What's in a name

What's in a name?

If the rose were given another name, would its perfume be less sweet? "

This quote, taken from Act II of Romeo and Juliet, opens

, the last book by the poet Ana Luísa Amaral (Lisbon, 1956), one of the most important voices in Portuguese literature of the last three decades.

A book in which the author takes up some of her fundamental concerns, and inhabits a poetic territory that takes as a central element the tension between the observation of everyday reality and the capacity for expression and understanding through words.

From that distant

(1990), which inaugurated his career, Amaral has built a work that unfolds in parallel to poetry (the headquarters of his literary universe) through theater, essays, narrative for adults or children and translation.

Precisely in this last facet, her work as a translator, we find some of the fundamental references (Emily Dickinson or William Shakespeare himself) with which Amaral's poetry lingers in a serene conversation, opening the doors of his creation to a crossroads of Traditions that link Anglo-Saxon lyrics with Portuguese lyrics by some modernists (Pessoa, above all, and Mário de Sá-Carneiro) or later voices, such as Jorge de Sena or Mello Breyner Andresen's own Sophia.

With these references, the poetic work of Ana Luísa Amaral is usually assigned to the so-called Portuguese generation of the eighties, which includes a set of names born in the 1950s, some of which have already been translated in Spain: Amadeu Baptista, Isabel de Sá, Jorge de Sousa Braga or the still unpublished in our country Adília Lopes (notice for editors: when will a book by this singular author be produced?).

In all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, it is possible to glimpse the hint of reality filtered through a sieve that approximates a certain new confessionalism, which in Ana Luísa Amaral also dresses in the robes of the intimate transfiguration of the more everyday acts.

What's in a Name

hides, behind a stage in which elements and situations of domestic life come together, a poetry of deep breath and metaphysical breathing, in which any excuse is used to try to start the poem from its assembly with reality.

Thus, Amaral's poetry, in which "the tiny gestures of which life is made" breathe, stands on the edge of the abyss of a question in the first person singular: "I ask: what is in a name?" , from which he weaves a book rooted in various traditions that shows a personal and unmistakable voice in the Portuguese lyrical scene.

Ana Luísa Amaral transcends the reality of any detail (a cooking recipe, the shape of a vegetable or the memory of her family members or lost places) to give herself to the deeply intimate act of writing, in which she always appears, as a lifeline against possible neo-romantic excesses, a distanced and ironic vision of existence, in its own philosophical search (there are many voices that speak of Amaral as a kind of Portuguese Szymborska).

Thanks to this strategy, the poet deconstructs the domestic and affective universe and kneads it with the matter of memory, in a continuous and persistent questioning about the limits of the possibility of naming and the borders of poetic language.

Especially noteworthy in this book is the insistence with which the author places the reader before the very fact of the writing of the poem, as a kind of small natural miracle that tries to explain everything around it.

This unequivocal desire to reflect both on the subject of the poem and on its own nature achieves one of its high points in 'Aleppo, Lesbos, Calais', or, in other words, a shocking poem in which its author delivers a fine and delicate rawness to the issue of refugees in Europe, with which he reaches one of the most exciting points of the book, always without losing sight of the central theme that runs through the volume: “for all this there is no form of verse that is enough for me / because nothing is enough for me of consolation or peace ”.

In these verses we also find the pulse of Ana Luísa Amaral who understands writing as a breath ("poetry is in my life like breathing, I don't know how to think or feel, without poetry," she says in an interview) with an ethical background , in the deep conviction that poetry, if it is poetry, cannot be detached from its own time, as the only way to try to answer the question of what a name is: "Once the name is removed, love will remain, / we will remain me, even in death / still only in myth.

// And even in the myth (listen!), / Our fleeting story / that some will read as inert matter, / will remain forever human.

// And others / will always pick it up, / when their century already lacks it.

// And then, my love, my greatest strength, / we will be to them like the rose.

// Or not, what its perfume: / ungoverned free ”.

'What's in a Name'

Author:

Ana Luísa Amaral

Translation:

Paula Abramo

Publisher:

Sixth Floor, 2020

Format:

Soft cover or pocket.

176 pages

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