Jorge de Sena
Jorge Cândido de Sena was born on 2nd November 1919 and died on the 4th June in 1978. He was a Portuguese-born poet, fiction writer, critic and university professor.
He graduated in Civil Engineering at the University of Porto During the 50’s and was one of the most influential and complex Portuguese poets. He went to Brazil and teached there. In 1965 he transferred to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the United States of America, in whose department of Spanish and Portuguese he would be appointed full professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Literature. In 1970, he transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was appointed head of the Comparative Literature department and, in 1975, head of the Spanish and Portuguese Department.
After the 25th of April, he received several public honors in Portugal, as until then he lived during a time where the government was strict, as it didn’t allow people to say or write certain things. Sena disagreed with this ideology and had trouble publishing his work, so he did it secretly or in other countries.
Jorge de Sena’s poems talk about how he was against the dictatorship installed by Salazar in Portugal. Sena was a big writer who openly fought the system using his poems, which got him in trouble, but he kept writing about things like being free, fair and strong. First he fought for his rights from Portugal but even when we moved to Brasil he didn’t stop doing it. His poems show what it was like for him and others to live under those hard rules. Sena thought poems could fight back the autocracy and show the population’s strong feelings of unsatisfaction and uneasiness. People still read his poems nowadays and explore how they tell the story of fighting for freedom in such a dark time of Portugal’s past.
In one of Jorge de Sena poems, “L’été au Portugal”, a reference to the return for holidays of Portuguese Immigrants in France he wrote:
“What to expect from here?
What do these people don’t
Expect because they expect without expecting?
What only life and death
Consented reports all devours itself and
Devours their lives?”
Manuel Alegre
Manuel Alegre was born on May 12, 1936, in Águeda. Fought against Salazar’s dictatorship and opposed the Colonial War Student of Law at the University of Coimbra, participated in rebellions against the dictatorship; Mobilized in 1962 for the overseas war, he led na attempt to revolt against the colonial war in Angola.
Back in Portugal, he collaborated, clandestinely, in actions to fight the regime, his poems often took on the unfair social and political acts of that time, facing bans and chase by those in power. Alegre was one of the many creators and smart minds who stood up to the tough rule through their work, using poems as a way to speak out and fight against being pushed down. He was forced to go into exile, from 1964 onwards, in Paris, and later, in Algeria, engaging in resistance initiatives from abroad. And being elected leader of the Patriotic National Liberation Front. After April 25, 1974, he joined the Socialist Party, becoming a deputy to the Assembly of the Republic in several legislatures.
From this poet we have chosen “The Words” ( “As Palavras” ) where he speaks about the power of words and speech o stand against dictatorship:
Words so often persecuted
words so often violated
That don’t know how to sing kneeling
That don’t surrender even if injured
Miguel Torga
Pseudonym of Adolfo Correia da Rocha and author of a vast and varied literary production, he was born in S. Martinho de Anta, Vila Real, on August 12, 1907, and died in Coimbra, on January 17, 1995.
After having worked in Brazil, between the ages of 13 and 18 , Adolfo Correia da Rocha returned to Portugal, earning a degree in Medicine. During his university studies, in Coimbra, he became friends with the group of writers who would found Presença.His rebellion during the Salazar dictatorship led to the seizure and interdiction of several works, as well as the ban on leaving the country and the raising of obstacles to the exercise of his professional activity.
The Salazar censorship had a significant impact on the work of Miguel Torga, a prominent Portuguese poet in the 20th century. Torga faced numerous restrictions and pressure from censorship due to the sensitive and critical nature of his works towards the authoritarian government. Despite the challenges, Torga bravely expressed his poetic voice by delving into themes like human nature, rural life, and societal contradictions in Portugal. His poetry mirrors a profound social awareness and a quest for personal liberation, making him a symbol of cultural and intellectual defiance against Salazar’s oppressive regime.
The chosen poem is the poem To the Poets (Aos Poetas):
It’s us
The human cicadas.
Us,
Since the time of Aesop we have known…
Us,
Lazy insects chased.
We are the ridiculous cronies
From the bourgeois fable of the ant.
We, the hungry tribe of gypsies
That shelters
At the moonlight.
We, who never passed,
To pass…
It’s us, and only we can have
Sound wings.
Wings that at certain times
They palpitate.
Wings that die but are resurrected
From the grave.
And that of the plain
From the harvest
Rise to a higher field
The hand that only height had sown.
Therefore to you, Poets, I raise
The fraternal cup of this song of mine,
And I drink in your honor the sweet wine
Of friendship and peace.
Wine that is not mine,
But rather from the must that beauty brings.
And I tell you and I conjure you to sing.
May you be minstrels
A gesture of universal love.
Of na epic that has no kings,
But natural-sized men.
Men from all over the land without borders.
In every shape and form,
The color that the sun gave them to their skin.
True offspring of Adam and Eve.
Men from the Tower of Babel.
Everyday men
Let them build walls of illusion.
Men with their feet on the ground,
May they be filled with dreams and poetry
By the childish grace of your hand.
