Anthology-Preface: Aljaž Koprivnikar
Translation: Yorgos Goymas, Maria Panopoulou
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Raquel Νobre Guerra, Sara F. Costa, Filipa Leal, Beatriz Hierro Lopes, Miguel Manso, Nuno Brito, Tiago Patricio, Tatiana Faia, Andreia Faria, Luis Felicio
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Portuguese poetry, in the company of the rest of European poetics, is proverbially located on one of the extreme edges of the European continent, and because of this is sometimes even a little too far removed from the consciousness of many readers, with the exception of well-known giants of Portuguese and world literature such as Luís de Camões, Fernando Pessoa and Nobel Prize winner for Literature José Saramago. But in reality, Portuguese literature demonstrates tremendous power and continuous progress that historically began in the far west of Europe with the Arabic culture of the written word, then developed in the following centuries through the Middle Ages with the tradition of Galician-Portuguese troubadour songs or the so-called movement of trovadorismo, in which collected poems were also printed in anthologies called cancioneiros, while at the same time Portuguese literature already showed intertwining and exchanging contacts with other literary streams, especially the area of present-day Spain, France and Italy.
This can further be seen in the period of Renaissance and Mannerism, when in the so-called Castile-Portuguese school, poetry comes to the forefront and Garcia de Resende publishes Cancioneiro Geral in 1516, where one can see the reliance on some of the great poetic names of the time, such as Dante Alighieri, Petrarca and Marquis de Santillana, but also at that time Portuguese literature was being produced by prominent local authors such as António Ferreira, Gil Vicente, Bernardim Ribeiro and Sá de Miranda. During that period, we can see a mix of different poetic forms on Portuguese soil, as well as the birth of some central themes of Portuguese poetics, such as so-called sebastianism, one of the myths of particular importance to nationality.
Even more important is the year 1572, when Portuguese literature experiences one of its highlights with the release of the national epic Os Lusíadas. Its author, Luís Vaz de Camões, who is still regarded as the greatest Portuguese poet to date, drawing on Virgil and Homer in the style of a regular historical epic, describes Portuguese history, its discoveries and conquests around the world, while the greatness of this epic poem is maintained to this day and influenced many authors from Portugal and abroad. Camões also made a major transition in Portuguese literature to mannerism, beginning a period of melancholy, deeply existential poetry that in some cases is characteristic of Portuguese literature even today.
However, the continuation of epic poetry at that time should not be overlooked, persisting through the Baroque period until meeting its final decline in what is known as the period of Arcadismo. In it we can see the Portuguese authors leaning towards neoclassicism, which turns away from the Baroque swell and, above all, through the poetry association Arcádia Lusitana (authors like – Francisco Manuel do Nascimento, Manuel Maria Barbosa Du Bocage, Correia Garção, Reis Quita, Francisco Joaquim Bingre, Marquesa de Alorna, José Anastácio da Cunha, José Agostinho de Macedo, Nicolau Tolentino de Almeida, António Dinis da Cruz e Silva…) develops poetics that follow the rules of harmony and simplicity in imitating the Greco-Latin poetic tradition and ancient poetic forms.
Like for many other European nations, the importance of romanticism applies also to Portugal, the period in which we can see the national idea at the forefront, rejection of past literary influences, and a turn to the North in its search for English literary tradition. Literature from that time shows influences of Victor Hugo, Shakespeare, Walter Scott and Byron. The greatest contributors of that period of Portuguese literature include de Almeida Garrett, Alexandre Herculano and António Feliciano de Castilho, the latter’s creation already passing into the realm of ultra-romanticism.
The emergence of later realism and naturalism in many respects also follows European trends of the time, associated in Portugal with Generation 70 (Antero de Quental, Eça de Queirós, Ramalho Ortigão, Teófilo Braga, Oliveira Martins…) for which a common thing is a shift to an area of objective description of everyday life and a negative attitude to past poetic styles. Among many of the poets of the time we should definitely mention the exhibition piece of national realism – parnasianism, and the author Cesário Verde, who outlines a completely authorial direction (for example sensory description of the streets of Lisbon, using rich, vibrant language and various poetic figures), thematically with human suffering (in the famous collection O Sentimento de um Ocidental), where we can already recognize a noticeable juxtaposition with European decadence, with authors such as Baudelaire, as well as meddling with the impressionism period.
The Portuguese line of symbolism, first started by Camilo Pessanha, with the publication of the famous poetry collection Clepsidra (1920), in which he reflects on the deep existential crisis of man between the rich versification range and fragmented, metaphorical language, is not to be overlooked as well since stylistically, it already marks one of the most important precursors of modernism. Before the transition to modernist and avant-garde writing, it is worth mentioning Portugal’s specific period of “neo” renaissance, led mainly by Jaime Cortesão, Teixeira de Pascoaes and the philosopher Leonardo Coimbra, who spread patriotic ideas through the literary magazine A Águia until the time of the Republican Revolution and the so-called movement of saudosismo. The latter is characterized by a neo-romantic aesthetic, where the authors favour historical themes, a mystical and animistic view of nature, exploring the national soul through folklore with a great deal of sentimentality and nostalgia, and pursuing a national revival, lead mainly by the today already typical Portuguese sense of saudade.
Mysticism is also one of the features of Portuguese modernism, with its first origins mainly around the movement of futurism and the authorial circle of Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Fernando Pessoa, who tried to invent a unique “Portuguese futurism” with the movements “Paulismo”, then “interseccionismo” and finally “Sensacionismo”. Pessoa is considered to be the second greatest Portuguese poet, in particular because of the leap into liberation of poetic form and content, characterized by a unique and dense complex personality, as he created under a number of heteronymous, each with a unique style of writing, different content and, respectively, individual literary streams. The two mentioned authors were collaborators of the first modernist generation (including authors such as Almada Negreiros, António Botto, Luís de Montalvor, Ronald de Carvalho, Raul Leal …) in Portugal, mainly collected around various literary magazines, such as Portugal Futurista, Centauro and Orpheu, with the subsequent publication of Contemporânea and Athena, all together transforming Portuguese literature of that time with great power.
The second modernist generation of the early 20th century, which expressed its ideas through the magazine Presença (for example, authors like Miguel Torga, José Régio, Tomaz de Figueiredo, Irene Lisboa, João Gaspar Simões, Vitorino Nemésio) is similar to modernist and avant-garde origins elsewhere in Europe since the Portuguese authors also argued for the freedom as a fundamental concept and the transforming power of art on society, while often colliding with an otherwise dominant culturally traditional environment, since at that time one could not ignore the social and political insecurity that led Portugal in the decades from the former monarchy through the short period of the First republic to the so-called Estado Novo, under the authority of António de Oliveira Salazar, who with his ideology to some degree also brought a time of censorship to literature.
If we take a look at Portuguese literature and its later generations, after the first modernist period, which ends around the 1940s, and gives way to the style of neo-realism and socialist realism, more in line with the social orientation of that time, their creation can be determined mainly by two milestones – first one being the poetry collection Poesia (1944) by de Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and, the second by the (Este) Rosto in the late 1970s by the author Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão. Portuguese poetry between those decades recovered much of its poetic power, by re-evaluating its abilities and seeking to regain the central place of the word in poem construction, which can also be seen as a re-affirmation of modernism itself.
Among many authors of that time (such as Carlos de Oliveira, Eugénio de Andrade, Jorge de Sena, Antonio Ramos Rosa, Alexandre O’Neill, Mário Cesariny, Casais Monteiro, Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, Miguel Torga, Edmundo de Bettencourt, Irene Lisboa, Luize Neto Jorge, Ruy Belo, Vitorino Nemésio, Herberto Helder, Armando Silva Carvalho, Fernando Assis Pacheco, Pedro Tamen …) we can see a variety of approaches and processes within the inherently authorial poetics – where poetic discourse can be drawn from both the lyrical conservative tradition and the rhetorical trend of poetry, again on the other side of the assimilation of surrealism, experimentation and poetic invention, where, between the abyss of language and reality, the establishment of complete freedom in combining words, images and sounds is characteristic, while in certain authorial poetics, the almost obsessive constructive rigor of texts can be seen from all mentioned above as well (for example in poetics of Jorge de Sena or Ruy Belo). Poetry generations until the 1970s, like elsewhere in Europe and the world, belong to different stylistical orientations, whether they used existentialism (for example, a generation of the 50’s), or concrete and experimental poetics (especially generations in the 60’s – for example poetry movement of Poesia 61 and important individual poetry names such Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, Maria Teresa Horta, Luiza Neto Jorge, Gastão Cruz and Casimiro de Brito), turning both to international trends, as well as originating from the domestic cultural treasury (as the saudosismo mentioned above).
This was also a time when Portuguese literature had an extraordinary power beyond the realm of fiction, actively concerning itself with social issues, evident in the so-called Carnation Revolution, where Portuguese poetry represents a means of social change (visible in the author’s poetics such as José Jorge Letria, José Mário Branco, Sérgio Godinho, Manuel Freire, Adriano Correia de Oliveira, Francisco Fanhais, Ary dos Santos and Manuel Alegre), among other things, bringing the people’s spirit and desire for democratization before the April revolution itself. After it, when Portuguese society moves from the area of socialism and the former regime to gradual democracy and liberalization, we are faced with a time of economic and social crisis, however, in the literary area, in connection with modernism, the cultural environment is more widely opened and facilitates cultural exchange (for example with Brazil and other former colonies as well as the rest of the world), which further enriches the culture and brings it from a regional to a wider international context, with Portuguese poetry regaining its strength and further building on its unique spirit.
Even after the 1970s, poetry maintains diverse poetics that move rather along generational affiliations, build around literary journals that show responses to past decades (for example, in the writing of António Franco Alexandre and João Miguel Fernandes Jorge), or the author’s poetics, on the other hand, move to find lyricism closer to everyday life and the use of free verse in the so-called phase of emphatic discursiveness (such as Nuno Júdice), remaining present to this day with its narrative and hybrid prose style. Like elsewhere in Europe, the search for a new expression in poetics and experimentation with content and form (Luís Quintais and Rui Cóias) is also evident, and can be seen as well in later poetic generations in the 1980s and 1990s (for example, by Luís Miguel Nava, Paulo Teixeira, Adília Lopes, Fernanda Luís Sampaio, Fernando Pinto do Amaral, Manuel Gusmão, Manuel António Pina) which, in the development of poetic language, devote themselves to a decisive refinement, even though the negative tendency of exhaustion cannot be overlooked in the post modern style “everything is already written, everything is already said”, to which, until this day, Portuguese literature still successfully resists with the diversity and direct power of expression of individual authors, while approaching other national literatures globally, still somehow maintaining its distinctive “national character”.
Moving from the historical overview to the present day, Portuguese literature is today a major player on the world stage, since Portuguese language in Europe alone is the third most spoken native language, with literature, also including the former Portuguese colonies, as an important mediator of various cultural exchanges and literary trends. In Portugal, the poetry and publishing market is well diversified in this way, as authors have the opportunity to participate in numerous literary festivals (LeV, Húmus, Tinto no Branco, Festival Literário da Madeira, Abecedário: Festival da Palavra, Fronteira, Correntes d’Escritas, Tabula Rasa Festival Literário de Fátima, Festival Literário Internacional Interior – FLII Palavras de Fogo, Silêncio Festival…) and book fairs (Feira do Livro de Coimbra, Feira do Livro de Lisboa, Feira do Livro do Porto …), publish their works in various literary magazines (Granta, Nervo, Revista LER, Tlön, Eufeme, Telhados de Vidro, Revista Caliban, Revista Intro, Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias…) as well as on websites (A Ulysses, Livrómano, Revista Blimunda, Apócrifa, Criatura…), in publishing houses (Edições Colibri, Edições Tinta Da China, Quetzal Editores, Bertrand Editora, Porto Editora, Editors A Tua Mãe, Não edições, Textura, Língua Morta, Artefacto, Douda Correria, Do Lado Esquerdo…) and present themselves at public readings (just to mention Poetas do Povo, which happens every Monday in Lisbon…).
Needless to say, Lisbon has the oldest operating bookstore (Bertrand Chiado, operating since 1732) and the smallest bookstore in the world (Livraria Simão), where in the country packed with many outstanding libraries and antiquaries, some of the most beautiful bookstores are consistently to be found on world’s top lists (such as the famous Livraria Lello in Port, serving as the inspiration for the author of the Harry Potter series), as well as various authoring agencies (such as one of the largest Booktailor) exist, all of which make the Portuguese literary scene well placed on the European map. Literature and especially poetry in this case still hold an enviable place in society as it is still well regarded, evidenced by many national literary awards (Camões Prize, José Saramago Prize, Prémio Autores, Prémio Leya, Grande Prémio de Poesia APE, Prémio de Poesia Cesário Verde, Prémio PEN Clube Português, Prémio Pessoa…), while one can still see readers in literary cafes and many new literary approaches (such as the Flanzine project or library loans spots in parks), with literature present in print media as well as in television shows (Todas as Palavras, Os Livros…) so we can conclude that literature is well-visible in public life.
In such a world, in which the latest generation of Portuguese poets is blossoming, poetry of today is created extremely heterogeneously, by varied authorial poetics that would be difficult to define with a common denominator or a single literary program, while also the term of generation as a unifying factor cannot be used. Looking at the creation of a generation that was born in the 1980s or 1990s, it is a generation that carries the heritage of modernism and post modernism, and at the same time it should widely be viewed in the context of globalization trends outside its homeland. Amongst the exceptionally few authors, mostly traversed between the two major literary centres – Lisbon and Porto (let us also not forget of many smaller ones, for example, Óbidos, which is a UNESCO city of literature), there are rarely some common denominators. One of the rare ones in the last years for example, is gathered around the magazine Criatura (Ana Antunes, David Teles Pereira and Diogo Vaz Pinto), but not due to the lineage of their authorial poetics, but more because of their personal relationship to poetry and the outside world. If we look at the broader picture of contemporary Portuguese poetry, we can more and more see the consistency of individual poetics in its construction of a language and form that is distinctly authorial (Filipa Leal, Catarina Nunes de Almeida, Joana Serrado, Rui Lage, Rui Cóias, Rui Pires Cabral, José Mário Silva, Luís Quintais, Daniel Jonas, Margarida Vale de Gato …), characterized by a search for one’s expression on the one hand and a return to one’s personal attitude to one’s time and world view, without belonging to a poetry school. The choice of ten poets in this anthology is in such way extremely difficult and given all the facts cannot fully reflect the current state of poetry of the young poetry scene in Portugal, but it can bring to the reader a welcome insight into today’s poetry and the tendencies that lurk in the poems of selected young poets.
The selected poets collected in the anthology are the recipients of many national and international literary awards, some of them are connected by the experience of being abroad, the poetic tradition, new environment and its cultural starting points, where individual national characteristics melt in the globalizing village of poetry. By saying this, it is best for a better understanding of the spirit of today’s Portuguese literature that we highlight each of the poetics individually.
If we start with the first of the authors living outside their home country, one should not overlook Sara F. Costa, who lives in Beijing and as a translator and organizer of various events (Spittoon Beijing Based Art Collective, The Script Road-Macau Literary Festival, China-European Union Literary Festival…) takes care of the intercultural contact between Portuguese and Chinese literature. As a multi-award winning author home and around the world (Serra da Lousã Literary Award, João da Silva Correia Literary Award, Prémio Glória de Sant’ Anna), she has written several collections of poetry in which she can open spaces for diverse topics (everything from erotica, human social critiques to modern technology), distinguished by the original language and labyrinth of images, where the entrails of the lyric subject and the exterior, or construction, are intertwined. In her poetry, one can notice the frequent changing of forms, where one thing spontaneously transforms into another, whether it is the temporal, geographical or personal coordinates of a body. The power of the process of mutation of metaphor and everyday language is present in the expression of flirtation with modernist, surrealistic and experimental poetry, with Sara F. Costa’s poetry opening up into the world, multicultural and intercultural experience, characterized by increasing deconstruction and the search for balance in a changing world, indeterminacy of the body and identity, combining into expression, capable to express the sense of exile in a modern world and gradual construction, where one side is equal to the other side of the world.
Similar to Sara F. Costa, who devoted her education to intercultural studies between Portuguese and Chinese, Tatiana Faia also creates as a poet abroad, currently living in Oxford and studying ancient Greek literature, with a significant connection with the Mediterranean or, more narrowly, Greek culture and literature. The author, who has so far published a collection of short prose and three poetry collections, with the last one Um quarto em Atenas receiving the prestigious Portuguese PEN Prize. In her own poetry Tatiana Faia combines numerous ancient and Christian myths, canonical historical and cultural references, displaced through a post modernist process into contemporary poetic landscapes, to which she self-referentially also adds the spatial and temporal coordinates of the poems’ origin, with her texts very often using geographical references to connect the past with the present, as she uses fundamental figures from the western canon to meet current societal challenges, such as the gulf between the banality of the daily life of Europeans and the dire reality of migration crises that reflect modern society in a convex mirror. In doing so, social engagement in the search for identity and meaning in the world is often fostered by an effective irony, through which from outside the world, she allows us to reflect on society as well as her own nation, if we only emphasize the humorous response to the Portuguese obsession with the triple F – fado, football, Fátima.
In his poems, the poet Luís Felício also touches on the tradition of the canon of culture, which he treats in a mystical and intimate way. In the past, the young Portuguese author lived between Poland, Germany, Netherlands and is currently settled in Paris where he completed his studies in art history and philosophy. An author who has won many literary awards (Prémio Nacional de Poesia Cidade de Almada, Prémio Literário Cidade do Funchal…), he also worked as an editor for the Portuguese magazine Cràse that played an important role in young Portuguese literature. He is also known for that in the past he often published his work under different pseudonyms, such as Ruy Narval. His poetry is characterized by a deliberate play of contrasts, which, through fluent language and away from metaphorical sobriety and the too often seen mundane poetry, breaks down, in dialogue with the symbolic and surrealistic tradition, and catches the subtle imbalances between the otherwise hermetic language, contrasted by an extremely delicate sensibility, which on the other hand is distinguished by a thoughtful use of rhythm and images, working together to define his poetics. Avoiding concrete descriptions and mainstream currents with an unusual anti-discursiveness and deconstructionism allow readings to be repeated and different, making his poetry interesting over and over.
Various spaces, places and worlds, as one of the central themes, appear in the same way as with Tatiana Faia with the poet, writer and playwright Tiago Patrício, who is a frequent guest of various literary residences (among others, having his residency in Scotland, USA, Spain, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and Tunisia). The author, who has received several literary awards, has devoted quite a few of his works to various geographical positions, since his debut, O Livro das Aves – for example the book written in New York (Caderno de New York) and, is on the other hand also frequently flirting with Slavic culture and literature, mainly related to the Czech capital within the book Cartas de Prague, as well as in the latest collection Turismo de Guerra, where the author divides its design into three parts (Slavic language, Bohemian crystal and Slavic winter), dealing primarily with the role of language as an identifying element in modern times, whilst also concerning itself with cultural aspects of the central theme of “war tourism”. At the same time, his poems show a strong propensity for lyricism or images, arranged in a linear narrative, but still acting as a deliberate poetry that combines the narrative arc with strong lyrical images so that it is able to address the reader with balanced poetic language.
With a strong attachment to the Anglo-Saxon cultural space at the other end of the world, more specifically in the United States, contemporary Portuguese young literature is also created by the poet Nuno Brito, who was born in Porto and later worked as a lecturer in literature at the Faculty of Arts of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and is currently completing his doctoral studies at the University of California and Santa Barbara. He published several collections (Delírio Húngaro, Creme de la Creme, Duplo-Poço, As Abelhas extension of salt, Estação de Serviço em Mercúrio and O Desenhador de Sóis) showcasing a fragmented, often disconnected expression in his poetics. Often there is visible flirting with avant-garde and post modernist remarks, extending from visionary insights of human existential reality between verse and prose, where the use of various literary genres and intertextual elements prevails, with the continual transcending of everyday elements through the realm of transformation. The complex set and means in the process of formalizing ludist poems in unusual recontextualizations, unexpected and powerful associations, sounds and colours sew contrasts in their duality into a path of hyper-consciousness that flows in an intensely poetic way, which places the author as a distinctly authorial voice within contemporary Portuguese literature.
A distinctly authorial voice that stands out from contemporary Portuguese poetics and shows resistance to the mainstream is as well Miguel Manso. The author, who also incorporates film, theatrical art and is involved in karate as well as poetry, has edited his first books in self-publishing, as graphic and design art as a whole, and in his further work has collaborated with various publishers, received good responses from the critical world and was also nominated for national literary awards (Sociedade Portuguese de Autores, Gloria De Sant’ Anna, PEN Clube Português, Casino Da Póvoa). In his poetry one can often see descriptions of the chaotic pulse of the world, mixing with linguistic idiosyncratic skill and rich language, full of rhythmic and sound effects, wordplay, ambiguities, and often unusual, archaic usage. A poetic language that, through its cutting-edge technique of looking at post modernist procedures in intertextual situations, brings many contradictions between cosmic immensity and everyday coincidence, while playing with language between salvific irony and elegance of harshness, this all together brings the reader astounding turns and tense throughout the readings.
To the extent that Nuno Brito gives his images complete creative freedom, often flowing into a fragmented form and Miguel Manso sticking out from the mainstream, also the poet Filipa Leal proves that Portuguese young poetry has long been focused not only on typical Portuguese motifs such as the sea and the saudade, even writing “I no longer want to write about the sea”. Her poetics, in her narrative, expand as a net that she uses to hunt for everyday life and fragile moments, so that she can freely transform it into poetic matter. In her poems she uses vocabulary from the Portuguese streets, the innards of conversations from the urban, modern world, such as the sounds of a human routine, while emphasizing one that is often overlooked or inaudible, which is revealed only through a poem. Her writing asks fundamental existential questions to purely banal everyday situations, from nostalgia for childhood to social engagement in the problems of the modern world, where a unique, individual experience is also becoming a collective one. As such her initial works often prove to be an allegory, and especially in her last works, she uses everyday life, where she is exposed to (self) irony and black humour, but in a gradual way of looking from the outside, she also welcomes social engagement, meant to provoke the current situation of the neoliberal capitalist world and deconstruct sentimentality into important messages about today’s world.
In exploring the central motifs and topics in which the aforementioned authors mostly relate to post modernist processes, innovative techniques are used, and the latter intertwining should also mention experimentation with a form of poetics in some cases already playing on the border between poetry and prose hybrids, also evident in the creation of Beatriz Hierro Lopes. Her poetic is distinguished by a sensitive view that constructs the direct and tangible reality within individual texts in a new and polarized way, where the narrative, existential elements in intense dialogue with the body and its shadow of poems transcend the assumption of individual experience. Topics such as memory, family and personal relationships, urban social contexts are dealt with extremely vitalistically through the intersections of perceptual images in the larger fragmentary units of a prose experiment, guided by the fluidity and acoustic-rhythmic suggestions of each unit into symbolic layers of the text, where the internal reflections are overflowing, respectively, metamorphosed with the outside world. In relation to the past and, on the other hand, the contemporary world, using a variety of topics, the author brings to her reader a space where the multiplication of poetic subjects takes place, which in its own way establishes a dialogue with the modernist tradition, and with its power of unusual balance and picturesqueness as one of the more interesting authorial voices of today’s Portuguese poetry.
Engaging in metafiction is also typical of poet Raquel Nobre Guerra, who won the Prémio Primeira Obra Literary Prize for P.E.N. Clube Português and Prémios Novos CGD / Culturgest, and who’s poetry is extremely flexible, behaves as an alchemist’s raw material for expression, where the influence of urban poetry is quite visible. We witness descriptions of bohemian cafes and everyday life, but the urban topography is also accompanied by fierce social criticism. Often, melancholy-sarcastic poems are intertwined with quotations of Portuguese and world literary works, as well as taken from popular culture and music, from describing personal experiences to existential themes, posing questions such as what the point of poetry in today’s world of capital, uncertainty and absence even is. They also shift the answers to fundamental challenges into a collective experience, which brings the poetry of the author, looking broadly at the world out there, closer to the present-day currents of an intimate position.
As we can see, intimist position, like elsewhere in European contemporary poetry, is also present within the younger generation of Portuguese poets, where the latter movement is recorded with the author’s voice and Andreia C. Faria, who has published several collections so far (De haver relento, Seguiram-se Flúor, Um pouco acima do lugar onde melhor escuta o coração and Tão Bela Como Qualquer Rapaz) and received the Prémio SPA Literary Prize for the best poetry book for her last poetry collection. Her poems are distinguished by extraordinary depth, the unexpected characteristic of each verse, which, while accepting the intimate atmosphere or physicality and its anatomical elements, are the starting points for viewing both the world and the creative impulse itself. In this way, intimism becomes a kind of weapon, characterized by powerful metaphors that are not afraid of violence, being torn, and cruelty of the view, allowing parallels to be seen both within American poetry (for example, by Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Anne Carson and Adrienne Rich) and Portuguese, as well as the World Modernist School, but at the same time, as we also saw with other nine presented poets so far, we are dealing with a unique, authorial position that stands out from other literary trends.
Given the historical overview of Portuguese poetry to this day, and the selection of ten contemporary poetic names, in the end, it also has to be said that the selection is trying to be as representative as possible, but being aware of its limitations. With the many poetic names of Portuguese contemporary poetry that create both in the homeland and in the world, as we saw in the preface until now, not all authors can be highlighted, so it has to be said that the selection itself is constructed according to the age limit (under 40, which is usually the dividing line of young authorship), and to a selection of poetic names that have won literary awards, have been recognized by Portuguese literary critics and already established at home and around the world. Young poetic names indicate and signify the movements of Portuguese poetry in the future, while giving the Greek reader an insight into what is happening now, with a brief, albeit curtailed insight into the history of Portuguese literature, seeking to approximate the specifics of the development and characteristics of Portuguese poetry. From the proverbial edge of Europe, the preface wants to expose Portuguese poetry on its well-deserved pedestal, as it builds, from the extraordinary power of the past to the wider European and world literature with diverse and exciting poetic voices of today, while the included authors not only are bringing individually rich and exiting poetry, but can also be an important inspiration to the Greek reader, situated on a bridge stretched between West and East – between Portuguese and Greek literature.
Aljaž Koprivnikar,
poet