Exterior and interior
We could begin this literary adventure in the time of the cave paintings or the dolmens that still dot the Alentejo, in the time of the Roman occupation or the Arab conquest, in the time when the Catholic religion was established, but in the end we will dedicate these first lines to a native who opened a maritime route to India in 1498. Vasco de Gama was born around 1469 in Sines, he will not come back from his third expedition which will see him breathing his last in Cochin in 1524. He will be the first one to go around Africa by the Cape of Good Hope, to take up a challenge and to chase a legend, the one of the mythical kingdom of the priest John whose existence had been attested by several European travelers since the 12th century. The report of his first expedition (from 1497 to 1499) was made by a man who accompanied him but whose identity remained a mystery for a long time. It is now customary to identify him with a certain Álvaro Velho, an eyewitness whose account can be discovered with an intact and always renewed pleasure in the beautiful Chandeigne editions.
While the navigator was discovering the vast world, two native Alentejo authors were exploring new literary genres: Garcia de Resende (1470-1536) and Bernardim Ribeiro (1482-1552). The former entered the service of John II as a page at the age of 10, and dedicated a chronicle to the king(La Crónica de D. Jao II) full of personal anecdotes in 1545, but this is only one of the works that he accomplished with brilliance, since he is also credited with an anthology of the works of almost 300 Portuguese and Spanish poets(The General Cancioneiro, 1516) and the Miscellanea, in which, in 300 stanzas, he tells the story of his time. Some also see him as the instigator of the cycle A castro, which Antónia Ferreira brought to the stage in Coimbra in 1587, and with this tragedy he established the classical movement in Portugal. Garcia de Resende was the first to evoke the strange post-mortem fate of Inés de Castro, who was proclaimed queen after her death and whose body was dug up to be presented at a funeral coronation ceremony during which, it is said, the members of the court had to kiss her hand.. Bernardim Ribeiro, on the other hand, is considered the initiator of the pastoral novel with his Memoirs of a Sad Girl or The Book of Solitudes, which was translated by Phébus Editions in 2003 but is now unfortunately out of print. With this portrait of a woman who dreams her life through the destiny of three of her fellow women, Bernardim Ribeiro is undoubtedly the first to evoke saudade, this feeling of "happy nostalgia" so typically Portuguese. This was a time of intellectual effervescence, as confirmed by the creation of the University of the Holy Spirit of Évora by Cardinal Infant Dom Henrique, future king of Portugal, in 1559. This prestigious institution welcomed Pedro da Fonseca (1528-1599) , who worked hard on the publication of commentaries on Aristotle, which earned him comparisons with the ancient philosopher , and Luis de Molina, who also taught philosophy at the University, and who was interested in the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas.From the 17th to the 20th century
On January 4, 1669, the Parisian bookseller-publisher Claude Barbin published Lettres portugaises translated into French. If the subject of this correspondence is quite classical - a woman, seduced by a man, who waits in vain for his return, oscillating between hope and despair - its story is not, since it is first published anonymously. At the end of what looks like a real literary investigation, these writings will be attributed, without real certainty, to Mariana Alcoforado, born in 1640 in Beja and placed in the convent of her city by her family. Her love and the recipient of her letters would be the French officer Noël Bouton de Chamilly. Finally, the rescue and translation of this correspondence, which was intended to remain secret, would be the work of Gabriel de Guilleguargues, a renowned scholar of the time. This story, romantic and fantastic, is now published by Larousse under the title Lettres de la religieuse portugaise
. The 19th century was marked by a man who was the antithesis of our convent, Fialho de Almeida (1857-1911), who was part of the post-romantic trend, or even decadence, if we are to believe his works - Os Gatos, O Pais das uvas, Contos, . .. - which combine his exacerbated realism, proper to his profession as a journalist, with a certain taste for morbidity. A tutelary figure of his time, his biting irony and provocative posture left no one indifferent, but it is important to emphasize the tenderness he never ceased to show for the "little people" of his native region. His contemporary António Lobo de Almada Negreiros (1868-1939) also worked as a journalist, which led him to be sent to Paris by the Lisbon government to present the Portuguese colonies at the 1900 Universal Exhibition. He was then appointed vice-consul in the French capital where he published articles in numerous newspapers but also works on his favorite theme, the colonies. He was also a poet and met with great success with his collection Lyra occidental. At the very end of the 19th century, the great poetess Florbela Espanca was born in 1894 in Vila Viçosa. Stricken by successive bereavements, including that of her mother and brother, and by three divorces, her verses are imbued with a real melancholy but also do not refuse to lend themselves, on occasion, to eroticism. Constantly rediscovered since her early death by suicide on her 36th birthday, Florbela Espanca is now considered one of the greatest Portuguese authors. Les Petites Allées publishers offer a glimpse of her talent in Our House, which they published in bilingual version in 2021.The new century
Florbela Espança is not necessarily associated with a specific literary movement because her work deals with universal subjects and uses classical forms, but with the emerging twentieth century her peers try to explore new paths. Thus, if José Régio favored a psychological approach to human dichotomies - body and spirit, individuality and gregarious instinct - in Poems of God and the Devil (1925) or in The Forbidden Song (1968), he also joined the "anti-literary" journal Presença
, of which he was a founding member in 1927. This publication brought together Portuguese modernists and translated many French writers, such as Apollinaire and Gide. Manuel de Fonseca (1911-1993) and Antunes da Silva (1921-1997), for their part, were to delve into the vein of neo-realism, ricocheting their pens on the turpitudes and anxieties of the history of their country, which, since the coup d'état of May 28, 1926, had sunk into dictatorship.It was not until the Carnation Revolution, in 1974, that Portugal was liberated, and the literature of the Alentejo was given a new lease of life, with José Saramago's Levantadode Chão, published at the beginning of the 1980s. The man who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998 was born in 1922 into a very modest family, and in his acceptance speech he paid tribute to his illiterate grandparents, with whom he had spent part of his youth. It is therefore from a life that he knows well, that of a rural village, that he will draw inspiration for his first successful work, the first also in which he will innovate by doing without a too rigid punctuation and by mixing skilfully direct and indirect speech, initiating the language that will be from now on his trademark. Relevé de terre (Survey of the Land
) recalls three generations of the same family of peasant farmers confronted with the Church and the control of landowners, from the beginning of the 20th century until the Carnation Revolution. This book, very realistic, is essential for those who want to understand the Alentejo from the inside. Almeida Faria, born in 1943 in Montemor-o-Novo, was also inspired by the life of an Alentejo family during the dictatorship in his Lusitanian Tetralogy, although this is only a small part of the work of a writer who also became a translator and, above all, who disrupted the stylistic codes on several occasions. In 2016, the editorial writer of the newspaper Expresso, Henrique Raposo, published Alentejo Prometido on the same theme, a work that caused controversy, with some seeing it as a crude caricature of the peasant world, while others welcomed the denunciation of the high suicide rate in this region of Portugal. Whatever the case, literature flourishes and blossoms in these arid lands, as evidenced by the richness of the ASSESTA (Associação de Escritores do Alentejo) website, which references new talent and has, moreover, created the Joaquim Mestre Prize, named after a librarian from Beja who had a decisive influence on local cultural life and who also made a name for himself by the quality of his prose, which was crowned with the Manuel da Fonseca Prize for Breviário das Almas, which was published in 2009. Also worthy of mention is José Luís Peixoto, born in Galveias Ponte del Sor in September 1974, who won the prestigious Saramago Prize for his first novel, published when he was only 26 years old. This title - available in French from Grasset under the title Sans un regard - tells the story of a shepherd, José, haunted by the idea that his wife is unfaithful to him. The second part propels readers thirty years later, when his descendants face an equally uncertain fate. The vigor of his writing and the strength of his themes were confirmed in the novels that followed, notably in A House in the Darkness, which features a writer living in seclusion with his mother and falling in love with the paper heroine of the story he is writing, or in Livro, which focuses on Portuguese immigration to France during the Salazar dictatorship.
