The UL recently acquired Poesia by Mário Cesariny (1923 – 2006), the first comprehensive collection of poetry by the Portuguese Surrealist. The library began collecting Cesariny’s work in the late 1980s, when much of his poetry was re-published and gained a new audience – but by which time he himself had more or less abandoned writing to focus on painting.

Cesariny was born and lived his whole life in Lisbon, though during his early 20s he briefly studied art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. While he was there, in 1947 he met one of his major influences,  André Breton. Spurred on by this encounter, Cesariny and his circle, who regularly met at Lisbon’s cafe A Mexicana, formed the Grupo Surrealista de Lisboa later that same year. Before formalising the birth of Portuguese Surrealism, these young writers and artists, amongst them the poet Alexandre O’Neill, had already begun to reject the strict Neo-Realism that had formed the dominant artistic opposition to Salazar’s regime.

These Portuguese Surrealists borrowed stylistically from their French counterparts. More importantly, however, they pursued Surrealism and its founder Breton’s original aims as a political movement in opposition to political, social and artistic conventions. Surrealism in Portugal never achieved the longevity or critical mass that it did in France and, within a year of founding the Grupo Surrealista, Cesariny had already formed a break-off “dissident” group Os Surrealistas. However, many of the writers and artists involved in this early period went on to have a significant impact on Portuguese art and literature.

Though groundbreaking, Cesariny’s work was not without precedent and he certainly took influences from the earlier Portuguese poets Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro. However, the rebellious, iconoclastic spirit that led him to reject Salazarism and Neo-Realism could also be felt in his ironic commentary on these seminal figures. Fernando J.B. Martinho describes this in Portuguese modernisms : multiple perspectives on literature and the visual arts:

Mário Cesariny (1923-2006), did not omit to pay homage to Sá-Carneiro in the middle of a long poem that professes to be a praise and simplification of Álvaro de Campos [one of Pessoa’s famous heteronyms]. Mário de Sá-Carneiro is commended for committing suicide and for having preferred death to dreary everyday life. In another poem, Cesariny sees Sá-Carneiro as a ‘hero’ in his own way, his heroism consisting of his refusal of a part in the mediocrity of his country, of his lack of ‘business’ sense and his inability to deal with practical life.

Cesariny took his “praise and simplification” of Pessoa (particularly the earlier poet’s use of heteronyms) even further in 1989’s O virgem negra, humorously subtitled “Fernando Pessoa explained for native and foreign little children by M.C.V.”. This was one of Cesariny’s few major works of poetry from the 1980s, and is discussed in depth in Mário Cesariny e O virgem negra by Fernando Cabral Martins.

As an openly gay man, Cesariny found his very existence in conflict with this country’s government and society, and was often harassed and arrested by the police under the thinly veiled charge of “vagabundagem” or vagrancy. Gay life in a repressive, conservative society is poignantly conveyed in poems such as De profundis amamus (from 1957’s Pena capital):

We walked
five miles
no one saw us go by
except
of course
the doormen
it’s in the nature of things
to be seen
by doormen

Look
as only you know how
at the street manners
The Public
the crease in your trousers
is shivering
and four thousand people are interested
in this*

Despite the many social and political barriers he faced, Cesariny was determined to pursue his freedom to express himself, both personally and artistically. This drive is evident in much of Cesariny’s work, including his most famous poem, You are welcome to Elsinore, also from Pena capital. The poem’s title (originally in English), is Hamlet’s greeting to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the two childhood friends summoned by Claudius to distract (and more importantly spy on) the prince. Cesariny clearly equates Elsinore with contemporary Portugal, an isolationist “prison” like Hamlet’s Denmark, where:

between us and words there are burning profiles
spaces full of people with their backs turned
tall poisonous flowers closed doors*

The poet evokes a repressive regime and small-minded, duplicitous society standing in the way of free expression. But he responds to this bleak depiction in the poem’s defiant final lines, which also give us an apt summary of Cesariny and his work:

Between us and words those who are walled in,
and between us and words our duty to speak*

*translations by Richard Zenith, from 28 Portuguese poets : a bilingual anthology and www.poetryinternationalweb.net

Christopher Greenberg