado, whose poetic work was promising indeed digressed towards children's and adolescents' literature, a modality in which he has consolidated a notable work, while still sporadically publishing poetry.

José Jorge Letria emerged in the seventies, but it was only in the following decade that he cut definitively his links with a writing of sociological genesis, moving on to privileging ontological preoccupations, still however related to the real. His easy moving around the spectral world and his adroit managing of noises and voices, of hopes and disillusions, of dangers and pleasures, result in his writing being crossed by a sort of active melancholy, marked by constant altercation with the evil phantasms that people his insomnias and as it were seized by the memory of life, not do drop into an anaesthetizing litany of pain of grief or indifference, leading to despondency. The explication given by the poet of his own alterity enlightens the existential dialectic of his speech, submitting thus to the sometimes terrible staging of remorse the confused self-esteem of the subject of his writing and the ample generosity of affections (physical, mythical and spiritual) in a poetry of sonorities and rhythms that coherently confer to it a tone of suggestive musicality. The essential of José Jorge Letria's poetry has been gathered in O Fantasma da Obra (1993), a collection that deserved enthusiastic praise for the unity of writing it conveys for an author until then considered as excessively fragmentary.

Wanda Ramos is another voice from the seventies whose poetry, not rejecting the surrealist heritage, claiming it rather, adjusts to a style verging on the baroque, an understanding of life in which erotic vibrations and dissociated silences sometimes ally with a certain rage of living, marked by the poetic word in its cycles of crisis, desire and offering. Ernesto José Rodrigues, who made his debut in 1973, is another of the poet-prose writers of which Portuguese literature is so rich, with his heart torn between the rocky hills of Northern Portugal and Danubian Hungary. A 1981 collection, Para Ortense: Variantes, gives instances of a humour with a strong sarcastic load, and a social criticism yet contusive enough, un-dissociated from a tendency to free verse that at some times even verges upon the prosaic. His language comes matured and codified in the more recent poems of Sobre o Danúbio (bilingual edition, Budapest, 1996, a small anthological house that the poet and the prose writer share without any conflict. João Camilo, whose free, loose verse is attentive to the daily life, has the best of his work collected in Nunca Mais se Apagam as Imagens, Fenda, 1996. Paulo da Costa Domingos, truculent and iconoclastic, collected his poetical work in Vaga, 1990. António Quadros, aka. Fr. Johannes Garabatus, aka. Mutimati Barnabé João, aka. João Pedro Grabato Dias — a luso-Mozambican who has been one of the most active voices in the phase prior to independence of his new country was also one of the most perturbing figures of his generation. O Povo é Nós, (1979) is a work of revolutionary affirmation, distant yet from Quybyrycas (1972), a lucid and good-humoured parody about the disaster of Alcazar-Quivir (2) and other historical vicissitudes of sad memory.

António Osório is a case of late revelation, which does not make less significant the place he takes in the panorama of our poetry: notwithstanding that he was co-founder and director of the review Anteu in the first half of the fifties, where he appears, besides Padro Tamen e Cristóvam Pavia, it is only in 1972 that he published books that have definitively consecrated him as one of the most authentic voices in the field of confessional love poetry, marked in lapidary fashion by Eugénio Lisboa in his preface to the second of these works: "...A Ignorância da Morte is, in its softly innovating mode, appetizingly slow and meticulous, in its progression along a musical inventory, in its fascinating mythic realism, wingedly terrestrial and affectionately aloof, one of the voices most strong, most isolated, most disturbingly personal and more complicatedly direct than we have been given to know in the last years." The echo of António Osório's poetry in the younger generations is already evident in the manner in which Fernando Pinto do Amaral pronounces: "For the return to a classic expression, for a confessional taste touched with modesty, for finding a new balance of the heart and the senses, for the fidelity to a universe in which the language of experience is always more decisive than the experience of language — for all of this — even those who aesthetically do not adhere to it, will have to acknowledge that this work has represented an efficient means to resist, with discreet obstinacy, the mainstream barbarism that often harasses us and aggresses us. Who can ask more from a poet?"

And, finally, as a figure revealed in the seventies, we must mention Nuno Júdice, one of the most enigmatic poets of our times. Having emerged from a conjuncture that was hardly favourable to poetical manifestations of an individualistic matrix (1972), when the social tensions in Portugal already carried the germ of the change that was to manifest itself two years later, and the country's preoccupations were centred on the crisis of confidence in the institutions, resulting from the erosion of the regime, and most of all by the blind alley which had led to the colonial war, Nuno Júdice "took the risk" to engage on an original path of investigation, if so may be called a work marked by the persistent exploitation of the potential of the Word, from subversion of the logical sense of discourse to the sense emerging after trafficking with verbal and cultural information, organizing itself in ambiguous metaphors of the very meaning of what he writes. The work of Nuno Júdice, seen in its whole, reveals structural coherence, undeniable refinement of the form and a semantic ambiguity in which can be read the conscience of this very ambiguity, and makes him, by the craft with which he succeeds in harmonizing these three trends, one of the most important characters in present Portuguese poetry.

It would be unfair to omit from this text the names of those whose activity in other areas of literature has been detrimental to their poetical production. Such is the case of Maria Alzira Seixo; of Fernando J.B. Martinho; of Eugenio Lisboa, the energetic and stylistically brilliant critic and essayist; or of Joaquim Manuel Magalhães and Manuel Simões, in equal ratio poets and theoreticians of literature. Others, like Olga Gonçalves, Mário Claúdio amd Maria Estela Guedes, appear to have passed through poetry without stopping, as their faculties adapted perhaps better to the writing of novels or essays.

New Poets like António Cândido Franco, Manuel Gusmão, Luís Filipe Castro Mendes, Manuel António Pina, Helena Buescu, Joana Varela, Ana Mafalda Leite, Rosa Alice Branco, Fernando Guerreiro, José Guardado Moreira, Ana Luísa Amaral and Tolentino Mendonça, are the poets of the future, because experience and life shall certainly not fail to make them complete a journey still far from its end. Yet they are also poets of today, because the work they have accomplished makes it already unambiguous that they are poets of great value, who need no more proof to be acknowledged.

Beyond these, many more names represent different ways of considering the phenomenon of poetry, and deserve to be entered in the vast list of those men and women who generously contribute to making Portugal acknowledged as a country of poets.

At present — as follows from what has been said — the "new" poetry made in Portugal relates to the elegiac tradition. If war poems like those of José Carlos Ary dos Santos, Joaquim Pessoa or José Correia Tavares seems today "elementary" compared to the standards of stylistic and narrative complexity reached by their peers in "structuring", "coding", "deconstruction" and "reconstruction" of the text, and of the subjective-melancholy ego deepening to a virtually suicide grade of nihilist excess, on another hand it is yet a necessity of the times to assess anew the regression to non-dysphoric realism through which poetry comes again nearer to the world of experience, with creative confidence, even in crisis scenarios in which the absence of epics in life prevents the surge of an epic current in poetic production. The rotation of ideologies, the advent of great causes and the aspiration of people towards a clarity of expression may, perhaps, set a new course for poets in the next century, to objectives less elucubrative and pessimistic than are today considered "unavoidable", and more in keeping with human felicity as a utopia but also as a collective aspiration that may materialize after mastering successive degrees of the apparently impossible. This is nothing but precarious futurology and things may happen according to this scheme, or exactly to the contrary? Naturally. But is not this exactly what, fifteen years ago or so, Joaquim Manuel Magalhães recommended in the last text of his book Os Dois Crepúsculos? Pay attention to what Magalhães wrote then: "In Portugal, as in the countries touched by capitalistic reform, the word of the poets needs to re-occupy the meaning of things that are being lost and of things that are late in coming. We now that the wait in poetry is the same as in history itself: without impatience. But we belong to a dissatisfied generation. Culturally, neither side has any meaning, or any new meaning. Politically, nothing marked any interest for cultural art of any kind. We hardly could reach the heart of nothing with this void. When it is more than ever necessary for our community to acquire a single and growing heart, to create a plenitude that may be sung. And this is where the poets have one of their most radical purposes".

Truly fine words for today, too!

31 December, 1996

Translated by J. Pailler

1) "cavaquism" — as in other countries thatcherism or reaganism — designs the ethos and economy of neo-liberalism associated in Portugal with the decade during which Mr Anibal Cavaco Silva served as Prime Minister (1985-1995).

2) Alcazarquivir, or Alcaçer-quibir, in Morocco, was the ground of a battle fought in 1578 between two rival Moroccan princes. Sebastian I, king of Portugal had allied himself with one of the contenders. His side lost and he was himself killed with thousands of his followers, in the worst disaster remembered by Portuguese History. Sebastian's death resulted, after a short war of succession, in Portugal being annexed by Spain, losing thus — for 60 years — its independence.

Júlio Conrado was born in the Algarve in 1936. When he was three, his family moved to Cascais, the seaside resort, fishermen's village and literati haven near Lisbon. He still lives around there. A writer of fiction and a poet, he has made himself known essentially as a journalist and a literary critic. He is a member of the International Association of Literary Critics, of the Portuguese Pen Club and of the Portuguese guild of writers.

For several years, for the Cascais city council, he has co-ordinated "Boca do Inferno", a literary magazine of exacting standards; he is deeply involved in various fields of cultural activity and he was a member of the Portuguese delegation at the 2000 Paris book fair.

A more comprehensive biography can be found on the site of "Projecto Vercial" - the greatest data source on-line for Portuguese Literature — at http://web.ipn.pt/literatura/jconrado.htm