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Metamorphoses
Poetry. Translated from the Portuguese by Francisco C. Fagundes and James Houlihan. Jorge de Sena (1919-1978), widely regarded as the foremost Portuguese poet and man of letters since the Second World War, authored about a hundred books, including over a dozen volumes of poetry and numerous translations of poets like Dickinson and Cavafy, during his life as a civil engineer in Portugal and, beginning in 1959, as a writer-in-exile in Brazil and the United States, where at the time of his death he headed the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This first English translation of his 1963 masterpiece establishes him as one of the greatest world poets of our day. Borrowing its title from Ovid, it consists of twenty-three poems inspired by twenty acclaimed examples of art and artistry (reproduced here in black and white) from the Archaic Period to the Space Age—from Moorish architecture to paintings by Rembrandt, Goya, and Van Gogh, from Keats's death mask to a sputnik. By turns philosophical and earthy, at once lucid and intense, these fine translations are perfectly pitched to capture Sena's distinctive voice, as he draws on a richly eclectic mix of sources to pay homage to the creative imagination and its man-made meanings in poems that are always formally subtle, deeply intelligent, and passionately human.
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
26 people want to read
About the author
Jorge de Sena
167 books84 followersJorge de Sena is one of the most important Portuguese poets of the second half of the 20th century, but he was also an outstanding essayist, a fiction writer of indubitable talent, a significant playwright and a tireless translator of the poetry and prose of writers from a variety of languages and periods. His published works extend to more than a hundred titles. It is difficult to understand how a single person could accomplish so much in one lifetime, and not a long one at that, especially if we consider that he worked under the demands of a professional life and raised nine children.
In 1959, fearing that he would be persecuted for his involvement in a failed coup attempt against the dictatorship of Salazar, Sena went into exile in Brazil, and later adopted Brazilian nationality. There he added a doctorate in the humanities to his degree in civil engineering. In 1965 he left Brazil with his large family for the United States, where he remained until his death. There is a Portuguese Studies Center named after him at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he held his last teaching post.
The innovative character and the excellence of his vast body of work are broadly recognized today, but this was not always the case. Sena himself believed that he was under-appreciated in Portugal and, from the vantage of his American exile, he took his revenge in a series of acid attacks against the mediocrity and provincialism of the Portuguese cultural scene. It is no wonder that his poetry provoked a certain resistance. Though he was a ferociously critical poet, he would nevertheless dispense with the primer of social realism, and occasionally display the outer signs of surrealism. However, he was much too cerebral to submit himself to the dictates of the unconscious, or to practice automatic writing. And though he would give voice to personal circumstances, his practice as a poet of witness, both of his own life and the world around him, had nothing in common with the subjectivity and the immersion in psychology so typical of the generation of writers grouped around the influential literary magazine Presença, launched in the city of Coimbra in 1927.
With the appearance in Portugal, at the beginning of the 1960s, of a poetry dedicated to creating a new autonomy for poetic language, one which would favor control, prosodic rigor and metaphoric density, it was natural that certain characteristics of Sena’s poetry, such as his frequent use of registers more typical of prose, were seen as symptoms of weak technique. But it is curious to note that what tended to alienate him from the successive poetic currents of his times is exactly what the young and influential Portuguese poets of today find so attractive in him.
As an essayist, Sena is an important reference, both when it comes to Luís de Camões and to Fernando Pessoa. He also wrote a novella, dozens of short stories and one powerful novel, Signs of Fire, which presents at once a fresco of Portuguese society during the period of the Spanish Civil War and a detailed portrait of the education of a poet. He will also be remembered as the translator of hundreds of poems by a variety of poets, and of the novels and plays of such authors as Molière, Lautréamont, Poe, Chestov, Brecht, Faulkner, Hemingway, Graham Greene, Malraux and Eugene O’Neill, among many others.
Miguel Queirós (Translated by Martin Earl)
In 1959, fearing that he would be persecuted for his involvement in a failed coup attempt against the dictatorship of Salazar, Sena went into exile in Brazil, and later adopted Brazilian nationality. There he added a doctorate in the humanities to his degree in civil engineering. In 1965 he left Brazil with his large family for the United States, where he remained until his death. There is a Portuguese Studies Center named after him at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he held his last teaching post.
The innovative character and the excellence of his vast body of work are broadly recognized today, but this was not always the case. Sena himself believed that he was under-appreciated in Portugal and, from the vantage of his American exile, he took his revenge in a series of acid attacks against the mediocrity and provincialism of the Portuguese cultural scene. It is no wonder that his poetry provoked a certain resistance. Though he was a ferociously critical poet, he would nevertheless dispense with the primer of social realism, and occasionally display the outer signs of surrealism. However, he was much too cerebral to submit himself to the dictates of the unconscious, or to practice automatic writing. And though he would give voice to personal circumstances, his practice as a poet of witness, both of his own life and the world around him, had nothing in common with the subjectivity and the immersion in psychology so typical of the generation of writers grouped around the influential literary magazine Presença, launched in the city of Coimbra in 1927.
With the appearance in Portugal, at the beginning of the 1960s, of a poetry dedicated to creating a new autonomy for poetic language, one which would favor control, prosodic rigor and metaphoric density, it was natural that certain characteristics of Sena’s poetry, such as his frequent use of registers more typical of prose, were seen as symptoms of weak technique. But it is curious to note that what tended to alienate him from the successive poetic currents of his times is exactly what the young and influential Portuguese poets of today find so attractive in him.
As an essayist, Sena is an important reference, both when it comes to Luís de Camões and to Fernando Pessoa. He also wrote a novella, dozens of short stories and one powerful novel, Signs of Fire, which presents at once a fresco of Portuguese society during the period of the Spanish Civil War and a detailed portrait of the education of a poet. He will also be remembered as the translator of hundreds of poems by a variety of poets, and of the novels and plays of such authors as Molière, Lautréamont, Poe, Chestov, Brecht, Faulkner, Hemingway, Graham Greene, Malraux and Eugene O’Neill, among many others.
Miguel Queirós (Translated by Martin Earl)
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