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Ana Luísa Amaral: "My poetry is a vehicle of resistance against barbarism"

2021-09-18T14:14:21.967Z


The Portuguese author is one of the great voices in current European literature. Writing, which now gives him joys as the last Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry, was also one of his havens during the days of bullying in childhood. In his house in Leça da Palmeira he reviews his life and explains the synthesis between transcendence and everyday life that makes it unmistakable


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

Ana Luísa Amaral (Lisbon, 65 years old) reads her verses with a voice that comes from the center of the Earth. He has a second-hand cell phone and a dog named

Emily Dickinson

. She is addicted to nicotine gum, as she was previously addicted to tobacco. You can find poetry in an onion, a seedy London picnic, or the "nameless" that ply the Mediterranean. One day in Paris, an insect landed on his notebook. The writer crushed him without thinking. And as soon as he thought, he said to himself: "I have killed a mosquito." It became the first verse of

Killing is easy

, one of the poems from the book

What's in a Name

(Sixth Floor, translation by Paula Abramo), where she also pays tribute to the neighbor who lost her son in an accident: “And there are some days when I think / how she does to see the sun”. Thanks to those verses that are born "always urgent", talk about the fear of flying or the needles of the pines, Amaral became the fourth Portuguese-language author (and the seventh woman) to win the Reina Sofía Prize for Poetry in May. Ibero-American since it was created 30 years ago.

“I write what I feel, I write because I need to write, how I need to eat or read, an almost physical need,” Amaral tells one morning in September, shortly before traveling to the Madrid Book Fair, during a conversation that goes from Spanish to the Portuguese, and vice versa, at his home in Leça da Palmeira, the same town on the north coast of Portugal where the architect Álvaro Siza designed his Piscinas das Marés (Tides). In 2006 these pools became a national monument, but they had been inaugurated in 1966, the year that Ana Luísa Amaral settled in Leça da Palmeira with her parents, a businessman frustrated for not being a pianist and a housewife frustrated for not being a pianist. businesswoman. He was nine years old and leaving Sintra and Lisbon behind. He was dying of nostalgia and loneliness. “I woke up with my pillow full of tears, I had so many saudades.I hated the north ”, he evokes.

The writer Ana Luísa Amaral.ÓSCAR CORRAL

The longing skyrocketed due to the bullying he endured for six years.

Her companions came to adapt a popular game and turned it into “Mata a la lisboeta”.

He had no friends, no brothers.

She protected herself with what she had at hand: poetry (her mother still has her first poem,

Autumn

, written at the age of five) and religion.

“The Spanish nuns at school helped me a lot because I felt that they were also foreigners like me.

They thought Franco was a hero and the Republicans were horrible, but at that time the nuns and religion was the refuge I had.

I never told at home what happened to me at school because I was afraid of what might happen ”.

The Amaral girl fantasized about habits. "I was almost almost on the point of entering the convent, to my mother's horror," he recalls. Visits to the sanctuary of Fatima, daily masses and poems to God. “Everything was part of a package tinged by fantasy and lyricism. I saw an Ingrid Bergman movie,

The Bells of Saint Mary

(1945), and it seemed extraordinary to me to become a nun ”, she recalls.

Religion disappeared when philosophy entered the scene in high school.

"I am spiritual, I don't know if I believe or not, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, but I don't believe in institutionalized religion."

Poetry remained, a transgressive and transparent voice, capable of connecting the trivial with the classical and of removing stereotypes and margins.

Ulysses and chestnuts.

Ariadna's yarn and coat shops.

Pessoa and the death of the father.

The vindication of the marginalized by the canon as he does in

Agora

, where he writes about what was never written from biblical paintings.

The poet, in 1969.

He makes a stop to read one of those texts,

The Adulterous Woman

, and concludes: “When it is said that there is no need for feminism, as if there were no domestic violence or different salaries for women! I would like not to have to worry about those things and dedicate myself only to abstract poetry, but poetry is not abstract, art is not abstract. It is made by humans, it belongs to the world, and it is contaminated by everything there is: kindness, generosity, and also cruelty and barbarism. I have an obligation in some way, I do not mean to make a committed poetry, but it is natural that my poetry can be a vehicle of resistance against barbarism. I believe in that. Poetry moves us and moves us, touches us and can make us move and protest. For some reason, revolutions have songs of protest and poets are prisoners of dictatorships ”.

The writer recalls the grayness of the Oliveira Salazar and Marcelo Caetano regime, which lasted 48 years. As Western societies plunged into struggles for political and civic rights, Salazar boasted that Portugal was still "proudly alone." “It was a very backward country, with a very high level of illiteracy. I think that the Franco regime may have been more openly violent, ours was more underground. It was a mean way of organizing the world, there was a common expression, “it seems wrong”, for everything. If you were a communist, they would imprison you, but the most terrible thing was this form of ideological control that came through things as simple as the arithmetic exercises that we studied ”.

Now Amaral, who supports the Bloco de Esquerda, attends with fear of the global advance of ideological extremism, which she identifies with unapologetic neoliberalism, religious fanaticism and the extreme right. “In Portugal I am afraid that CDS [Christian Democrat right] and PSD [center right] will join forces and rule with Chega [far right]. There was a time when I thought that the conquests were irreversible, today unfortunately I don't think so, and this is very sad ”. And he adds: “What do parties like Chega or Vox have to offer society that is not hate? We have a neoliberalism where money only generates money and extremism where hatred only generates hatred ”.

The interview takes place a day before the poet flies to Berlin, her first trip since the coronavirus broke out in 2020 and mobility was halted. This fall he will visit Spain four times (Madrid, Salamanca, Pontevedra and Cartagena), where interest in his work has skyrocketed after the Reina Sofía award. Of the 16 books that he has published since it was released in 1990 with

Minha Senhora de Quê

, only

Oscuro

(Olifante, 2016) and

What's in a Name

have been translated

, chosen by Madrid booksellers as the best collection of poems of 2020. His new title ,

World

, will be released this spring with Sixth Floor. Nor can you find Spanish versions of her children's books or essays in which she addresses pressing issues such as the struggle between feminist orthodoxy and

queer

theories.

who reject categorization by gender and sexual orientation. When asked which side he is on, he turns to Einstein's answer to the question of whether he hated Germans. “He said he never hated in the plural. My position is that both are necessary. In Afghanistan, right now, you need a 70s feminism that speaks to the most basic rights of women. We have to think about localization policies, for example on the issue of prostitution that divides feminism. I cannot reflect on Amsterdam in the same way as on Thailand, where a six-year-old girl is sold by her family to an old man. It is a women's right when it is a right, but it is a form of oppression when it is a form of oppression. I think feminism does not threaten

queer

theory

, which tries to give a voice to those who had no voice and which is necessary in a society where women already have rights.

Therefore, feminism and

queer

theory

complement each other.

I don't see anything antagonistic, ”reflects Amaral, who was a pioneer of feminist studies in Portugal from the University of Porto and as a researcher at the Margarida Losa Institute of Comparative Literature.

ÓSCAR CORRAL

The writer moves at ease on the periphery, intellectual or geographical, despite the price. He is one of the most international Portuguese authors (translated in 14 countries) and, nevertheless, it is not easy to find his works in the bookstores of Lisbon due to the lack of reissues. When he won the Reina Sofía Prize, the minimal media coverage he initially received in Portugal was so striking that Isabel Pires de Lima, former Minister of Culture and professor of Portuguese Literature, wrote

an outraged article against that silence

in the newspaper

Público

. "A silence that I have difficulty in identifying if it is dictated by ignorance, contempt, envy or discrimination," he reproached.

"I don't live in Lisbon and that changes everything," says the poet. “Two years ago I sold a small apartment that I had next to the Campo de Ourique market. I have great friends, but I'm not from Lisbon and… I'm not from Porto either. I always felt between two rivers ”. That border identity, straddling two worlds, inspired the book

Entre Dois Rios e Outras Noites

, published in 2007 and marked by the loss of his father.

Poetry of excess.

The book that will be released this year in the United Kingdom about her work puts that quality first

: The Most Perfect Excess: The Works of Ana Luísa Amaral.

She never does things by halves.

He discovered Emily Dickinson and became one of her great specialists.

She read

The Eunuch Woman

, by Germaine Greer, and worked hard to promote feminist studies in Portugal.

He translates the poets he loves.

Once a week he spreads his adoration of poetry on Portuguese public radio and sometimes in the theater.

"If there is no passion," he proclaims, "life is not worth it."

Amaral in four acts

Erudition and broken mass. Ana Luísa Amaral cooks and writes verses about it ("Then put it in a round mold, / which, as in the Kabbalah, circles / have a fascinating symbolism. / And, in maternal protection, reserve", from the poem 'Suggestion for a chicken tart (or, as it was said in other times, a chicken tart). 'He has also studied the classics, which permeate his books (“Homer's seas have ceased / to bring, slender, his ships”, in' Mediterranean '). This overlap between erudition and ordinary life is, together with ethical commitment, a constant that can be explored in 16 collections of poems present in fifteen countries. In Spanish there is only a small trace of his creativity since 2016, when Olifante published 'Dark.' In 2020, 'What's in a Name' came out, on the Sixth Floor, which will now be published by 'Mundo'almost on par with the Portuguese market. The Reina Sofía Prize has aroused sudden editorial interest in the author, now courted by Spanish labels that have ignored her for years.



Poetry on the airwaves. Four years of promoting poetry on public radio says a lot about an author and a country. Since January 2017, Ana Luísa Amaral has been recording every week with the journalist Luís Caetano the program 'O som que os versos fazem ao abre (The sound that the verses make when opening)', on Antena 2, in which they scrutinize a poem. They have a cross-border vocation. They speak the same about Amanda Gorman and Percy B. Shelley, Nobel laureates like Wislawa Szymborska and singers like Vinícius de Moraes. And they have recited in Spanish, among others, Nicanor Parra, Vicente Aleixandre, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Federico García Lorca and Juan Gelman. 214 programs already endorse them. The last one: 'Não te amo, quero-te', by Almeida Garrett.



Round-trip translations. Ana Luísa Amaral was one of the few people on the Iberian Peninsula who was able to celebrate Louise Glück's 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature almost as her own. To date, he has translated six books into Portuguese. Amaral translates with the vehemence that he imprints on everything he does. “I love translating because I love words. I don't know how to do things by halves ”. A specialist in Anglo-Saxon poetry, he has translated Emily Dickinson, John Updike, Margaret Atwood and William Shakespeare, among others, into his language. And, going the other way, he has translated compatriots like Mário de Sá-Carneiro into English.



Feminism and stories. Emily Dickinson and feminism entered the life of Ana Luísa Amaral almost on par. He has devoted a good part of his academic research to both. She is a pioneer in 'queer' theories and gender studies, which she introduced at the University of Porto amid skeptical ridicule and which ended up being successful postgraduate degrees. "The first thing I said was that feminism can be summed up in one expression: human rights." His reflections have led to essays such as 'Arder a Palabra e Outros Incendios'. Together with Ana Gabriela Macedo, she published the 'Dictionary of Feminist Criticism' (2004), nonexistent in Portuguese until then. Among the thirty works by Amaral are also novels, plays and children's books that have been recommended in the National Reading Plan of Portugal.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-09-18

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