Article
Welcome to Portuguese poetry - January 2005
January 18, 2006
Carlos de Oliveira (1921-1981) and António Ramos Rosa (b. 1924) had their own, individual ways of responding to the prevailing orthodoxy. The first writer, who is as famous for his novels as for his poetry, is in fact considered one of the greatest Portuguese Neo-Realists, precisely because he was unorthodox, endowing his characters with a psychological complexity and a Greekly tragic dimension that Marxist theory did not contemplate. Oliveira’s mature poetry, on the other hand, pursued a species of ‘micro-realism’, with meticulously wrought, minimalist verses that attempted to get under or into reality’s skin. The title of his collected poetry, which underwent constant distillation and revision, translates into English as Poetic Work, but the Portuguese word for ‘work’ is not the usual obra (‘oeuvre’) but trabalho, which is the kind of work that implies sweat, like the French travail.
António Ramos Rosa has pursued what we might dub a Ur-Realism. Alberto Caeiro, the alter ego of Fernando Pessoa who supposedly had no schooling and lived in the country, proposed “lessons in unlearning” to enable us to see the world in the full freshness of what it is, without preconceptions. Ramos Rosa proposes the same kind of lessons in order to reach an original state of ignorance, of knowing without knowing, through direct apperception. Language, in this scheme, has an incantatory function, the power of naming things into existence. Less labored and more liberated than Oliveira, Ramos Rosa’s poetry of the last two decades is an exalted hymn of original, pure, ignorant being.
One more thing . . . Those readers who enjoyed the poetry of Eugénio de Andrade, featured in the last Portuguese contribution to Poetry International, may want to see the article we are just now posting by his translator, Alexis Levitin.
Our next issue will be published on April 1. {id="4638" title="Who’s behind the Portuguese magazine?"}
The two poets we are presenting to kick off the new year at Poetry International – Carlos de Oliveira and António Ramos Rosa – were contemporaries who came of age during the Neo-Realist phase of Portuguese literature. Though their work was initially informed by Neo-Realist tenets, they refused to mold their writing according to a set of principles. Or they defined their own principles and developed, we could say, their own kind of realism.
Neo-Realism, with its focus on social inequities and its Marxist vision of history and economic evolution, was the politically correct response to the Salazar regime, at least during its first several decades. (Salazar, who wielded considerable power as a Finance Minister since 1928, became prime minister and a virtual dictator in 1932.) As occurred with Neo- or Social Realism elsewhere, the Portuguese variety produced its share of programmatic literary productions that, while interesting as sociological documents, lacked the universality of ‘great’ and enduring art (some people, I realize, will object to the very notion of ‘great’ or canonical art). A late-blooming Portuguese Surrealist movement – a subject we will take up in the future – was one of the most interesting and fruitful reactions to the artistic limitations of Neo-Realism.Carlos de Oliveira (1921-1981) and António Ramos Rosa (b. 1924) had their own, individual ways of responding to the prevailing orthodoxy. The first writer, who is as famous for his novels as for his poetry, is in fact considered one of the greatest Portuguese Neo-Realists, precisely because he was unorthodox, endowing his characters with a psychological complexity and a Greekly tragic dimension that Marxist theory did not contemplate. Oliveira’s mature poetry, on the other hand, pursued a species of ‘micro-realism’, with meticulously wrought, minimalist verses that attempted to get under or into reality’s skin. The title of his collected poetry, which underwent constant distillation and revision, translates into English as Poetic Work, but the Portuguese word for ‘work’ is not the usual obra (‘oeuvre’) but trabalho, which is the kind of work that implies sweat, like the French travail.
António Ramos Rosa has pursued what we might dub a Ur-Realism. Alberto Caeiro, the alter ego of Fernando Pessoa who supposedly had no schooling and lived in the country, proposed “lessons in unlearning” to enable us to see the world in the full freshness of what it is, without preconceptions. Ramos Rosa proposes the same kind of lessons in order to reach an original state of ignorance, of knowing without knowing, through direct apperception. Language, in this scheme, has an incantatory function, the power of naming things into existence. Less labored and more liberated than Oliveira, Ramos Rosa’s poetry of the last two decades is an exalted hymn of original, pure, ignorant being.
One more thing . . . Those readers who enjoyed the poetry of Eugénio de Andrade, featured in the last Portuguese contribution to Poetry International, may want to see the article we are just now posting by his translator, Alexis Levitin.
Our next issue will be published on April 1. {id="4638" title="Who’s behind the Portuguese magazine?"}
© Richard Zenith
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