Mario Cesariny, surrealist poet dies

Mr. Cesariny also wrote novels and plays. He worked with other surrealist greats and was influenced by French artist Andre Breton, author of the Surrealist Manifesto. He met Breton while studying in Paris in 1947. In Portugal, Mr. Cesariny was a part of the “Surrealist Group”, a gathering of Portuguese artists that included Antonio Pedro and Alexandre O'Neill. He left the group to create the Dissident Surrealist Group. In 2005, he received the Grand Prize of Literary Life. Among his best-known works are 1950's Corpo Visivel (Visible Body), Pena Capital (Capital Punishment) from 1957, and 1994's Titania.

Richard Zenith, the Portuguese editor of PIW, adds:

Mário Cesariny, one of Portugal’s most original and provocative poets, died on November 26th, at the age of 83. He was the prime mover of Portuguese Surrealism, which arrived twenty years late (1947) to Portugal, a country stifled by a dictatorial regime from 1926 until 1974. For Cesariny, who was also a notable painter, art and literature meant transfiguration – not only of political systems but of life itself. He staunchly opposed the police state (which kept him under surveillance not only for his attitude of permanent defiance but also for his ‘immoral’ homosexuality), and he also satirized the well-intentioned ‘neorealists’, whose socialist-inspired art struck him as feeble and feckless – yet another form of slavish obedience to rules and a programme. In the newspaper Diário de Notícias, which dedicated the first seven pages of its November 27th edition to Cesariny, one of the columnists noted that, were there more people with the courage to be so completely free, the world would be a very different place.