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António Pereira Nobre (Porto August 16, 1867 – March 18, 1900) was a Portuguese poet. He died of tuberculosis in Foz do Douro, Porto, in 1900, after trying to recover in a number of places. His masterpiece Só (Paris, 1892), was the only book he published. Nobre was a member of a wealthy family. He was born in Oporto, and spent his childhood in Trás - os - Montes and in Póvoa de Varzim. He studied law unsuccessfully at the University of Coimbra from 1888 to 1890 when he dropped out. As a student in Coimbra, and according to his own words, he only felt at ease in his "tower" (referring to the Torre de Anto - Anto Tower, in upper Coimbra, where he lived) during the "sinister period" he spent studying law at the University of Coimbra. An unknown fiancée, more fictitious than concrete; a friend - Alberto de Oliveira, and a brief intervention in the literary life, through some magazines, did not conciliate him with the academic city of Coimbra where this predestined poet flunked twice. He went to Paris where he took a degree in political science at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. There he came into contact with the French coeval poetry - he met Paul Verlaine and Jean Moréas, among others. He also met the famous Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz in Paris, who was a Portuguese diplomat in the city. It was from 1890 to 1895, that Nobre studied political science in Paris, where he was influenced by the French Symbolist poets, and was there that he wrote the greater part of the only book he published. The
Paris exile, sad by his own words ("poor Lusitanian, the wretched",
lost in the crowd that does not know him), was not a time of
happiness. The aristocratic shutting up caused nausea or indifference.
Frustrated and always marginal in experiences he became bitter. He was far
from all sorts of fraternity, from desire and hate,
and from the wailing of the breed, a childlike, lost, instinctive and
princely life, a souvenir of the sweet old landscape that memory seems
to encourage. In his tender but never rhetorical mourning Nobre
manifests himself and mourns over himself as a doomed poet, with a hard
soul and a maiden's heart, which carried the sponge of gall in former
processions. His
verse marked a departure from objective realism and social commitment
to subjective lyricism and an aesthetic point of view. The lack of
means aggravated by his father's death, made him morbidly reject the
present and the future, following a pessimistic romantic attitude that
led him to denounce his tedium. However excessive, this is a controlled
attitude, due to a clear aesthetic mind and a real sense of ridicule.
He learned the colloquial tone from Almeida Garrett and Júlio Dinis, and also from Jules Laforgue,
but he exceeded them all in the peculiar compromise between irony and a
refined puerility, a fountain of happiness because it represents a
return to his happiest of times - a kingdom of his own from where he
resuscitates characters and enchanted places, manipulating, as a
virtuoso of nostalgia, the picturesque of popular festivals and of
fishermen, the simple magic of toponyms and the language of the people. In
his prescience of pain, in his spiritual anticipation of disease and of
agony, in his taste for sadness, in his unmeasured pride of isolation,
António (from Torre de Anto, at the centre of old Coimbra where
the poet lived an enchanted life, everywhere writing his mythical and
literary name: Anto) keeps an artist’s composure, always expressing the
cult of the aesthetic life and of the elegant personality. In his
courtship of death (to whose imminent threat he would later answer with
dignity), he takes his spiritual dandyism to extremes, like in the
“Balada do Caixão.” His poetry translates the lack of a total
maturation, an adolescent “angelism” present in fabulous confirmations:
he is “the moon”, “the saint”, “the snake”, “the sorcerer”, “the
afflicted”, “the inspired”, “the unprecedented”, “the medium”, “the
bizarre”, “the fool”, “the nauseated”, “the tortured”, “D.
Enguiço”, “a supernatural poet.” Narcissus
in permanent soliloquy, whether he writes verses of nostalgia to Manuel
or speaks to his own pipe - António Nobre (A.N.) makes poetry
out of the real, he covers what is prosaic with a soft mantle of legend
(“My neighbour is a carpenter / he is a second - hand trader of Mrs.
Death”) and creates, with a rare balance between intuition and
critique, his familiar “fantastic” (“When the Moon, a beautiful
milkmaid / goes deliver milk at the houses of Infinity”). His catholic
imaginary world is the same as in a fairy tale, a crib of simple words
but with an imaginative audacity in the scheming of those words that
separate him from the consecrated lyrical language. His power of
“invention” comes forth in the inspired, yet conscious, use of the
verbal material (“Moons of Summer! Black moons of velvet!” or “The
Abbey of my past”). Between the Garrettian and the symbolic aesthetic,
the most personal and revealing feature of his vocabulary is naturally
- even for his longing for the childhood aesthetical retrieval -, the
diminutive. A man of sensibility rather than of reflection, he took
from the French symbolism, whose mystery and deep sense he could never
penetrate, the repelling of oratory and of formal procedures - the
original imagery (“Trás - os - Montes of water”, “slaughter
house of
the planets”), the cult of synaesthesia, the rhythmic freedom, the
musical research. A. N. had a very thick ear. All his poetry is
rigorously written to be heard, full of parallelisms, of melodic
repetitions, of onomatopoeias, extremely malleable. Its syllabic
division depends on the rhythm that obeys to feeling. However, the
images or the words of his sentences rarely have the precious touch of
the symbolic jewellery. Evidently, in “Poentes de França”, the
planets come drink in silver chalices in the “tavern of sunset”;
however, his transfiguration of reality almost always obeys not to a
purpose of sumptuous embellishment, like in Eugénio de Castro, but to an essentially affectionate eager desire of an intimism of things (“the skinny and hunchbacked poplars”, etc). António Nobre died of tuberculosis in Foz do Douro, Porto, in 18 March 1900, after trying to recover in Switzerland, Madeira and New York. Other than Só (Paris,
1892) two other posthumous works were published: Despedidas (1st
edition, 1902), with a fragment from O Desejado, and Primeiros Versos
(1st edition, 1921). António Nobre's correspondence is reunited
in several volumes: Cartas Inéditas a A.N., with an introduction
and notes by A. Casais Monteiro, Cartas e Bilhetes - Postais a Justino de
Montalvão with a foreword and notes by Alberto de Serpa, Porto,
1956; Correspondência, with an introduction and notes by
Guilherme de Castilho, Lisbon, 1967 (a compilation of 244 letters, 56
of which unpublished). |