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How
do we decide upon the criteria to be used in defining exactly what
represents our time? Do we just accept everything that coexists with us?
But, in saying “us”, how do we decide which of us to include, given
that our ages are different, and so are our ideas, sensitivities and
values? We may perhaps consider that these differences are precisely the
distinguishing feature of a time that has not yet been filtered through
the systematicity of a historical viewpoint and consider their
coexistence to be a sign of variety and richness, or even a sign of the
imperfect nature of our approach, and think instead that this sign
transmits to us the vibrancy of the incompleteness of everything that
lives, and therefore pulsates, lasts and is changed.
Contemporaries writing in Portugal. There are some unquestionable
figures on the list, major personalities, writers who are essential
references, who remain somewhat aloof from our everyday lives, although
they appear from time to time in the press, on TV, or even live next
door to us, going to the same beach as us, or, like us, going to the
supermarket or cinema. Other less influential names, who write in
periodical publications, receive prizes, are younger and more precarious.
All of them engaged in making us think about the world and life, causing
us to emerge from our situation as passive readers from the outset,
although we are absolutely determined about our attitudes and choices,
which can only be based on knowledge. Let us, then, attempt to know more
about them.
 In
Arte Poética II, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
(b. 1919) writes:
Poetry
is my explanation with the universe, my life with things, my
participation in the real world, my encounter with voices and images.
That is why the poem does not talk about an ideal life but about a
concrete life: the angle of a window, the resonance of the streets,
cities and rooms, the shadow of the walls, the appearance of faces, the
silence, distance and brilliance of the stars, the breathing of the
night, the scent of a lime-tree or oregano.
For Sophia, poetry is therefore the encounter of the being with the
concreteness of the world, and notice how, in explaining what poetry is
for her, unbeknown to her she is already making poetry, communicating
her perception of things through the transfiguration of the poetic word.
She
has been publishing books since 1944 (also prose fiction, and
children’s books such as A
Menina do Mar and A Fada
Oriana, 1958), and one of her great themes is the sea, shining with
the luminosity of its solar knowledge and with its regularity in the
reconstruction of movement, or its vital respiration, which it
communicates to us, or even its role in the epiphany of the world. In Dia
do Mar (1947), she writes in the poem «Navegação»:
Distance
derived from distance
Apparition of the world: the land flows
Through the eyes that see it revealed.
And
behind this another far off immensity dies.
Very
sensitive to the cultural implications of politics and of the feeling of
freedom, she sometimes expresses the pettiness of those environments
that are suffocated by social oppression. In Livro
Sexto (1962), she writes in the poem «Exílio»:
When
we do not have the homeland that we have
Lost through silence and renunciation
Even the voice of the sea becomes an exile
And the light surrounding us is like bars.
 In
Eugénio de Andrade (b.
1923), the poetry of the elements is also very powerful, although it is
almost always related to love - the love of nature, beings and the body.
Very sensual and literary, plastic and musical, his poetry is conceived
as a reworking of the word until the very limits of an extreme nakedness
that comes from the world (perceived most acutely) to rediscover in this
the chosen being and, in the final analysis, loneliness as an essential
refuge. As palavras interditas (1951) has become a cult poem for several
generations:
Ships
exist, and there exists your face
Leant against the face of ships.
With no destination they float in the cities,
Depart in the wind, return in the rivers.
The words that I send to you are forbidden
even, my love, by the halo of the wheat-fields;
if any were to return, I would no longer even recognise
your name in its clear curves.
Eugénio
has the ability to combine the circumstantial and the absolute, to
understand in a concrete environment the voice of communication that
will lead to poetical writing, an exemplary form of
transfiguration, in a limpid and pure expressiveness that is
peculiarly his. In Memória Doutro
Rio (1978), he writes in «Com a manhã»:
Coming
from the river, hands extremely cool, the hair still with some drops of
water. With the morning comes the anonymous breathing of the world. A
smell of fresh bread invades the whole yard. Coming from the river: to
be raised to the mouth, or to the poem.
 António Ramos
Rosa
(b. 1924) intellectualises (not only in his countless books of poetry,
but also in his essays on literary creation and poetic interpretation)
the interrelation between the natural elements and culture, but he
maintains the full vibrancy of his call for man’s free expression and
for his consecration in the labours of the word. This
poem became famous in Viagem através
duma Nebulosa (1960):
I
cannot put off love to another century
I cannot
even though the cry chokes in my throat
even though hate crackles and snaps and burns
under grey mountains and grey mountains
(...)
I cannot put off to another century my life
nor my love
nor my cry of freedom
I cannot put off my heart
Later,
the austerity of his expression was refined in his poetry, becoming
extremely bare at the level of syntax, just as it was luxuriant in its
insistence on certain words and in its inexhaustible semantic
radiation, almost always dealing with the subject of love
relationships and the relationship with writing. In O
Incerto Exacto (1982), he writes:
Desire
Surprise
Or wonderment
Not for the same image
but tearing it apart
Only residues or the passing of signs
That tell of the passage of what will be
if it is
the unpredictable contact
of the dark
inaccessible
body in another living body
 In
fiction, Agustina Bessa-Luís
(1922) established her reputation with A
Sibila (1954), which creates its very own style for narrating in the
novel, using constant shifts in relation to the novel’s central
discourse, but avoiding the abstractive tendency that might result from
this, through a regionalism rooted in peculiar psychological attitudes
and a style centred on the subjectivity of narrative judgements.
Ah,
the sweet routine of that life we shared in common, although an
extraordinary one of independence and solitary quality! The farm
progressed, the women grew older: their hair, which until recently had
still been brown, appeared grey and then white; Joaquim completely
abandoned his work as a farmer, rarely supervised the boys or chose the
cattle and even stopped visiting his lady friend, dry and dark, like a
tree-trunk castigated by the storms. He drank his shot of brandy at dawn
and this kept him in a benevolent and distracted mood for the whole day;
he enjoyed a discreet, almost affable drunkenness, and delicate dreams
filled his mind.
Os Quatro Rios,
1964
In
her novel, she develops a concept of time that underlines its quality of
internal duration and continuity, which she extends into her more recent
fiction, such as A Corte do Norte,
1987, or O Concerto dos Flamengos,
1994.
 Also
noted for the fictional quality of internal time is Maria Judite de Carvalho [1921-1998], a delightful revelation in her
short stories Tanta Gente, Mariana!,
1959, or in the novella As
Palavras Poupadas, 1961, in which there emerge characters of a
psychological depth with hints of delicate social entanglements,
displayed in snippets of the slightest gestures or imperceptible
attitudes and judgements:
He
gets up from the table. Outside, some clock strikes two. A few moments
later, an eternity later, he will get up from the table again. And
tomorrow. And then afterwards, And then many years later. Everything
dies at night, Claude used to say. But no, life is long, it slips and
slides without a break. A succession of events, an endless stream of
words uttered and words spared. Mainly
these.
As
Palavras Poupadas
This
narrative concept results in a certain attention to the unravelling of
daily time and to the untypical characters to be found in common
circumstances, who lead the author to the writing of chronicles (Seta
Despedida, 1994) and to her awareness of the fragmentary element
which can be made concrete in the short story (Flores
ao Telefone, 1968).
 Urbano Tavares
Rodrigues
(1923) has been writing regularly since the 1950s, during which time he
has revealed himself to be a talented writer of short stories (Uma
Pedrada no Charco, 1958) and a novelist who is sensitive to the state of
contemporary society and the evolution of literary writing (e.g.
Bastardos do Sol, 1959, and A Hora da Incerteza, 1995). Love, social and
political action, the city of Lisbon and the region of the Alentejo are
his predominant themes, whose nature and circumstance pursue him with
both insistence and dissatisfaction:
For
lunch (Adriana is relearning the Alentejo recipes) I have a fabulous
soup of purslane with cheese and poached egg. It is my childhood that
comes back to me, almost intact, in this taste. My sister’s eyelashes
batting furiously, questioning and indignant, when I secretly steal from
her plate the delicious piece of ewe’s cheese, which by right, by all
the rights in the world, belonged to her. She already has tears in her
sweet brown eyes and I am repentant, with my spoon in the air, wanting
to restore to her the object of her grief.
A
Hora da Incerteza
 José Cardoso
Pires
(1925-1998) was always linked to the fiction of social entanglement,
sometimes joining neo-realistic concepts to existentialist ones (O Anjo
Ancorado, 1958), and distinguishing himself through his dry, lean style
that he manipulated with great sobriety in works ranging from O Hóspede
de Job, 1963, to Balada da Praia dos Cães, 1982.
Birds
dotted about the branches, the horizon of the sea above the tree-tops
and between the sky and the water line a cold frail light making its way
into the dusk. An oil-tanker? Elias lingers over his gaze. Giving time
to time. Only the next day will he begin the inventory of signs and
hunches, continuing to trust as he has always done in the Handcuff Crook.
Giving time to time. You catch a murderer more quickly than a dead man,
because as they used to say, the dead man gallops on horseback into the
soul and the murderer stumbles over fear.
Balada
da Praia dos Cães
More
recently published works, Alexandra Alpha, 1987, and De Profundis -
Valsa lenta, 1997 reveal an incurable fondness for turning the closest
and most common reality into fiction, drawing from it, through the
perceptiveness of the fiction writer, all its unlikely, exceptional
aspects that are inaccessible to the human eye.
 José Saramago
was born in 1922, although he only began to publish much later in the
form of poetry, chronicles and short stories. Indeed, it was only with
the novels Levantado do Chão, 1980, and Memorial do Convento, 1982,
that he was to achieve a popularity that has continued to grow both
nationally and internationally. He fictionalises about particular
moments in Portuguese history and culture (O Ano da Morte de Ricardo
Reis, 1944, História do Cerco de Lisboa, 1989) or provides a glimpse of
periods of dystopia occurring at the wrong time (Jangada de Pedra, 1986)
and in the wrong place (Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, 1995, Todos os Nomes,
1997). All these different fictions show man being forced to revert to a
necessary, and not always fortunate, confrontation with his community.
His writing has a very particular style that gives special emphasis to
long and progressively more elaborate sentences developing through the
author’s sense of urgency, not shying away from the role of selecting
and judging and thus justifying the idea of literary creation.
Here
you are, said the writer. The doctor’s wife asked, May I, without
waiting for the reply she picked up the pages of writing, there must
have been some twenty of them, cast a glance over the tiny handwriting,
over the lines that rose and fell, over the words inscribed on the
blankness of the paper, engraved in blindness. I’m passing through,
the writer had said, and these were the signs that he was allowing to
pass by. The doctor’s wife placed her hand on his shoulder, and his
two hands went in search of it and brought it slowly to his lips. Do not
lose yourself, do not let yourself be lost, he said, and these were
unexpected, enigmatic words, they did not seem to be at all to the point.
Ensaio
sobre a Cegueira
Augusto
Abelaira
(1926), a well-known fiction writer from the 1960s (Cidade das Flores,
1959, As Boas Intenções, 1963), expressed the anxieties of a
generation that was in favour of a social and political renewal in a
cultural context of increased awareness and responsibility, in which art
and literature had a decisive role to play. Bolor, 1968, is a novel
showing the breakdown of feelings and the wavering of convictions,
written in a profoundly innovative narrative style that its author has
subsequently continued to develop, questioning the logic of
communication and the succession of time, and, precisely because of this,
affirming his loyalty to fundamental values such as love and creativity
(O Bosque Harmonioso, 1982, Outrora Agora, 1996).
Now,
he (he, Jerónimo) is there on the balcony, thirty years later, enjoying
the sun, his eyes on the sea (“la mer, toujours recommencée”). But
down below, grey, on the avenue running parallel to the beach, a car
pulls up and, quickly turning, without any hesitation, slips in between
two cars - an astounding, millimetrical manoeuvre. Jerónimo would have
taken much longer to park, carefully assessing the available narrow
space - which explains the curiosity with which he is waiting for the
hero to appear (is it true that the Chinese, unlike the European,
civilisation did not celebrate their warrior heroes, considering them
even to be inferior beings? Sparta, the secret model of western
civilisation. A hero without a plume on his head, like Hector, the one
with the shining helmet. Ring Marta (I forgot to pay the phone bill, the
reminder was left on top of the fridge).
Outrora
Agora
 Maria
Velho da Costa
(1938) proved to be a quite dazzling revelation as a novelist with Maina
Mendes, 1969, centred around the female figure for whom ancestry,
rebelliousness, pleasure, creativity and pain represent the places for
the affirmation of being. She continued with this theme in Casas Pardas,
1977, which highlights her polyhedral method of composing texts in
different registers, even though she always remains secure and cohesive
in her compositional structure, and conveys a most poignant sensibility
that gives an even sharper cutting edge to her formal rigorousness (a
quality which is also to be seen quite clearly in her later works Missa
in Albis, 1988, or Dores, 1995).
Ah,
I can tell you that there is a discontentment which contents,
tittle-tattle, which can be spoken with fairness and listened to with
gravity, there are festivals of discontent and what a boon we have had
with this vocation of weeping and wailing, which immediately overcomes
us when we’re not on our way anywhere. I even believe that nostalgia
is the bitterness of idleness, not of distance. And this struck me
yesterday, again, more and more definitely, at the quayside in Alcântara,
with the seagulls slumbering like little ducks, perfectly still in the
bobbing water, how worthless we are when we have nowhere to go.
Maina
Mendes
Almeida Faria
(1943): When still very young, he published two excellent novels, Rumor
Branco, 1962, and A Paixão, 1965, which revealed a talent that was
confident in the art of narrating, whilst simultaneously introducing the
spectacular innovations of discursive disconnectedness and hybrid
modalities into novel-writing. His later career has continued in the
same vein, underlining his use of intertextual effects (including texts
from the worlds of art and communication in general) and a sharp irony
that reveals a satirical vocation in the observation of customs and
socio-political atmospheres, particularly in the transitional period
after the 25 April Revolution (Lusitânia, 1980, O Conquistador, 1990).
Death
touched them lightly, with its black wing, with its fine, chilling,
cavernous mystery, and so the men saw how alone they were, and how
dependent they were upon themselves and their own nothingness; but the
danger has passed, or they think that it has passed, and their mouths,
until quite recently afflicted with misfortune, immediately join
together to release a howl or a sob, the howl of every dog that has
escaped from torment and still feels the taste of death above, the sob
of relief and also of sadness made by those who have freed themselves
from an infinite tunnel.
A
Paixão
 António Lobo Antunes
(1942) was the great revelation of the end of the 1980s, with two hugely
successful novels: Memória de Elefante and Os Cus de Judas, written in
a lively style and producing prodigious metaphorical effects. These two
novels provide a deceptive view of the colonial war and the generation
who, against their will, were forced to embody it. Writing on a regular
basis since then, he has achieved international recognition and
continued to express his sharp critical awareness of the contemporary
environment and the national memory of the recent past with Auto dos
Danados, 1985, or Manual dos Inquisidores, 1996, or even of the more
glorious Portuguese past, in a simultaneous gesture of homage and
accusatory and painful lampoon (As Naus, 1988).
It
is, in fact, not just the mice who live with us in the attic. We have a
zoological garden full of ants, gnats, moths, centipedes, spiders,
crickets, woodworms, which I presume live off the same lack of food as
we do, without counting the butterflies that crush themselves against
the light-bulbs in the summer and are immediately reduced to a dark
veneer of dust. And then there are the pigeons. And the doves. And the
boats, like slugs, on the Tagus. And the neighbours in their vests,
incapable of flying, crucified on the flower-pots of their balconies.
And you and me, ever more transparent and thinner, preparing our
breakfast of a half a gram of heroin for our morning injection.
Auto
dos Danados
 Mário Cláudio
(1941), who began by establishing himself as a poet and cultivated
various literary genres, has been known in particular as a writer of
fiction since the publication of Um Verão Assim, 1974, confirming his
reputation with Damascena, 1983, and then being recognised as one of the
leading figures in contemporary Portuguese fiction on the basis of his
Trilogia da Mão (with volumes on Amadeo Souza-Cardoso, Guilhermina
Suggia and Rosa Ramalho). His fondness for the literary forms of
historical reconstruction, in which he combines his capacity for evoking
specific atmospheres with a very personal subjectivity of creative
distortion, is accentuated in many of his later works, such as A Quinta
das Virtudes, 1990, or As Batalhas do Caia, 1995.
Cândida
Branca was the fruit of a certain extremely fleeting and intense romance
between a stagecoachman, married and the father of two other girls, and
a sweet seller, from the village of Irivo, in the vale of Penafiel. Her
parents had seen each other at the feast of Senhora Aparecida, for one
long hot, fiery day, of the kind which cause even the wheat-fields to
wilt. And in the midst of the ears of wheat, the little girl had been
engendered, thereafter growing under the shadow of the sweet seller, who
later found a farm boy who was prepared to take her as his consort.
A
Quinta das Virtudes
 Maria Gabriela
Llansol
(1931) is a unique figure in contemporary fiction with a gushing,
unexpected and original creativity. Writing in her own very personal
style, her strong personality first asserted itself in 1957, with the
narratives of Os Pregos na Erva, later becoming consolidated with O
Livro das Comunidades, 1978, and all her later works, including A
Restante Vida, 1978, and Um Beijo Dado mais tarde, 1990, and
Lisboaleipzig, 1994 and 1995. Combining expressive subjectivity and a
strong liking for myths with lyrical implications, based on a heretical
but religious vision of life and the world that was simultaneously
sensualistic and naturalistic, her fiction is characterised by the
hybrid nature of the registers she uses and the spatial and temporal
summoning of different entities. It all, however, results in a
cohesiveness that is engendered by her own persistent and unmistakable
discursive imprint.
The
text is the only way of identifying anyone’s gender and humanity,
because, strange poet, a person’s gender is their narrative. Their
narrative, or that which the text tells us, in its place. Thus, their
gender will be like the place of the text.
When you desire someone, as you desire Infausta, and she desires Johann,
it is their scenic place which you desire,
the gestures of the text that they describe in space
and call it
precious companion;
about me, I shall say that I was once sent,
you brought the sentence that you had never read before,
my body uttered it, and you didn’t notice that you had ended up with
it written.
Lisboaleipzig 2
  Although
somewhat distant in ages, Mário
de Carvalho (1944) and Luísa
Costa Gomes (1954) are two literary personalities who established
their reputations in the 1980s. Their confirmation took place with works
published more or less towards the end of the decade, the former with A
Paixão do Conde de Fróis, 1986, and the latter with O Pequeno Mundo,
in 1988. With a taste for historical and parodic reconstructions, Mário
de Carvalho produced a work with a most complex plot with his recent Um
Deus Passeando na Brisa da Tarde, 1994, a novel about the dawns and
implications of Christianity and the possibility of its being
reinterpreted in the present time. With Olhos Verdes, 1994, Luísa Costa
Gomes has given us a quite remarkable work of simulation and a criticism
of advertising and the media. Both of them use a classical syntactical
style of writing, making use of themes drawn from everyday or even
ordinary life and distinguishing themselves from other writers by the
way in which they instil in their work unexpected nuances and meanings
of intense reflective and critical sharpness.(1944)
Moving
at a canter, the two horsemen continued their way across the heath,
now very distant from the path, fleeing towards the border. They rode
around a circular pine grove, hesitated at the sight of the naked
plain, overlooked by the small hill on which the square stood, and set
off at a sudden gallop, without any shelter and angling towards Spain.
Shortly, they had vanished from sight, leaving as a sign of the path
that they were following a cloud of dust that was slowly evaporating
from this side.
Mário
de Carvalho, A Paixão do Conde de Fróis
His
interests were companies, the utilitarians, artistic carpentry and
space. Football was something he watched from time to time. He had
theories about things and he yearned to share them with others. He
explained himself clearly, although he could not be considered always
to make sense. What particularly intrigued him was space, the space
that permeated everything, the empty air between the desk and the
chair, between the face and the hand, between the floor and the
ceiling. He said that he was sure that all the empty spaces had a
profound meaning.
Luísa
Costa Gomes, Olhos Verdes
Many
other novelists and poets have enriched our literature and made it
difficult to write this synopsis. That is the very nature of
contemporaries: an excess in relation to the critic’s eye, an
abundance of life and its inexhaustible continuity in relation to the
historian’s sieve.
Let
us then turn now to poets such as
Egito Gonçalves, Nuno Júdice, Vasco Graça Moura, António Franco
Alexandre, João Miguel Fernandes Jorge, Paulo Teixeira - and we
shall say the same thing about the writers of fiction: Maria
Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, Hélia Correia, Alexandre Pinheiro
Torres, Eduarda Dionísio and so many others.
It is all of these, in other words the writers that we did not get to
talk about and those that we did not even mention by name, who give
meaning to what has been written here and cause this synopsis to be
incomplete, making us feel how alive and immense literature is, because
above all it is about reading and time, and not immobility, nor does it
fit completely on any page:
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