Abstract
In the present essay, I examine Portuguese poet Vergílio Alberto Vieira’s 2018 collection, Cleptopsydra, an explicit parody on Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsidra (1920). Within the collection, the poetic voice moves beyond the rigidity of Pessanha’s form through a series of sublime, transcendent, but ultimately earthbound symbols. This tension between form, symbol, and transcendence likewise exists in the work of several of Vieira’s contemporaries, and I suggest an openly transnational and translinguistic link between them. Finally, I discuss how contemporary Portugal has come to serve as both a challenge and a point of articulation for Vieira’s poetics.
Highlights
In the present essay, I examine Portuguese poet Vergílio Alberto Vieira’s 2018 collection, Cleptopsydra, an explicit parody on Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsidra (1920)
From the moment Camilo Pessanha arrives in Macao on 10 April 1894, he will never cease to manifest, despite underemployment and bad health, an attraction Journal of Lusophone Studies 5.2 (Fall 2020)
Vieira recounts the binary oppositions of silence and “transparência verbal” as a moment in which Pessanha initiates a process of unifying the multiplicity of the poetic word with the essence the poetic voice seeks out through the knowledge that “vive, que viver será, quando menos se pensa [...] o encontro com a morte.”
Summary
Clepsidra was the only collection of poetry that Pessanha published during his lifetime; he did mange to compose and publish several poems and short stories before his death in 1926. These compositions evince a strong current of fin-de-siècle decadence, but they came to serve as the Saudosist, orientalist basis for Portuguese modernism (Garay 194). Siary clearly delineates Pessanha’s unusual perspective vis-à-vis his exoticized poetic object. The notion that a poetics of alterity can both create an image of the exotic and become the object of its own exoticism bears the weight of Pessanha’s thematic development in Clepsidra. This questioning of the real as abjection bears fruit in Vieira’s poetic experience
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