Portuguese Writers and their Works

Fernando Pissoa

Fernando António Nogueira Pessôa

•was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, recognized as the greatest poet of the Portuguese language .

Born: June 13, 1888, Lisbon District, PortugalDied: November 30, 1935,

•he spent nine of his childhood years in the British-governed town of Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was the Portuguese consul.

•Pessoa, who was five years old when his natural father died of tuberculosis, developed into a shy and highly imaginative boy, and a brilliant student

•study on his own at the National Library, where he systematically read major works of philosophy, history, sociology and literature (especially Portuguese)

•He published his first essay in literary criticism in 1912, his first piece of creative prose (a passage from The Book of Disquiet) in 1913

•He is distinguished as the most momentous literary figure of the 20th century who played a major role in the development of modernism in his country.

•By 1914 Pessoa had started publishing criticism in prose and poetry. Fernando Pessoa, the extraordinary poet of “Message”, poem of appraisal of nationalism, one of the most beautiful ever written, was buried yesterday

•He was surprised by death in his Christian bed in the Hospital São Luis on Saturday night.

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.” ― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Almeida Garrett

João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett,

•was a Portuguese poet, playwright, novelist and politician

•He is considered to be the introducer of the Romantic movement in Portugal.

Born: February 4, 1799, Porto, PortugalDied: December 9, 1854, Lisbon, Portugal

•At an early age, around 4 or 5 years old, Garrett changed his name to João Baptista da Silva Leitão, adding a name from his godfather and altering the order of his surnames.

•In childhood, his mulatto Brazilian nanny Rosa de Lima taught him some traditional stories that later influenced his work.•In 1818, he moved to Coimbra to study at the University law school. In 1818, he publishedO Retrato de Vénus

•a work for which was soon to be prosecuted, as it was considered "materialist, atheist, and immoral"

•it was during this period that he adopted and added his pen name de Almeida Garrett

•Almeida Garrett ended his relationship with Luísa Midosi and divorced in 1835 (who later remarried Alexandre Desiré Létrillard) to join 17-year-old Adelaide Deville Pastor in 1836 – she was to remain his partner until her early death in 1839, causing him to break, and leaving a daughter named Maria Adelaide (who later married and had issue), whose early life tragedy and illegitimacy inspired her father in order to write the play FreiLuís de Sousa.•Later in his life he became the lover of Rosa de Montúfar y Infante, a Spanish noblewoman

•Garrett died of cancer in Lisbon at 6:30 in the afternoon of 9 December 1854. He was buried at the Cemetery of Prazeres and, on 3 May 1903, his remains were transferred to the national pantheon in the Jerónimos Monastery,

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz or Eça de Queirós

Born: November 25, 1845 Died: August 16, 1900•generally considered to be the greatest Portuguese writer in the realist style. Zola considered him to be far greater than Flaubert. •shared pseudonym Carlos Fradique Mendes • novelist committed to social reform who introduced naturalism and realism to Portugal.

•He is considered to be one of the greatest Portuguese novelists and is certainly the leading 19th-century Portuguese novelist. Eça de Queirós’s real interest lay in literature, however, and soon his short stories—ironic, fantastic, macabre, and often gratuitously shocking—and essays on a wide variety of subjects began to appear in the Gazeta de Portugal.

•By 1871 he had become closely associated with a group of rebellious Portuguese intellectuals committed to social and artistic reform and known as the Generation of ’70. Eça de Queirós denounced contemporary Portuguese literature as unoriginal and hypocritical.

•During this time he wrote the novels for which he is best remembered, attempting to bring about social reform in Portugal through literature by exposing what he held to be the evils and the absurdities of the traditional conservative social order.

•His first novel, O Crime do Padre Amaro (1876; The Sin of Father Amaro), •It describes the destructive effects of celibacy on a priest of weak character and the dangers of fanaticism in a provincial Portuguese town.

•. A biting satire on the romantic ideal of passion and its tragic consequences appears in his next novel, O Primo Basílio •Caustic satire characterizes the novel that is generally considered Eça de Queirós’s masterpiece, OsMaias (1888; The Maias), •a detailed depiction of upper-middle-class and aristocratic Portuguese society.

•His last novels are sentimental, unlike his earlier work. A Cidade e as Serras (1901; The City and the Mountains) •extols the beauty of the Portuguese countryside and the joys of rural life.

Eça de Queirós was appointed consul in Paris in 1888, where he served until his death.

Jose Saramago

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Jose Saramago

1992-2010• The Nobel prize-winning Portuguese novelist.

•1998’s Nobel Laureate is considered the contemporary voice of Portuguese literature. Admired for his relentless interrogation of human experience in relation to morality and identity, •José Saramago’s active support of the anarchist-based idea of ‘libertarian communism’ has not only provided an intricate inspiration for his literary canon of prose, poetry and stage plays, but also labeled him a somewhat controversial figure.

Cain – his rewriting of the biblical story – was his final novel, and is in some ways a fitting conclusion. Cain's is the story of mankind, and Saramago was one of those authors much concerned with the plight of mankind. Like all good Nobel laureates, he was the kind of writer who wrote about the human condition, with a capital H and a capital C.

•Saramago's last novel: a radical re-telling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel.

• 1982’s Memorial do Convento (Baltasar and Blimunda) remains one of Saramago’s most renowned novels

• . O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Christos (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ), arguably Saramago’s biggest mainstream success, is a highly controversial novel fictionally crafting

Francisco Lobo

Francisco Rodrigues Lobo(born 1580, Leiria, Port.—died November 1621, Portugal),

pastoral poet, known as the Portuguese Theocritus, after the ancient Greek originator of that poetic genre.

His first book of poems, Romances (1596), written in the Baroque manner of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora y Argote, reveals a refined sensibility and skill in describing the moods of nature.

Most of the 61 poems are in Spanish, a second language for Portuguese writers until the end of the 17th century.

•Rodrigues Lobo’s best works are the eclogues interpolated in his trilogy of pastoral novels, Primavera (1601; “Spring”), O Pastor Peregrino (1608; “The Wandering Shepherd”), and O Desencantado (1614; “The Disenchanted”). •These poems combine pleasing descriptions of the countryside of his native region with witty dialogues between shepherds and shepherdesses on the wiles of love. •His most masterful works in prose are the lively and elegant dialogues CôrtenaAldeia (1619; “Village Court”), in which a young noble, a student, a wealthy gentleman, and a man of letters discuss manners, philosophy, social questions, and especially literary style.

•Rodrigues Lobo was accidentally drowned on a voyage on the Tagus River.

Agustina Bessa Luís, or (née) Maria Agustina Ferreira Teixeira Bessa

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Agustina Bessa Luís•(born October 15, 1922, Vila Meã, Portugal),

•novelist and short-story writer whose fiction diverged from the predominantly neorealistic regionalism of mid-20th-century Portuguese literature to incorporate elements of surrealism.

•The best-known of BessaLuís’ early novels is A Sibila (1954; “The Sibyl”),

•won the Eça de Queirós prize •prose has been called “metaphysical” and “ultra-psychological,” and the influence of Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka may be distinguished in the fictional worlds she created.

•In BessaLuís’s fiction, notions of time and space become vague, and planes of reality flow together, dimming the sense of a logical order of events.

•She remained a prolific novelist through the turn of the 21st century, and in 2004 she received the Camões Prize, the most prestigious prize for literature in Portuguese. In addition, several of her works were adapted for film by Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.

•Other well-known novels of BessaLuís include Osincuráveis (1956; “The Incurables”), A muralha (1957; “The Stone Wall”), O susto (1958; “The Fright”), O manto (1961; “The Mantle”), and O sermão de fogo (1963; “The Sermon of Fire”).

The Threes Marias

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By: Mary Grace Panangganan