Context N°22
À Sombra da Memória (In the Shadow of Memory), the 1993 prose meditation by seminal Portuguese poet Eugénio de Andrade (a.k.a. José Fontinhas, 1923–2005) will be reprinted by Quasi Ediçőes, Lisbon, at the end of 2008. The following brief appreciation of this work by Gonçalo M. Tavares, one of the best young Portuguese writers working today, represents the first in a regular series of short reviews to appear in CONTEXT of works that have not yet been translated into English, with contributions by Tavares as well as other authors from abroad. Portions of the following text will appear as the introduction to the new edition of À Sombra da Memória.
How to Step from Stone to Stone
Both the poetry and the prose of the Portuguese poet Eugénio de Andrade calls to mind the notion of trying to cross a moving stream by stepping from stone to stone. Your feet can’t falter, because the ground beneath you isn’t solid. Ninety percent of what you’re moving across is water. Faced with the necessity of placing your feet with precision, you concentrate like someone taking precise aim at a target. We proceed through the world in the same way: putting one foot in front of the next, trying to find the places where the ground is firm enough to allow us to continue. Thus we balance ourselves, trying with every step to discover the one spot in the world where we’re unlikely to slip and fall. In this way, moving neither slowly nor quickly, we strive to reach those moments of clarity that, like clearings on the far side of a stream, the world might still offer up.
Similarly, Eugénio de Andrade fashions a text step-by-step, speaking with precision, referentially, using either religious or outright profane terminology to describe the activity of writing. The author follows Rilke in saying, “He was a poet. He disliked things that were not put precisely.”
However, it would be a mistake to confuse the exactness of Andrade’s vocabulary with a lack of emotion. Often it seems that emotion is associated with the kind of movement and force that accumulates moment to moment: the more a text cries or laughs, the more feeling it’s supposed to have. But no. Sometimes the most important emotions are reflected in things that are made with deliberation, made to last—made to embody feelings that transcend the moment. Achieving this is more difficult. Going through a range of colorful emotions in a short period of time is easy. Anyone can do that.
In In the Shadow of Memory, Eugénio de Andrade refers to two opposing statements made by Braque. The first: “I love the rule that corrects the emotion.” And the second: “I love the emotion that corrects the rule.” When taken together, these two statements don’t demand that you embrace one to the exclusion of the other. Nor are they a reflection of the adage that age will always deliver a man to his final destination. Instead, the important thing to recognize about this author’s work is the sense of a mixture brewed in a laboratory: a combination of emotion and precision: the profession of patience (the title of one of his books) and sensation.
In my next letter, I will address Alexandra Lucas Coelho’s Near Orient (published by Relógio d’Água), an extraordinary book that recollects stories told from the viewpoint of a journalist stationed in Israel and Palestine. I will also talk about Nada, a journal devoted to contemporary thought.
Translation by Kerri A. Pierce
