Saudade
More than a language, it is a soul that embodies Portuguese literature, that of saudade, the "delicious nostalgia" according to the dictionary definition, necessarily inaccurate and incomplete since this term has no equivalent in French. But it is the feeling, already, that is at the heart of the cantigas, these medieval poems as written by Denis I, known as the troubadour king. Died in 1325, the sovereign left behind him the image of a just and good man, and more than a hundred songs. During the 15th century, lyricism gradually gave way to prose, but reality still prevailed over fiction, as witnessed by the chronicles of Fernão Lopes. His name appears for the first time in 1418. Certainly self-taught, and perhaps from a modest family, he nevertheless assumed the important role of official historiographer and was entrusted by King Duarte with writing the history of the kingdom, from its origins until 1411, when he stopped to retire. Also responsible for the royal archives, he traveled and immersed himself in the history of his country. Although only some fragments of his remarkable work have survived, Fernão Lopes still enchants with the grace of his flowery language. As such, he is recognized as the first Portuguese author.
The 16th century was the golden age of Portuguese poetry and coincided with the expansion of the country, the time of the great discoveries, the sailors ventured further and further away and contacts were established as far as Oceania. The fiery Luís de Camões, to whom legend lends sulphurous love affairs, also took to the sea in 1553 after having had a taste of jail. From Goa he was exiled to Macao, following a satire against the viceroy, and it was there that he began the poem of which every Portuguese still knows at least a few verses, The Lusiads. In this epic, he sings of the exploits of Vasco da Gama, praises the power of his country and invokes both Greek mythology and the Christian God. Although it was almost lost in a shipwreck, the manuscript was finally published in 1572 and dedicated to King Sebastian I, whose death would lead to Portugal's incorporation into the Spanish crown in 1580, the same year in which, ironically, Luís de Camões lost his life. The poet, who also wrote love sonnets that can be found in the Chandeigne editions, was the contemporary of Bernadim Ribeiro (1482-1552), a major figure of the pastoral novel who, in his masterpiece Menina e Moça, introduced the notion of saudade in literature. The Renaissance also saw the birth and death of one of the fathers of Portuguese and Castilian theater. In fact, Gil Vicente used both languages and sometimes mixed them. Although his life is full of enigmas and is the subject of random cross-referencing, it is well known that his first play, The Visitation, also known as The Cowherd's Monologue, was performed on June 7, 1502 in the royal apartments in celebration of the birth of John III. Throughout his career, his works would punctuate the events of the palace, and his Barque de l'enfer (Boat of Hell) continues to sail proudly in the Portuguese-speaking heritage.
The decline then the Renaissance
The 17th century was less flamboyant, Portugal was still under Spanish rule and remained so until the Restoration of 1640, and then came the Inquisition, which ended a few years after the ban on burning in 1771. This was a dark period that saw men and books burned in the public square, but from which we can nevertheless remember some names, for example that of Francisco Manuel de Melo. Born in Lisbon in 1608, the scholar came from a noble family and took up the military uniform very early on. His life was marked by a terrible shipwreck, numerous imprisonments, political and amorous machinations, and finally an exile that led him to the New World, but the man never lost his pen and his numerous works bear witness to the Baroque movement. His play The Gentleman's Apprentice, which may well have inspired Molière, is particularly noteworthy. His exact contemporary, António Vieira, opted for the ecclesiastical habit. A Jesuit preacher and author of several hundred sermons, he also embodied the Baroque movement and put his talent at the service of theology. Some of his works are available in translation from Allia(Sermon du bon larron, 2002) and Bayard(Sur les procédés de la Sainte Inquisition, 2002). He died in 1697 on the other side of the Atlantic.
The baroque flights of fancy were not echoed by the religious Manuel Bernardes (1644-1710) who, although he praised emotion, preferred a classical style of writing in keeping with his life as a contemplative recluse. Another trend, Romanticism, is reflected in the writings of Francisco Manuel de Nascimento (1734-1819), who experienced two revolutions: the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which brought the Marquis of Pombal to power, and the French Revolution, which he lived through during his interminable exile in Paris. Better known as Filinto Elisio, translator and poet, he worked to develop the Spanish-French alliance, somewhat unwillingly, joining after being declared a heretic in 1778 a country he admired, but regretting all his life his homeland that he could never see again. It was João Baptista da Silva Leitão, who became Viscount Almeida Garrett, who is truly considered the father of Portuguese Romanticism. He remained famous for his Journey to My Country (1846), for the Portuguese oral poetry he carefully collected, for having founded the Lisbon Conservatory, but also for his liberal political ideas, which he shared with his younger brother Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877), with whom he created the Gremio Leterario club in 1846.
The second half of the 19th century was already moving towards realism, and it was Júlio Dinis, pseudonym of the doctor Joaquim Guilherme Gomes Coelho, who best embodied this transition. Of frail health, he devoted himself early on to literature, publishing poems in magazines, but became known for his novels inspired by provincial life(As pupilas do senhor reitor) or the Anglo-Irish origins of his mother, whom he lost as a child(Uma familia ingleza: scenas da vida do Porto). Like his mother, he succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 31, leaving to posterity writings that are as much a reflection of his amiable character as of the reality he briefly experienced. He hardly had time to discover the Generation of '70, the avant-garde movement that introduced naturalism into Portuguese literature. As sometimes happens, even among men of letters, it all began with a polemic. The Coimbrã Question, named after the country's oldest university, pitted the "white hairs" of the blind poet Feliciano de Castilho (1800-1875) against a group of young students whom he accused of lacking "good sense and good taste. Antero de Quental, who stressed the importance of putting into words the great transformations that society was undergoing, immediately retaliated. Although the debate was gradually lost in increasingly opaque counter-arguments, it was the starting point of a real revolution that was embodied in the Casino Conferences given in Lisbon in the spring of 1871, over which the thought of the Frenchman Proudhon reigned. Although idealistic and enthusiastic, Antero de Quental gave in to his darker ideas over the years and ended his life in 1891, five years after publishing his masterpiece, the Complete Sonetos. His friend Eça de Queirós outlived him by barely a decade and died of illness in Paris in 1900, a man who had been so influenced by French authors, especially Flaubert and Zola. In the novel La Capitale, translated in 2000 by Actes Sud, he recounts his arrival in Lisbon under the guise of fiction, an account that recalls some other Lost Illusions..
The new golden age
The new century was a turbulent one, with many political upheavals, but Portuguese literature flourished, giving rise to a number of authors who would go on to achieve international renown. In fact, there was talk of a "Renaissance" when, in 1911, a new literary movement, Saudosismo, was founded in Porto around the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes, a term that hints at the elusive saudade and is sometimes clumsily translated as "nostalgia". In opposition to the chaos of power, these writers wanted to refocus on what united and defined them, the Portuguese soul, which was also based on "Sebastianism", the founding myth and eternal expectation of the providential man. Fernando Pessoa, born in Lisbon in 1888, was seduced for a time by the power of this prophecy, but soon joined forces with two other poets, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, one of the leading exponents of the Symbolist movement, and Almada Negreiros, a modernist artist. Together, they founded the magazine Orpheu in 1915, which, despite having only two issues, caused a considerable stir, with public opinion somewhat shocked by its stylistic experimentation and pornographic allusions. This did not discourage Fernando Pessoa, and all his pseudonyms, from collaborating on various publications during his remaining twenty years, notably Presença in 1927, a magazine that marked the starting point of "second modernism". With his complex personality and fascinating mysticism, the author of the Livre de l'Intranquillité, which became Livre(s) de l'inquiétude in Marie-Helène Piwnik's new translation for Editions Bourgois in 2018, was soberly buried in Lisbon in 1935. It took many years for his genius to be recognized. Vitorino Nemésio (1901-1978), whose Le Serpent aveugle was translated into French as early as 1944, and José Maria Ferreira de Castro (1898-1974), whose Forêt vierge was published in 1938 by Grasset in a translation by Blaise Cendrars, inaugurated the neo-realism movement that lasted until the 1960s. Miguel Torga (1907-1995), for his part, entered literature through self-publishing, which did not prevent him from becoming a novelist of the first rank.
Poetry, so dear to Portugal, enjoyed a second golden age in the second half of the twentieth century. In turn, Cahiers de Poésie, Table ronde, L'Arbre and Poésie 1961 brought together the talents of Jorge de Sena, Sophia de Mello Breyner, David Mourão Ferreira, Ramos Rosa and Herberto Helder. Until his death in 1997, Al Berto's poems delighted the Portuguese, and his anthology O Medo was awarded the Pen Club prize in 1988. Another major figure is Nino Júdice, born in Algarve in 1949, whose Un chant dans l'épaisseur du temps is available in Gallimard's Poetry collection.
As far as novels are concerned, the Carnation Revolution of 1974 sounded the death knell for traditional codes and liberated speech. This is all the more true of António Lobo Antunes, who indulges in stream-of-consciousness narratives, not hesitating to mix and match his stories from the point of view of several narrators. Awarded the Camões Prize in 2007, Lobo Antunes' immense body of work focuses on the past, both his own and that of his country. His first novel, Mémoire d'éléphant (1979), has strong autobiographical overtones, echoes of which can be found in Jusqu'à ce que les pierres deviennent plus douces que l'eau (Christian Bourgois, 2019), which again evokes Angola, the country in which the writer practiced medicine from 1971 to 1973. Memory is also central to the work of Lídia Jorge, a talented author who was born in 1946 and also lived in Africa. Her books have met with success, both in Portugal and in the many countries where she has been translated, as demonstrated by the impressive list of awards she has won. Les Mémorables, to be published by Métailié, takes us back to the not-too-distant days of the fall of the dictatorship. A young author is vying for the spotlight. José Luís Peixoto began his career in journalism before going into teaching, but is now a full-time writer. Sans un regard (Grasset, 2004) takes place in rural Portugal: under a scorching sun, a shepherd stands still and listens to the voice of the devil whispering to him that his wife is unfaithful. La Mort du père (2013), a short, dense text, confirms the talent of Peixoto who, with Soufre in 2017, consolidated his place on the international literary scene. Of course, it would be impossible to talk about Portuguese literature without mentioning the name of the only Lusophone author to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, José Saramago. Although his first novel appeared in 1947, it was only later that he allowed himself the personal style that so characterizes him: dense novels with no dialogue and very little punctuation. It was not until 1982 that he met with success with The One-Armed God. At the age of 60, José Saramago won several awards and was praised by Federico Fellini. It took another decade, until 1988, for him to be awarded the prestigious Swedish prize for the body of his work, including a number of must-reads published by Seuil in France: L'Année de la mort de Ricardo Reís, L'Aveuglement, La Lucidité and La Lucarne. The writer passed away in 2010, leaving behind a legacy of incomparable, inalienable novels.
