Welcome to Portuguese poetry - April 2005
It would be hard to imagine two poetic personalities as different from each other as Vasco Graça Moura (b. 1942) and Adília Lopes (b. 1960). The first has forged a brilliant career not only as a poet but as Portugal’s most distinguished translator of poetry (with Dante, Petrarch and Shakespeare to his credit), as a novelist and essayist (with important studies on Luís de Camões), and as a holder of key posts in national cultural institutions. The younger poet, who has done some editorial and research work, lives in modest circumstances with several cats and derives inspiration for some of her poems from graffiti on the walls of Lisbon subway stations.
The different lifestyles are reflected in their rather different approaches to poetry, and yet there are some striking similarities. Both are storytellers. Vasco Graça Moura has cultivated a narrative, ‘plain’ syle of poetry whose stories range from highly personal experiences (as in ‘twilight’) to dramatic historical events (‘road to ohrid’). His reflections on culture and the arts (‘coffee-mill’) and on the human condition (‘sentimental education’) are also presented in story form. Adília Lopes’s stories are often based on childhood memories (one of the poems presented here is actually titled ‘Childhood Memories’) or on her own experience as a sometimes overweight woman who doesn’t consider herself attractive and would prefer not to be single (‘Weather Report’, ‘Curlpapers’). Or is she joking? Some people in Portugal joke about her, and not everyone takes her seriously as a poet.
The startling candor of Adília Lopes has made her something of a media figure, invited to appear not infrequently on Portuguese television. She is asked to read her poems not only in bookstores but also in bars, in between the rock music. She calls herself a ‘pop poet’, and the epithet seems appropriate. Many of her poems play with popular Portuguese sayings or allude to facets of everyday life and culture. Her poetic line is usually short, and many poems are quick and snappy, like advertising slogans. Vasco Graça Moura, for his part, is no disdainer of popular culture. He has written dozens of poems to be sung as fados, by Mísia and other singers who are putting a new twist on the Portuguese popular music tradition. And Graça Moura’s poetry happily accommodates pedestrian as well as more sophisticated subject matter.
Intertextuality abounds in both poets, with frequent citations from other writers or from pages of history. One of Lopes’s books is the continuation, in verse, of a novella by Portuguese writer Nuno Bragança (1929-1985), and several others elaborate on the story of Mariana Alcoforado, purportedly a Portuguese nun whose love letters to a French captain were published, in French, in the 17th century. Graça-Moura can develop a poem out of a single phrase by another writer (‘A Word in the Heart’, on a phrase of Paul Celan) or even, less literarily, from the biographical notes on a record jacket (‘Clara Haskill’).
The two poets have this in common: just about anything can be incorporated into their poems. But their poetic attitudes are diametrically opposed. Lopes’s poetry is an art of acceptance, of learning to receive and accept life as it is, with all its bumps and rough edges. Graça Moura’s poetry receives everything omnivorously, so as to transform it. He doesn’t want to change the world in its substance, a task he knows would be impossible. But he wants to add to the world, to make it into something on top of what it already is. Poetry, for him, is like icing on the cake. The icing is the tastiest part, but you need the cake to go with it.
