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How the works were chosen

Countries / Southern Europe

Portugal

works
59
34 books · 25 films
period covered
1517–1988
language of writing
Portuguese

When Fernando Pessoa died in Lisbon in 1935, he had published only one book of poems. In his home was found a trunk containing twenty-seven thousand five hundred and forty-three papers, written under dozens of different names, unfinished, taken up again, classified and then reclassified. The state bought the manuscripts in 1979 and 1982 had to be waited for before the fragments of a plotless journal attributed to an assistant bookkeeper were assembled, since become the most widely read Portuguese book in the world.

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This country made a method of absence. It was the first European maritime empire and the last to give up its colonies, in 1975, after thirteen years of war in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea. Its national epic, published in 1572, recounts a voyage and ends on a warning. The king who disappeared in 1578 in a battle in Morocco has been awaited for four centuries. And two million Portuguese left to work elsewhere while the dictatorship lasted, from 1926 to 1974.

The form is the fragment, the doubling, the voice that declares itself unfit. The price was that of censorship and of war. Eça de Queiroz published in 1876 a novel about a young priest in love with his landlady's daughter and was attacked by the entire Catholic press. In 1972, three women authors published a book of letters on the condition of women: the work was seized, they were prosecuted, and the trial stopped with the Carnation Revolution. The colonial war produced two of the country's greatest books, that of Lobo Antunes in 1979 and that of Lídia Jorge in 1988, written by a military doctor and by an officer's wife.

What awaits the reader is a literature of active melancholy, ironic rather than plaintive, and a cinema that filmed the children of Porto as early as 1942. The novel that opens this page brings together a one-handed soldier, a woman who sees inside bodies and a priest who builds a flying machine beside the vast building site of the Mafra convent, and it was with this book that its author's style was recognised.

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A way to begin

Baltasar and Blimunda

José Saramago · 1982

A one-handed soldier, a woman who sees inside bodies and a priest building a flying machine: the novel that made Saramago's name.

The entry See the author

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, King John V, who has no heir, promises the Franciscans a convent if the queen gives him a child, and an immense building site opens at Mafra where the workers wear themselves out. Baltasar, a soldier back from the war with one hand missing, meets Blimunda, who can see inside bodies. Father Bartolomeu de Gusmão takes them in: he is building a machine that flies, and to make it rise he needs human wills that only Blimunda can gather.

Timeline

  1. 1572The LusiadsCamões sings the navigators and founds the Portuguese literary language.
  2. 1870–1900RealismEça de Queirós, the Portuguese Flaubert, dissects a society falling asleep.
  3. 1910–1935PessoaOne man alone, under several names, remakes the whole of modern poetry.
  4. 1933–1974SalazarForty years of censorship. Literature goes into exile or falls silent.
  5. 1974Carnation RevolutionFreedom returns. Saramago, long ignored, then writes his great books.

Reading keys

1Names and kinship
  • Names are long, with several elements coming from the father and the mother, and everyday usage retains only one or two, often the last.
  • The author's name is sometimes a fragment of the civil name, which multiplies the forms in catalogues.
  • Pessoa's heteronyms are not pseudonyms but fictitious authors with their biography and their style, and a text may cite them as persons.
  • The saint's name, godparenthood and belonging to a rural parish structure village narratives.
2What is said and unsaid
  • The colonial war from 1961 to 1974, the return of five hundred thousand people from Africa and the fate of the soldiers are an open subject, central in literature since 1975.
  • The Estado Novo, the political police and each person's degree of participation are not settled, and the vocabulary used situates a text.
  • Atlantic slavery, of which Portugal was the first European organiser, has recently been approached in the terms of public memory.
  • Mass emigration, the money sent home and the return to the village are a permanent social theme, treated without irony.
3Religion and the unseen
  • Catholicism is in the majority and popular, with the apparitions of Fátima in 1917 as a national event and a mass pilgrimage.
  • The Portuguese Inquisition, active until 1821, pursued converted Jews, and that memory surfaces in historical novels.
  • Sebastianism, the expectation of the return of the king who disappeared in 1578, is a living political myth that literature summons in order to speak of the present.
  • Practices of blessing, promises and wax votive offerings are common and appear in the narratives without explanation.
4Colours, rites, mourning, feasts
  • The June festivals, grilled sardines and neighbourhood dances in Lisbon and Porto, are the great popular gathering.
  • Fado is a codified genre, with its houses and its rules of silence, and not a tourist atmosphere.
  • Mourning is worn in black and for a long time in the countryside, with anniversary masses and the upkeep of graves.
  • 25 April, the day of the 1974 revolution, is a consensual civic date, celebrated with carnations.
5Shared references
  • The maritime epic of 1572 is the founding text, with its giant of the cape of Storms, and its lines are learnt at school.
  • Sebastianism and the battle of 1578 provide the political metaphor of waiting.
  • The tale collections of Adolfo Coelho in 1879 and of Teófilo Braga in 1883 are the reference corpora, dictated for the most part by illiterate women.
  • The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which set the whole of Europe debating, is a common reference, including in the French tale that opens the page for France.
6Misreadings to avoid
  • Saudade is not a vague sadness but a technical term of this literature, with a history and competing definitions.
  • The Portuguese of Portugal is not that of Brazil: pronunciation, syntax and spelling differ, and the 1990 orthographic agreement is contested.
  • Portugal is not a province of Spain: independence dates from the twelfth century and mistrust of Madrid is a cultural fact.
  • The empire is not a distant past: the colonial war ended in 1974 and a generation of writers fought it.
  • The catalogue stops at the beginning of the nineteen nineties, which reflects the state of translations and not current production.

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