Alberto Pimenta

Alberto Pimenta, 2008

Alberto Pimenta (born December 26, 1937 in Porto , Portugal ) is a Portuguese poet , essayist , performer, university professor, philologist , eccentric, translator and Germanist .

Despite his often unconventional poetry , he is considered one of the leading contemporary poets in his country.

He was one of the first in Portugal to hold happenings .

In Germany he taught Portuguese for many years at the University of Heidelberg .

He is also considered one of the most important representatives of Concrete Poetry, Visual Posie and Experimental Poetry and Literature in Portugal.

And in his capacity as an intellectual he is one of Portugal's great social critics.

Life

Alberto Pimenta was born in the port city of Porto. He studied German at the University of Coimbra and came to Germany in 1960. On behalf of the Portuguese government, he worked here as an editor for various publishers. Because of his massive criticism of the Salazar dictatorship, however, he was dismissed as a lecturer in 1963 and hired by the University of Heidelberg as a lecturer in Lusitan Studies and Portuguese language and literature. He held this office until 1977.

After his return to Portugal - the country had become democratic through the bloodless Carnation Revolution in 1974 - he taught social sciences and anthropology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (the new University of Lisbon) until his retirement .

In the 1987 film documentary Im Labyrinth des Ich-Fernando Pessoa and Portugal , he was one of the three major celebrities, alongside João Gaspar Simões and Yvette Centeno . In the documentary he reads from books of poetry by Fernando Pessoa and speaks fluent German in a café about Pessoa and his work. Perhaps that was the only TV appearance of the Portuguese on German television.

Alberto Pimenta lives in Lisbon .

The experimentalist

The literature of Pimenta, but above all his poetry, is characterized by concretism and visualism in the posie. He sees himself as a major surrealist, satirist, and experimentalist of modern Portuguese literature. He rejected conformity and conformity , capitalism, moralism and kitsch or fought them in his work. He held his first happening as a performer in 1977 at the Lisbon Zoo. He wants to provoke with his literature. His best-known book, translated into other languages - but not into German - is called Discurso sobre o filho-da-puta (translation: Discussion about the son of a bitch ), from 1977. Botho Strauss and parts of Thomas Bernhard's work were translated by him translated into Portuguese.

That he also became an advocate of eroticism in Portugal is shown by the experimental volume he edited together with Miguel Vale de Almeida and Rui Simoes : Pornex-Textos Teoreticos e documentais de pornografia experimental portugues , 1984. The book that looks a lot in Portugal aroused, was one of the first attempts to anchor pornographic texts in Portuguese literature.

His volume of poetry Marthiya de Abdel Hamid segundo Alberto Pimenta , 2005, which can be seen as very sharp criticism of the invasion of American troops in Iraq and the attitude of the Portuguese government to it , also caused a sensation in Portugal .

Some of the poet's texts were first published in German in 1992 by Edition Splitter in Vienna, under the title Verdichten . These are the only translations so far.

Work (selection)

1970: O labirintodonte, essays
1971: Os lentes e os contractes, essays
1973: Corpos Estranhas, essays
1973: Ascensao de dez gostos a boca, poetry
1977: Discusao sobre a filho-da-puta, essays
1978: O silencio dos poetas (The Silence of the Poets), study of the silence in political literature around the world
1984: Pornex-Textos teoreticos e documetais de pornografia experimental portuguesa, 1984, studies and essays as well as erotic texts
2000: Ode pos-moderna, poetry
2001: Grande colecao de mineiro 2001-2002, poetry
2002: Tijoleira, poetry
2005: Marthirya de Abdel Hamid segundo Alberto Pimenta, poetry
2006: Initiacao de Ovidio, poetry
2007: Indulgencia plenaria, poetry
2007: Planta rubra, poetry
2008: Prodigioso Acanto, poetry

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Pimenta, Alberto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Portuguese lyric poet
DATE OF BIRTH	December 26, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH	Porto , Portugal