Poetry
Lira dos vinte anos
Not translated into English
Álvares de Azevedo · 1853
Opening lines
Era de noite: — dormias,
Do sonho nas melodias,
Ao fresco da viração,
Embalada na falua,
It was night: you were sleeping,
In the melodies of dream,
In the coolness of the breeze,
Rocked in the felucca,
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
The collection has three parts. The first and the third sing of an ideal, platonic love, the pure maiden, melancholy and death dreamed of as a deliverance. A preface warns, at the threshold of the second, that the visionary world ends there: “after Ariel, we stumble upon Caliban”. The same poet becomes sarcastic and sensual there, compares woman to wine and to the smoke of a cigar, and laughs at his own corpse.
Context
The book appeared in 1853, the year after the death of its author, who had himself begun its edition and written its prefaces; according to the journal of the University of Catalão, the first publisher did not respect the intended order, and later editions added poems that had been found. The poet spoke in it of a “medal with two faces”. Antonio Candido's reading, which set Ariel against Caliban in it, renewed in the 1980s the view taken of a work long reduced to the life of its author.
Who it is for
Collection in Portuguese, with no French translation; the parts are meant to be read against one another, and reading only the first distorts everything.
Prizes and reception
The best-known collection of the Romantic generation of the mal du siècle in Brazil, reread since Antonio Candido.
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