reading

First of all, I would like to thank Eugénio de Andrade, whose deep respect for Carlos de Oliveira encouraged my own admiration and helped lead me to the commitment of this book. I am also grateful to Gastão Cruz for his quiet confidence in the value of this project and the evident esteem for Carlos de Oliveira that he communicated to me. Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão befriended me many years ago and introduced me to the Café Nobre tertúlia, a literary circle that included Carlos de Oliveira’s widow, the gracious Ângela de Oliveira, who has kindly given her support to these translations. I remain profoundly thankful to Clara Pires, formerly of Montreal and now of New York, who, for twenty years, has been this translator’s guardian angel; without her none of my literary projects would have come to fruition. Last, but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to the Camões Institute, the Portuguese Ministry of Culture, the National Library and Book Institute of Lisbon, and Plattsburgh State University for their support of this project, as well as many earlier ones.

Thanks are also due the editors of the following magazines in which many of the poems from this collection first appeared: Artful Dodge, Beacons, Cimarron Review, Confrontation, Controlled Burn, Cream City Review, The Dirty Goat, The Fiddlehead, Filling Station, Great River Review, Greenfield Review, Home Planet News, International Poetry Review, Journal of Cave and Karst Studies, Luna, Marlboro Review, Metamorphoses, Mid-American Review, the new renaissance, Nimrod, Northwest Review, Osiris, Paintbrush, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Visions International.

Introduction

Carlos de Oliveira was born in 1921 in the city of Belém, on the delta of the Amazon River. At the age of two, he was taken by his parents to their native Portugal, where his father settled them in the small town of Nossa Senhora das Febres, in the impoverished region of Gândara. There, the father practiced medicine amongst the poorest of the poor, while the surroundings, both geographical and human, engraved barrenness and sorrow on the imagination of the young boy.

Almost fifty years later, in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a collection of crónicas (personal essays, musings, and commentaries on life, art, and his own work), the poet described the region of his childhood memories: “Swampy lagoons, desolation, limestone, sand. I grew up surrounded by the great poverty of the peasants, by enormous infant mortality, and a dreadful emigration.” Tattooed by the deolation and suffering, he feels that his work “was born from that almost lunar atmosphere inhabited by men…” He goes on to suggest that the very language of his poetic style sprang from his childhood experiences. “The dryness, the aridity of this language, I form it and it forms itself in part from materials come from a long way: gravel, limestone, trees, moss. And people, in a vast solitude of sand. A landscape of childhood that is no paradise lost, but poverty, nakedness, a dearth of almost everything…” He then goes on to speak of a word essential to his vision and expression: brevity. “The very land is transient: dunes molded, then undone, by the wind. What literature could have been born of all that without being marked by that oppressive brevity, by that precarious tone, growing ever more in tune with the author’s own feelings?”

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction