The poet Herbert Helder died Monday at his home in Cascais, age 84, and only a few months after the release of Death Without Master (2014), a craft of darkness, angry and ironic, and sometimes a rawness without balm, “and I’ve forgotten to grow: Family, innocence, gentleness, / I will die like a dog lying in the pit.” Sometimes knowing that their mysterious gifts creators had not yet stopped all: “(…) the death of your body is a node that flickers and goes out, / and you you look at the little things / and where you look is this part illumined all. “
As Pedro Mexia stated in its reaction to the death of the poet, will soon become common ground that Herbert Helder is the central poet of the second half of the twentieth century, as it was the first Person. But it is a centrality that is both an anomaly, because the magic and barbaric Herbert language, even in its attenuated version of the latest books, seems to come from the bottom of times and have been born by mistake in the modernity.
There is no post-Person Portuguese poetry no poet who has exercised such a power of attraction and generated so many epigones. And no more absolutely impossible to imitate with advantage.
Who desprevenidamente read these first books of Herbert in the 60s and 70s, it is to have experienced this feeling that poetry could only be that. It was always the biggest and strangest gift of Herbert Helder: convince us (albeit wrongly) that you type directly into poetry, as if poetry was their mother tongue, and all other poets would merely translations more or less achieved in a lost language that he alone held the key.
Nothing could be further from this cultured postmodernity, bored, cynical and skeptical than the understanding that Herbert had poetry. In an extraordinary interview that designed for a Galician magazine and the PUBLIC released in 1990, he himself writes: “(…) the poem is an object full of magnificent, terrifying powers: put in the right place at the right time, according to some rule promotes a disorder and an order that the world located in an extreme point: the world ends and begins. ” Herbert Helder came not entertain anyone, came to live what we once called, with entire property, his real life.
Just a year before No Death Master , marking the passage of his work for the Porto Editora, the poet launched in 2013, the Assyrian & amp; Alvim, the book Easements . But outside especially with Does not Cut Knife Fire (2008) which had become a case of almost absolute critical consensus.
The largest after Camões
“Herbert Helder was a powerful poet, his work was a center of attraction and a horizon against which all his contemporaries had to lie,” says the critic Antonio Guerrero. “As had happened before with Fernando Pessoa, there was also an ‘effect Herbert Helder’.”
Visibly moved by the news of the death of Herbert Helder, the writer Maria Velho da Costa told the PUBLIC who “died most Portuguese poet Luís de Camões after. ” The novelist who is in The Death Master No “a long poem, beautiful,” he concludes with a plea: “If my words had some influence, I proposed a national day of mourning.”
“When a poet dies with the size of Herbert Helder, what we feel is not only a poet but died poetry,” said the poet PUBLIC Madeira José Tolentino Mendonça. “In these cases the mourning becomes unbearable and, at the same time, this fight makes us realize that Herbert Helder is immortal with his work. In a thousand years, there remains a speaker of Portuguese language, the poetry of Herbert Helder stand. “
In testimony collected by Lusa agency, the critic and poet Pedro Mexia considers that” the place of Herbert Helder in Portuguese literature equivalent to the Fernando Pessoa in the first half of the twentieth century “, which, he adds,” came the saying for some time and it will become, over time, a peaceful thing, notwithstanding the great poets of his generation ” .
From Love in Visit , even in the late 50s, to The Death without Master , as in the XXI century, the written production of Herbert Helder created a universe in constant expansion and revision, a continuous poem constantly rewritten. Whose last formulation was now irrevocably fixed by his death in newly released Complete Poems (Porto Editora, 2014), a title, in fact, somewhat disconcerting for those who never seems to have seen in his work a discrete succession of autonomous and closed poems
If it is undeniable that Herbert Helder is now a well-known poet, the point of each new book is exhausted at a glance -. which does not necessarily mean it has so many readers – never fed that reputation with the display of their civil person. Already in his poetry, it can be said that his last books indicate a marked inflection for a sharper, more declarative autobiographical dimension, with all caution that requires word when applied to a poet.
“My mortal remains”
“It was very unexpected,” confesses the poet Gaston Cruz on the death of Herbert. “He’d had a recent contact with him, which had not happened for some time”, he says. In late January Herbert sent him a copy of the Complete Poems with a dedication:. “Here are my remains”
Gaston Cruz remembers who knew too much about the poet more old in the 60 and 70. “First, in the restaurant of Toni steaks, next to the building where he lived Carlos de Oliveira, and after the death of Carlos Oliveira in coffee Monte Carlo.
Herbert was a good friend the poet of About Left and “too felt his death,” says Gaston Cruz: “The death affected him, he manifests a great difficulties in coping with aging and death, and this is very visible in Easements and The Death without Master . “
In and another book, adds,” will by different language paths previous, more metaphorical, but still has a dazzling language, but with more references to the concrete. ” The last poetry of Herbert “was a great verbal force,” he says, and “had a deep connection with what has always been his poetry, a poetry of a single poem.”
The poet prefers not make comparisons, but does not hesitate to say that Herbert is one of the first line of Portuguese poetry names. “It is extraordinary how the second half of the twentieth century, after a phenomenon as Fernando Pessoa, poetry could be renewed,” note. “There have been great poets and he is one of the greatest of this generation where are Ruy Belo, Luiza Neto Jorge, or poets a little older, like Sophia and Carlos de Oliveira.”
About the brand Herbert leaves, Gaston Cruz refers to a António Ramos Rosa test, Herbert Helder – Orphic Poet , where it says Herbert Helder “is a visionary poet and Orphic poet Hölderlin a strain or a Rilke”.
His poetry “crosses modernism and surrealism with some things of German romanticism poets,” but there it a “very intensity” Gaston Cruz associated with something the poet one day confided: ” He told me that his poetry of the personal tragedy that was the loss of her mother at age eight. ” And cites the verses of The Spoon In Mouth where Herbert says “In the crazy smile mothers hit the light / rain drops (…)”. “He could have just left this book and would be enough to only consider,” says Gaston Cruz.
“On the side of truth”
“Now there is a great silence, “says Jaime Rocha, whose testimony confirms well the hypnotic power of seduction that poetry of Herbert has on who falls suddenly this true language in its own right. “We had twenty years of difference and his poetry caught me when I was 17, 18, and any idea of poetic thought from that moment changed, my relationship with the text changed,” he told PUBLIC Jaime Rocha, alias Writer and journalist Rui Ferreira e Sousa. “It took another 25 years trying to find a my text, my word that could get out of that force, that seduction” he said.
“Herbert Helder is for me the most important poet, who influenced me a generation that included Sophia or Eugene of Andradiz yet. “It gave me a force only against the sea of Nazareth, my land, a sea of tragedy, dramatic”. And going back to the sad news of the death of the poet, notes:. “We were building a very large ball around the Herbert and these days is a great void”
The essayist Rosa Maria Hammer says due to Herbert Helder ” hours without pure joy account to read, glimpse of passion the things of the world. ” And to know that the poet “died of sudden death,” says “have been so suddenly” seems to him “a great justice.” In recent books, recalls, “had anticipated often death itself, living it in exasperated poems, not wanting to escape the violence, panic, but in some texts wanted this very thing, die quickly and painlessly.” He adds:. “He who died in recent books so many times, with evident suffering”
Herbert leaves us, he says, “one of the greatest works ever written in English, because the language in his poetry extreme in subtlety, clarity, conceptual and plastic precision “. And stresses that the poet “wrote with absolute passion” to note that “in these sad times, in which the meaning of words constantly float at the mercy of interests and commitments,” he leaves us “written on the reverse happens literally addition, the side of truth, which is where the words are a living body, always just been born. “
continuous Poem
Born in 1930 in Funchal, Herbert Helder published the his first poems in anthologies Madeira – Archipelago (1952) and Bestial Poems (1954) – and yet in the journal Conch , edited by Antonio Aragon . His debut work, Love in Visit , a small booklet published by Counterpoint, came out in 1958, while attending in Lisbon, the surrealist group that met at Cafe Ice, living with Mario Cesariny, . António José Luiz Pacheco Fort or
By this time, abandoned attended university in Coimbra (first right and then of Romance Philology), the poet had had several precarious jobs – Passed CGD, . raised advertising, worked in the Meteorological Service and was medical sales representative
In 1961, he published the book that immediately would consecrate as one of the key voices of Portuguese poetry: The Spoon In Mouth , published by Attica, the seal so that published the works of Fernando Pessoa. Ruy Belo, who also published in Attica, and the same year, his first book, One Great River Euphrates , told Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, according to the chronicles in The Two sunsets (1981), that “to see evidence in the publisher’s book Herbert Helder, have felt that this is the book and not his.”
Between the publication, in 1958, the long poem Love in Visit , whose opening lines all young readers of contemporary Portuguese poetry color knew in the 60s and 70s – “Give me a young woman with his shadow harp / bush and his blood. With her / encantarei night (…). “- And the launch of The Spoon In Mouth , the poet traveled in Europe
It has become mythical eclectic and picturesque inventory crafts that was playing to survive while she was walking by France, Holland and Belgium. It was metal worker, employed in a brewery, vegetable cutter in a house soups, sailors guide in Amsterdam and packer scrap of paper, curious occupation for someone who will demonstrate an ongoing drive to turn itself on paper, disappearing into within the work.
Back in Lisbon, working in Itinerant Libraries Gulbenkian. After passing through the National Radio and RTP, works in advertising and becomes, in 1969, Editorial Director of Print, which starts the edition of the works of Almada Negreiros, who always admire.
In 1963, published a book that is sufficient to also ensure you have a very high place among contemporary Portuguese prose writers, Steps in Volta . Yet in 60 years, leaving Poemacto (1961), Place (1962), Electronicolírica (1964), then retitled The Lyric Machine , Humus (1967), his fascinating dialogue with Raul Brandão, and Portrait in Motion (1967). In 1968 publishes The Drinker Night , the first devários volumes of poetry translations, and Face presentation , a title that later reject, although several of the texts that comprise resurgence then in other books.
In the early 70s, back to travel around Europe and, in 1971, working in Angola for the magazine News , Luanda. In one of his reports, while traveling with his colleague Eduardo Guimarães, who was driving, suffered a serious car accident that almost cost him his life.
Again in Lisbon, working in Arcadia publisher, and also the RDP, and collaborates in various publications, one of the organizers of the journal New (1976)
In 1968 claimed would no longer write. – back to do it more often – and indeed deducted Animal Calling (1971), does not publish any new book to
But Cobra marks the start of a very creative period, including The Body the Luxury at Work (1978), Flash (1980), or The Head Between Hands (1982). And the volume of prose and poetry Photomaton & amp; Vox (1979), the first released with the seal of the Assyrian & amp; Alvim, of Herminio Monteiro and Manuel Rosa, who will be for decades to his publisher.
If we discount the compilations and translations, and his very personal anthology of modern Portuguese poetry, Edoi Lelia Doura (1985), it follows another period of silence to The Last Science (1988), and another six years to The World , published in 1994, the same year in which the Pessoa Prize is allocated to it, Herbert Helder refusal pedindoao jury than announce the winner and give the prize to another.
While continuing to rewrite the work, Herbert is eclipsed, then for nearly a decade and a half. But his return with Does not Cut Knife Fire , possibly the best English poetry book of the century, is overpowering. In 2013 published Easements , and in 2014 came out No Death Master , which marked his move to Porto Editora and received mixed reviews, breaking for the first time almost absolute consensus that had generated around their work.
Herbert Helder currently living with his second wife, Olga Ferreira Lima in Cascais. Was the father of Daniel Oliveira, political and columnist, and Gisela Oliveira. His funeral takes place today and will be reserved for family, reports the Porto Editora.
Isabel Lucas, Isabel Coutinho and Hugo Pinto Santos
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