Em Minúsculas

by Herberto Helder

Embora não esteja aqui coligida a totalidade das suas colaborações, todos os textos deste livro foram publicados no Notícia - Semanário Ilustrado, no período em que Herberto Helder viveu em Luanda. Correspondem a pouco mais de um ano de colaboração - entre abril de 1971 e junho de 1972 - em que o poeta assinou como Herberto Helder e Luís Bernardes (ou respetivas iniciais).

Genres: Nonfiction

200 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2018

About the author

Herberto Helder was born into a family of Jewish ancestry in the Portuguese Atlantic island of Madeira. In 1946 he traveled to Lisbon to complete his secondary studies and subsequently in 1948 moved to Coimbra to study Law at university. In 1949 he had changed to the Humanities University to study Romance Philology but dropped out after three years without completing the course. After returning to Lisbon he took up several temporal jobs, and got in contact with a circle of artists and writers such as Mário Cesariny, Luiz Pacheco, João Vieira and Hélder Macedo, known as the "café gelo" group . This group revolved around Surrealism which would inform his early writings. In 1958 his first book, O Amor em Visita, was published. In the following years he traveled and lived in France, Holland and Belgium taking menial and marginal jobs to survive. He returned to Portugal in 1960 and published some of his best books in the following years A Colher na Boca, Poemacto e Lugar, Os Passos em Volta and A máquina de emaranhar paisagens. In 1964 he participates in the organization of Experimental Poetry magazine. After the April Revolution he published Cobra, O Corpo, O Luxo, A Obra, Photomaton and Vox.
The singularity of his poetry goes along with the personality of the poet: nowadays he abandoned public life, refusing prizes or interviews.

Reviews

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

A posthumous book that brings together a set of journalistic reports by the great poet, written during his stay in Angola between April 1971 and June 1972. The journalistic writing is clean and direct, with a persistent and highly refined sense of humor and irony. The quality of the chronicles cannot be compared to the author's poetic writing, but there is a collection of high-quality journalistic pieces that deserve future rereading. It is also a document of its time—temporal, spatial, and political.