Portuguese literature

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Portuguese literature begins with a woman's voice. Or rather, with a man writing as a woman. In the medieval courts of Galicia and northern Portugal, male troubadours composed poems in a female voice, lamenting love and longing in a genre called the cantiga d'amigo. These poems would become what scholars call the largest surviving body of female-voiced love lyric from ancient or medieval Europe. How a small nation on the western edge of the continent produced such a sustained outpouring of literary creativity is the question this documentary sets out to answer. From those first datable poems around 1200, through the towering epic of Luís de Camões in the sixteenth century, through the Baroque, the Romantics, the Naturalists, and into the Nobel Prize-winning prose of José Saramago, Portuguese literature traces a thousand-year arc of survival, reinvention, and occasional magnificence.

• 2. The Galician-Portuguese Lyric

  ›

  Around 1200, the first datable poems in the Galician-Portuguese tradition appeared, showing influences from Provence though scholars have long argued that an indigenous popular poetry existed before any written record. The great early scholars Henry Roseman Lang and Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos made that case. The first venues of poetic activity were aristocratic courts in Galicia and the north of Portugal, as the Portuguese historian António Resende de Oliveira has documented. From there the center shifted to the court of Alfonso X, King of Castile and León, and later to the court of Afonso III of Portugal, who had been educated in France.

  The reign of King Dinis I, who ruled from 1261 to 1325, produced a late flowering. A very learned man, Dinis left behind the largest preserved output of any single poet in the tradition: 137 texts. The main genres were the male-voiced cantiga d'amor, the female-voiced cantiga d'amigo, and the poetry of insult known as cantigas d'escarnio e maldizer. The total corpus of medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric, excluding the Cantigas de Santa Maria, runs to around 1,685 texts.

  The main manuscript sources are the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, probably a late thirteenth-century manuscript, and the Cancioneiro da Vaticana and the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, both copied in Rome around 1525 at the request of the Italian humanist Angelo Colocci. Two smaller sources preserve something the larger manuscripts do not: music. The Vindel Parchment contains melodies for six cantigas d'amigo by Martin Codax, and the Pergaminho Sharrer preserves a fragment with seven cantigas d'amor of King Dinis himself, the same poems found in the larger codices and in the same order.

• 3. Camões and the Golden Age

  ›

  Luís de Camões, who lived from 1524 to the 10th of June 1580, wrote the national epic Os Lusíadas, and his death date became the date of Portugal's national holiday: Portugal Day, formally the Dia de Portugal, das Comunidades Portuguesas e de Camões. It is a day of national pride comparable to independence days celebrated elsewhere. In the Victorian era, Elizabeth Barrett Browning found Camões both sufficiently admired and sufficiently obscure that she could disguise her own work by entitling it Sonnets from the Portuguese, a reference to the poet.

  The Golden Age that produced Camões also produced the playwright Gil Vicente, considered the father of the Portuguese stage. Of his forty-four pieces, fourteen are in Portuguese and eleven in Castilian, with the remaining pieces bilingual. He began in 1502 with religious works, including Auto da Alma and the famous trilogy of the Barcas. By the close of his career in 1536, he had arrived at pure comedy in plays like Inês Pereira and the Floresta de Enganos. His plots are simple and his dialogue spirited; his plays mirror the types, customs, and daily life of all classes.

  The best prose of the sixteenth century was devoted to history and travel. João de Barros described with mastery the Portuguese conquests in the Orient in his Decadas. Damião de Góis, a humanist and friend of Erasmus, wrote with rare independence on the reign of King Manuel I. The Peregrination of Fernão Mendes Pinto, described as a typical conquistador, offered extraordinary adventures in a vigorous style, while the História trágico-marítima recorded notable shipwrecks between 1552 and 1604 in specimens of simple anonymous narrative.

• 4. The Baroque Century

  ›

  The seventeenth century is generally regarded as a century of literary decadence in Portugal, a decline blamed on new royal absolutism, the Inquisition, the Index, and the exaggerated humanism of the Jesuits who directed higher education. The influence of the Spanish poets Gongora and Marino was felt across the period's writers, known as the Seiscentistas. The sixty years of personal union with the Spanish crown left lasting marks: Spanish continued in use among the upper classes, and many authors who wanted a larger audience chose to write in Spanish rather than Portuguese.

  Yet the century produced one writer of undeniable genius. Father António Vieira earned in Rome the title of Prince of Catholic Orators for the originality and imaginative power of his sermons. Perhaps his most famous was his 1654 Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish. His letters exhibit some of the prevailing faults of taste but remain great both in ideas and expression. By contrast, the Oratorian Manuel Bernardes, who was a recluse, brought a calm and sweetness to his discourses and devotional treatises that is absent in the writings of a man of action like Vieira. Bernardes is at his best in Luz e Calor and the Nova Floresta.

  The most intriguing document of personal feeling from this era is the Cartas de Mariana Alcoforado: five short but eloquent letters of human affection that stand among the master examples of epistolary writing the century produced. D. Francisco Manuel de Mello was the most versatile figure of the period, writing sonnets, popular romances, a witty comedy in Auto do Fidalgo Aprendiz, and a vehement Memorial to John IV, as well as the prose classic Carta de Guia de Casados.

• 5. Arcadias and Neoclassicism

  ›

  The Academy of History, established by John V in 1720 in imitation of the French Academy, published fifteen volumes of learned Memoirs and laid the foundations for critical study of Portuguese history. The Royal Academy of Sciences, founded in 1779, continued that work. But the principal literary energy of the eighteenth century belonged to the Arcadias, literary societies dedicated to purifying style and translating foreign classics.

  The most important of these was the Arcadia Ulisiponense, established in 1756 by the poet Cruz e Silva with the stated purpose of forming a school of good example in eloquence and poetry. Pedro Correia Garção composed the Cantata de Dido and many excellent sonnets and odes. Cruz e Silva himself satirized ecclesiastical jealousies and the prevailing French cultural fashions in his mock-heroic poem Hyssope. Intestine disputes led to the dissolution of the Arcadia in 1774.

  In 1790 the New Arcadia came into being and had in Bocage a poet whose sonnets vie with those of Camões in quality, though he achieved no sustained flights. Bocage reacted against the general mediocrity and used satire to effect in the Pena de Talião. Outside the Arcadias, three poets called the Dissidents showed genuine independence: José Anastácio da Cunha, Nicolão Tolentino, and Francisco Manuel de Nascimento, better known as Filinto Elysio. Filinto Elysio spent a long life of exile in Paris reviving the cult of sixteenth-century poets and purifying the language of Gallicisms. Shortly before his death he became a convert to the Romantic Movement, for whose triumph in the person of Almeida Garrett he had prepared the way.

• 6. Romanticism, Realism, and the Novel

  ›

  Almeida Garrett began the Romantic reformation of Portuguese literature after becoming acquainted with English and French Romanticism in exile. His narrative poem Camões, published in 1825, broke with established rules of composition. He followed it with Flores sem Fruto and a collection of love poems, Folhas Caídas. His prose is seen at its clearest in the miscellany Viagens na minha terra. Garrett also reformed the stage, choosing subjects from Portuguese history and producing a series of prose plays that culminated in Brother Luiz de Sousa, described as a masterpiece.

  In 1865 a group of young poets led by Antero de Quental and the future president Teófilo Braga rebelled against the literary dominance of Castilho, proclaiming the alliance of philosophy with poetry in a fierce pamphlet war. Quental produced finely wrought, pessimistic sonnets inspired by neo-Buddhist and German agnostic ideas. He had studied at the University of Coimbra and distinguished himself there by unusual talent as well as turbulence. A spinal disease drove him after years of retirement to suicide on his native island.

  The novel came into its own in the second half of the nineteenth century. Alexandre Herculano began with historical romances in the style of Walter Scott. Camilo Castelo Branco, a rich impressionist, described the life of the early part of the century in Amor de Perdição and Novellas do Minho. The great creative breakthrough came with Eça de Queirós, born in 1845 in Póvoa de Varzim, near Porto. He became a consul and accepted an assignment to the consulate of Paris in 1888, remaining there until his death on the 16th of August 1900. Nicknamed the Portuguese Zola and the founder of Portuguese Naturalism, his most famous works include Os Maias from 1878, O Crime do Padre Amaro from 1876, and O Primo Bazilio also from 1878. In 2002 the Mexican director Carlos Carrera adapted O Crime do Padre Amaro as El Crimen del Padre Amaro, one of the most successful Mexican films in history.

• 7. Pessoa and the Twentieth Century

  ›

  Fernando Pessoa, who lived from 1888 to 1935, used heteronyms, which allowed him to write in different styles not usually available to a single poet. His epic-lyric poem Mensagem discusses Sebastianism, the Portuguese belief in prophecies that arose after the death of King Sebastian in the Battle of Alcácer Quibir. The poem centres on the awaited return of the dead king on a foggy day, the return of what Pessoa called the Eu Nacional, the National Self, that would take Portugal to govern a Fifth Empire. He is considered one of the greatest national poets alongside Camões.

  Alexandre Manuel Vahía de Castro O'Neill, a poet of Irish origin born on the 19th of December 1924 and died on the 21st of August 1986, brought a different energy to the twentieth century. In 1948 he was among the founders of the Lisbon Surrealist Movement, alongside Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos and José-Augusto França. His poetry quickly diverged from surrealism into an original style characterised by disrespect for conventions, playfulness with language, parody, and black humor. Poems such as Standing at Fearful Attention and Portugal argued that the dictatorial regime under Salazar was a symptom of deeper national ailments: lack of courage and smallness of vision. A publicist by profession, he was famous for inventing some of the most ingenious advertising slogans of his time, though he refused to put that skill in the service of feel-good poetry.

  José Saramago, who lived from 1922 to 2010, wrote works including Memorial do Convento and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. His achievement confirmed what the tradition had been building toward for eight centuries: a literature capable of standing beside any in the world, rooted in a language that began in the courts of medieval Galicia.