The eternal search for Herbert Helder – publico

                 

                         
                     

                 

 
                         
                     

                         When a poet dies in, there is always the temptation to identify it as the last of a generation, a genre, a clan. Happened to Sophia or Ramos Rosa. Herbert died, though, as the last representative of himself, of his brilliant uniqueness. It was, by the end, one hotly obsessive sculptor of the word, but a stronghold averse to worldly exposure, its affirmation and consecration rituals (refused in 1994 the Prize Person suggesting to the jury: “Do not tell anyone and give the prize to another “). What, on the one hand created the so-called “myth Herbert Helder”, or the myth of “obscure poet”, allowed him to establish himself as strictly poetic reference to his contemporaries, such that, as said yesterday the critical António Guerreiro, all had to be located before the horizons for him trimmed, and this will have been the “Herbert Helder effect.”

Although not give interviews and were averse to photographs, “gave” an interview with him himself, who PUBLIC published on 4 December 1990. In it, it was said “an author of leaflets” and stood face to poetry this way: “It is written a poem due to the suspicion that while the write something goes happen, a formidable thing, something that will transform us, that will transform everything. ” But …

“You have to intoxicate themselves with the passion of danger, develop people within that passion: why gold and silver hide in forest recesses, mine funds, lands after water. Passion is the moral poetry: risk their head if they want to understand; (…) “He risked, the head and everything else, the idea that” the question, the demand, the defaulter poem, crystallize in a large translucent mass, a quartz block, “maybe” at the time of biographical apocalypse “allows us to see clear as to” finally appeased confusion of the world. ” Death, which he anticipated in writing, became a hit this search incomplete; and eternal.