Minotaur, Parrot, and the SS Man: Essays on Jorge de Sena by George Monteiro

Abstract

Reviewed by: Minotaur, Parrot, and the SS Man: Essays on Jorge de Sena by George Monteiro Silvia Oliveira Monteiro, George. Minotaur, Parrot, and the SS Man: Essays on Jorge de Sena. Tagus Press, 2021. Pp. 210. ISBN 978-I-933227-97-9. Minotaur, Parrot and SS Man: Essays on Jorge de Sena is a collection of essays authored by George Monteiro, professor emeritus of English, American, Portuguese, and Brazilian studies at Brown University, about Jorge de Sena’s work—including his scholarship, poetry, fiction, translation and epistolography—selected and introduced by Francisco Cota Fagundes, professor emeritus of Portuguese at UMass Amherst. The twelve essays were originally published in American academic journals and books “at least from 1980s to 2016” (4), and are presented as chapters of a book that George Monteiro might have composed on Jorge de Sena and Portuguese literature intended for American and international readers. The fact that George Monteiro passed away in 2019, during the organization of this volume published by Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, transfigures the book into an homage to the Portuguese American scholar whose “discreet [End Page 148] charm” (George Monteiro: The Discreet Charm of a Portuguese-American Scholar, edited by Onésimo Almeida and Alice Clemente Gávea-Brown, 2005) profoundly marked Portuguese, Brazilian and Portuguese American studies in the US. The twelve chapters of this book, twelve essays on Jorge de Sena, provide eloquent insights into the image or figura of the Portuguese scholar and poet (1919–78) who was a self-exiled academic in Brazil (1959–65 at Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Assis and Araraquara, São Paulo) and in the United States (1965–78 at U of Wisconsin, Madison and UC Santa Barbara). Monteiro’s assessment of Jorge de Sena’s mythic life in poetry and criticism is precisely put: “Remarkably, on the basis of the published evidence, Sena’s mythic life has a shape and direction that are uncommonly consistent. And because, unlike the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who explained that his late revising of earlier poetry was his way of remaking himself, Sena dated the composition of his poems and other pieces and usually limited revision to polishing (and then apparently not at all extensively), we are safe in looking at texts that reveal their author as he saw and created himself at most of the ages of man” (15). As a scholar of English and American literatures, George Monteiro’s readings of Sena’s poetry, fiction, drama and translation is in essence comparative: considering Sena’s signature poem “Em Creta, com o Minotauro,” which is for Monteiro “one of the strongest twentieth-century poems” (34), he places it with Álvaro de Campos’s “Tabacaria” and T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“If This Be Treason”); an insight into one of Sena’s most commented short stories, “Homenagem ao Papagaio Verde” takes us on a voyage through the presence and the function of parrots and “other so-called literary creatures of the air” (44) in Anglophone and French literatures. “An ‘Eichmann’ Story” is Monteiro’s masterful analysis—and defense—of Sena’s controversial short story of 1961, “Defesa e justificação de um criminoso de guerra (das memórias de Herr Werner Stupnein, ex-oficial superior das S.S.” In “The Case for Camões” Monteiro gives an account of Sena’s efforts at disseminating information about Portugal’s great poet in the United States and in the English-speaking world, an effort notably sustained and expanded by George Monteiro himself in his 1997 book The Presence of Camões: Influences on the Literature of England, America, and Southern Africa. In “Portugal in figura” Monteiro delves into the historical mismatch between Miguel de Unamuno and Fernando Pessoa, brilliantly framed by an analysis of the two poets’ differing representations of Portugal in their poetry. Jorge de Sena enters this essay only at the closing, by way of his fiction in Novas andanças do demónio (1966), to resolve the poetic match in favor of Don Miguel de Unamuno’s harsh depiction of Portugal. “On American Writing” is a piece on Jorge de Sena’s engagement as translator...