Modern Portuguese Poetry Essays Poems And Translations

The present volume assembles, for the first time in English, a wide range of poetic voices and critical perspectives that illustrate the vibrancy and richness of contemporary Portuguese poetry. Special attention is given, in seven chapters, to the relations between poetry and the visual arts, to questions of gender, politics, language, and resistance. While aiming to make a unique contribution to Portuguese Studies, this book also invites scholars engaged in questions of Poetics across the board, to enter into a fresh dialogue.

This bilingual and illustrated edition offers to all English-speaking readers interested in poetry, and in the cultural legacy of Lisbon, verses written by great poets who were born or lived in Portugal's legendary capital city. The globally celebrated Luís de Camões and Fernando Pessoa, along with the latter's heteronyms, are joined by three other poets widely praised within the Portuguese-speaking world—Cesário Verde, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Florbela Espanca—, whom we have the pleasure of introducing to you.

This bilingual anthology of fifty one poems selected from Judice's extensive poetic opus covers the years of 1967 to 2005 and contains the original Portuguese poems face a face with their English translations. Although his works have been translated into twelve languages in twenty countries, Judice's poetry is underrepresented in the English language. At present, this anthology stands as the only book of his poetry available in the English language. The extended, contemplative tone in many of Judice's poems, his unhurried meditation on the subject at hand will appeal to the reader who seeks refuge from the present day diet of fast-food culture. Judice's poetry is a welcome counterpoint to the hurried existence of our modern lives. In this collection of bilingual poems the reader will find words that slowly melt into the page as though he or she contemplated an unhurried winter icicle melt from the eaves or the heavens, departing one form to embody another, before dropping into the reader's mind to moisten a new consciousness and renewed understanding of being. Nuno Judice was born in 1949 Algarve, Portugal. A professor at Lisbon's Universidade Nova, he served from 1997 to 2004 as the cultural attache of the Portuguese Embassy in Paris. One of the most important contemporary poetic voices in Portuguese literature he has written more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, essays, criticism and drama. His poetry has garnered over a dozen prizes and, although translated into twelve languages, is underrepresented in English. paulo da costa was born in Angola and raised in Portugal. He is a writer, editor and translator living on the West Coast of Canada. paulo's first book of fiction The Scent of a Lie received the 2003 Commonwealth First Book Prize for the Canada-Caribbean Region and the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. His poetry and fiction have been published in literary magazines around the world and have been translated to Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese. www.paulodacosta.com"

Fernando Pessoa is one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Until some years ago known in the English-speaking world only among a minority of connaisseurs, his work is finally becoming available in English translations, and more are in the process of reaching the literary public. Born in Lisbon in 1888, Pessoa was only forty-seven when he died, but he left behind a staggering number of unpublished manuscripts that are still being screened and brought to light. George Steiner heralded the day Pessoa discovered his major Portuguese heteronyms, for no country had ever seen the birth of four great poets in a single day. That was a reference to the personae Pessoa created, the famous heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis, besides the man himself -- all poets in their own right with their biographies and even critical exchanges among themselves. Today well over a hundred Pessoa heteronyms are known, including, notably, the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, author of The Book of Disquiet, presently available in two English translations. Lately, another Pessoa is emerging -- an English writer, as well as a thinker. Indeed, having been educated in Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was the consul of Portugal, the poet had a strong English education that shaped his life and thought. George Monteiro has been in the forefront of the uncovering of this side of Pessoa. Author, among many other works, of The Presence of Pessoa: English, American, and Southern African Literary Responses, and Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, in this volume Monteiro continues to explore and interpret the world of Pessoa to English-speaking readers.

Luís de Camões is world famous as the author of the great Renaissance epic The Lusíads, but his large and equally great body of lyric poetry is still almost completely unknown outside his native Portugal. In The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões, the award-winning translator of The Lusíads gives English readers the first comprehensive collection of Camões's sonnets, songs, elegies, hymns, odes, eclogues, and other poems--more than 280 lyrics altogether, all rendered in engaging verse. Camões (1524-1580) was the first great European artist to cross into the Southern Hemisphere, and his poetry bears the marks of nearly two decades spent in north and east Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, and Macau. From an elegy set in Morocco, to a hymn written at Cape Guardafui on the northern tip of Somalia, to the first modern European love poems for a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camões's encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places. Translator Landeg White has arranged the poems to follow the order of Camões's travels, making the book read like a journey. The work of one of the first European cosmopolitans, these poems demonstrate that Camões would deserve his place among the great poets even if he had never written his epic.

A selection of prose by “Portugal’s greatest writer of the twentieth century . . . as addictive, and endearing, as Borges and Calvino” (The Washington Post Book World). Building on the wonderful Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, which was acclaimed by Booklist as “a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century,” translator Richard Zenith has now edited and translated selections from Pessoa’s prose, offering a second volume of this forgotten master’s flights of imagination and melancholy wit. Though known primarily as a poet, Pessoa wrote prose in several languages and every genre—the novel, short stories, letters, and essays. The pieces collected here span intellectual inquiry, Platonic dialogue, and literary rivalries between Pessoa’s many alter egos—a diverse cast of literary voices he called ‘heteronyms’—who launch movements and write manifestos. There are appreciations of Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, and Joyce; critical essays in which one heteronym derides the work of another; experiments with automatic writing; and works that toy with the occult. Also included is a generous selection from Pessoa’s masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, freshly translated by Richard Zenith from newly discovered materials. Fernando Pessoa was one of the greatest exponents of modernism. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa is an important contribution to literature that brings back to life a forgotten but crucial part of the canon.

Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet and prose writer, has become an icon not only in his native Portugal -- where his likeness once adorned a monetary note -- but also in France, where he is revered in much the same way that Whitman is here. Never before has such a comprehensive and beautifully translated edition of his poetry been available in English. Richard Zenith has taken three of Pessoa's major "heteronyms" (the poet's term for his numerous literary alter egos), as well as the poetry Pessoa wrote "as himself", and created a volume of extraordinary emotional depth and poetic precision. With an introduction that throws light on the work and on the elusive man himself, Fernando Pessoa and Co. is an important addition to world literature.