Maria Teresa HortaPoint of Honour: Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta, Ana Raquel Fernandes

Abstract

Reviews 248 Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘necropolitics’, how Africa has long symbolized death in Western consciousness, Jones highlights the parallel between colonial and patriarchal oppression in two narratives by Momplé and Cassamo ending in the suicide of their main protagonist. If Jones’s examination of hunger and food as gendered symbols of oppression and deprivation illuminates how FRELIMO replicated the colonial connection between women and domesticity, it might have benefited from a more anthropological perspective on ‘the politics of the belly’ highlighting the intrinsic link between power and ingestion in Africa.1 Sharp and clear in its writing, ambitious and stimulating in its thematic and comparative layout and scope, Battleground Bodies is an important contribution to Lusophone African literary studies and to Lusophone postcolonial studies more generally. It is an engaging read that produces brilliant close-readings while conveying a subtle and complex understanding of Mozambique, convincingly showing the continued relevance of resistance literature in Portuguese-speaking Africa. Maria Teresa Horta, Point of Honour: Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta, translated by Lesley Saunders and introduced by Ana Raquel Fernandes (Reading: Two Rivers Press, 2019). 237 pages. Print. Reviewed by Ana Filipa Prata (Universidad de los Andes) Point of Honour is the first anthology of poetry by Maria Teresa Horta published in English. It presents a selection of more than eighty poems chosen by Horta herself and her husband, the late Luís Barros, and translated by Lesley Saunders, a contemporary British poet. This book constitutes a landmark in the reception of this major Portuguese poet who is mostly known internationally for being the author, together with Maria Velho da Costa and Maria Isabel Barreno, of the Novas Cartas Portuguesas [New Portuguese Letters], published in 1972. The chosen title for this collection — taken from one of the poems — is a very enlightening editorial decision: this anthology is meant to be a real point of honour for Horta’s literary work; it is both a poetic statement and a moment of consecration of a singular and revolutionary voice that has shivered patriarchal discourses and conservative mores in Portugal throughout the last decades. Maria Teresa Horta has been consistently publishing since 1960, from the inaugural Espelho incicial [First Mirror] to Estranhezas [Oddities], her last book published, in 2018. Horta has thoroughly cultivated a poetic work that is nowadays unanimously considered groundbreaking in both rhetorical and thematic terms, elaborating sensual and erotic expression, defying a conventional representation of womanhood and its imagery, aiming at the creation of an independent feminine discursive location. This anthology gives an account of this historical evolution and poetic consolidation; each of Horta’s 1 Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, 1st English edn (London: Longman, 1993). Reviews 249 books published from the ’60s up to the first decades of the twenty-first century is represented by two to five poems, which fosters a comprehensive approach to her profuse poetic creation. This bilingual edition opens with an introduction by Ana Raquel Fernandes, whose recent research draws mainly on female Portuguese and English authors. Fernandes provides very valuable information on Horta’s literary trajectory, but also on the political and social commitment of the author during the times of dictatorship, stressing her engagement in the defence of women’s rights. Fernandes briefly comments on several poems and highlights the main themes in Horta’s poetry such as women’s bodies and sexuality, social and literary insubordination, the representation of mother and motherhood, and the intertextual and intermedial references often present in her poetry, especially in her recent publications. There follows a translator’s note in which Lesley Saunders comments on her first approach to Maria Teresa Horta’s poetry, how she came to meet her, and how these translations are the result of a fruitful dialogue between these two poets. Even if Saunders does not have a deep knowledge of Portuguese language — as she admits — she has managed through the dialogue with the author to immerse herself in the poetic essence of Horta’s poetry and ‘bring it across’ to English-speaking territory. The thorough translations by Lesley Saunders are an example of what Haroldo de Campos called ‘transcreation’: Saunders goes beyond...