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European Literature: Portugal

A literature studies guide covering the literature of Europe.

Portugal Literature

This page covers Portugual literature. McKee Library's collection includes numerous titles by Portugal authors. The resources below cover the general topic. However, more information is available if you search for individual authors by name in the databases. 

Reference

Streaming Media

Perspectives & Author's Works

Pessoa

Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do "more in dreams than Napoleon," yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or "heteronyms," under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this "most multifarious of writers" (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer--but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet's life against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa's teeming imagination and literary genius. Much as Nobel laureate José Saramago brought a single heteronym to life in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Zenith traces the backstories of virtually all of Pessoa's imagined personalities, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs, or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. A solitary man who had only one, ultimately platonic love affair, Pessoa used his and his heteronyms' writings to explore questions of sexuality, to obsessively search after spiritual truth, and to try to chart a way forward for a benighted and politically agitated Portugal. Although he preferred the world of his mind, Pessoa was nonetheless a man of the places he inhabited, including not only Lisbon but also turn-of-the-century Durban, South Africa, where he spent nine years as a child. Zenith re-creates the drama of Pessoa's adolescence--when the first heteronyms emerged--and his bumbling attempts to survive as a translator and publisher. Zenith introduces us, too, to Pessoa's bohemian circle of friends, and to Ophelia Quieroz, with whom he exchanged numerous love letters. Pessoa reveals in equal force the poet's unwavering commitment to defending homosexual writers whose books had been banned, as well as his courageous opposition to Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, toward the end of his life. In stunning, magisterial prose, Zenith contextualizes Pessoa's posthumous literary achievements--especially his most renowned work, The Book of Disquiet. A modern literary masterpiece, Pessoa simultaneously immortalizes the life of a literary maestro and confirms the enduring power of Pessoa's work to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of our modern world.

The Songs of Antonio Botto

Antnio Botto was one of Portugal's first openly gay writers, a po te maudit whose unapologetic and candid verses about homosexual life and passion were both praised and reviled when they appeared in Portuguese in 1922 under the title Can Aes . Botto's poetic voice-confessional, personal, and intimate-revels and luxuriates in eroticism while expressing the ache of longing, silence, and suffering. Yet for all of his acclaim and notoriety-he was both hailed as one of the great poets of his day and condemned for his frank depictions of male-male desire-Botto and his work fell into oblivion after his death. The Songs of Antnio Botto recovers this important, urgent voice in modern poetry by making available-for the first time since its private publication in 1948-the English-language translation of Can Aes that Botto's friend and artistic collaborator, Fernando Pessoa, completed in 1933. Pessoa, Portugal's preeminent modernist literary figure, considered Botto the only Portuguese poet worthy of the label aesthete and, as a critic and publisher, championed his work. Featuring an introduction to Botto's work and Pessoa's previously unpublished foreword to the 1948 edition as well as a new translation of Botto's 1941 elegy to Pessoa, The Songs of Antnio Botto establishes Botto as a pioneering figure in modern gay literature and places him alongside C. P. Cavafy and Federico Garc a Lorca as one of the major poetic voices of the twentieth century."

Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa

How Africa was perceived in the early modern imaginary In this first book to study Portuguese texts about Africa, Moorings brings an important but little-known body of European writings to bear on contemporary colonial thought. Images of Africa as monstrous, dangerous, and lush were created in early Portuguese imperial writings and dominated its representation in European literature. Moorings establishes these key works in their proper place: foundational to Western imperial discourse. Attentive to history as well as the nuances of language, Josiah Blackmore leads readers from the formation of the "Moor" in medieval Iberia to the construction of a full colonial imaginary, as found in the works of two writers: the royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara and the epic poet Luís de Camões. Blackmore's original work helps to explain how concepts and myths--such as the "otherness" of Africa and Africans--originated, functioned, and were perpetuated.Delving into the Portuguese imperial experience, Moorings enriches our understanding of historical and literary imagination during a significant period of Western expansion.

The Inner Sea

An expansive consideration of how nautical themes influenced literature in early modern Portugal. In this book, Josiah Blackmore considers how the sea and seafaring shaped literary creativity in early modern Portugal during the most active, consequential decades of European overseas expansion. Blackmore understands “literary” in a broad sense, including a diverse archive spanning genres and disciplines—epic and lyric poetry, historical chronicles, nautical documents, ship logs, shipwreck narratives, geographic descriptions, and reference to texts of other seafaring powers and literatures of the period—centering on the great Luís de Camões, arguably the sea poet par excellence of early modern Europe. Blackmore shows that the sea and nautical travel for Camões and his contemporaries were not merely historical realities; they were also principles of cultural creativity that connected to larger debates in the widening field of the maritime humanities. For Blackmore, the sea, ships, and nautical travel unfold into a variety of symbolic dimensions, and the oceans across the globe that were traversed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries correspond to vast reaches within the literary self. The sea and seafaring were not merely themes in textual culture but were also principles that created individual and collective subjects according to oceanic modes of perception. Blackmore concludes with a discussion of depth and sinking in shipwreck narratives as metaphoric and discursive dimensions of the maritime subject, foreshadowing empire’s decline.