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Ana Luísa Amaral dies, the writer who lived poetry as a necessity

2022-08-06T17:12:47.632Z


Translator, essayist and author of 16 collections of poems, in 2021 she won the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry


The writer Ana Luísa Amaral at her home in Leça da Palmeira, in Matosinhos (Portugal).ÓSCAR CORRAL

There is no better beginning for the obituary of the Portuguese poet Ana Luísa Amaral, who died this Friday in Leça da Palmeira at the age of 66, than one of her verses.

She wrote it in the book

What's in a Name

in tribute to a neighbor who had lost her son in an accident: "And there are some days when I think / how she does to see the sun."

Solidarity was one of the forces that ran through both her life and her work, which has been translated in more than 15 countries.

In 2021 she became the fourth Portuguese-language author (and the seventh woman) to win the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry since its creation.

"I write what I feel, I write because I need to write, as I need to eat or read, an almost physical need," he said in September 2021 in Babelia, in one of the last long interviews he gave before he was diagnosed with cancer.

Amaral was able to see the sun in an onion and the storm in a woman with a shopping cart.

Her poetry, collected in more than 16 books, is crossed by forces that fought between the subtlety of everyday life and the transcendence of the meaning of life.

She wrote verses about the crushing of a mosquito as well as about the seas of Homer, about migrants than about a cooking recipe, about the father's mourning than about biblical scenes.

A poetry of excess that was born from his own way of walking around the world.

"If there is no passion, life is not worth living," he pointed out in that interview, held at his home in Leça da Palmeira.

The writer Ana Luisa Amaral at her home in Matosinhos, on the outskirts of Porto (Portugal)ÓSCAR CORRAL

That existential vehemence was in everything.

When she wanted something, she devoured it.

She read Emily Dickinson and became her translator and one of her great specialists in the American poet.

He finished honoring her the day she named her dog after her.

He discovered Germaine Greer and became a feminist and theorist of feminism (she was in fact one of the pioneers of gender studies in the country from the University of Porto).

The first thing she said in the classrooms was that "feminism can be summed up in one expression: human rights."

Ana Luísa Amaral was born in Lisbon in 1956. She was the only daughter of a businessman who dreamed of playing the piano and a housewife who dreamed of being a businesswoman.

The family moved to Porto when Amaral was nine years old.

The move was not easy.

To resist the loneliness and bullying she suffered, she took refuge in religion and poetry.

For a time she fantasized about becoming a nun and she lived immersed in a world of devotion that included visits to the Fatima sanctuary, daily masses and poems dedicated to God.

Since she wrote her first poem,

Autumn

, at the age of five, she has never stopped doing it.

In high school she turned away from "institutionalized" religion, though she retained a sense of spirituality that runs through her books.

In 1990, when she was already working as a teacher, she published her first work,

Minha Senhora de Quê

, in which she advanced that her poetry was born of urgency: “

Se os versos apressados ​​/ Me nascem semper urgentes

” [If the accelerated verses are always urgent to me].

That book already showed that a voice with a lot to say had arrived in Portuguese literature.

In these three decades she has built one of the most international careers in the country and has become one of the great European writers, who has also cultivated essays, novels and children's literature.

In Spain, where it had not been translated until 2016, it took off with the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry in 2021. That same year, Madrid booksellers chose

What's in a Name

as the best poetry book of 2020.

She was also a passionate translator back and forth between English and Portuguese.

She spread the works of Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, John Updike or the Nobel Prize for Literature Louise Glück in her mother tongue.

Conversely, she translated her compatriot Mário de Sá-Carneiro into English.

For four years she had a radio program,

O som que os versos fazem ao abre

(The sound that verses make when opening), to talk about poetry.

The first thing she had to do with a poem was read it aloud: "A poem is poetry."

The anthology

O olhar diagonal das coisas

(The diagonal look at things) is the last book to be published in Portugal and which was presented by herself in June in Porto, where it was scheduled to receive a tribute at the end of August during the Fair from the book.


Source: elparis

All life articles on 2022-08-06

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