Alberto de Lacerda

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Alberto de Lacerda , actually Carlos Alberto Portugal Correia de Lacerda (born September 20, 1928 in Lourenço Marques , today Maputo , Mozambique ; † August 27, 2007 in London ) was a Portuguese poet, university professor, art collector, art critic, eccentric .

The man, who alternately lived and worked in the USA and Great Britain , was often referred to as "the most important Portuguese poet of the second half of the twentieth century". Descriptions call him the "modern Fernando Pessoa ". He was friends with important figures of the cultural and intellectual life worldwide. Thanks to the translation of his verses into English, he is particularly well known in the Anglophone world.

Live and act

Childhood and youth

Lacerda comes from an old aristocratic family whose ancestors even included kings of Portugal, high cardinals of the Curia and governors-general e.g. B. from Timor . Lacerda was born in Mozambique , which was then a colony of Portugal . His father was a high colonial official. As a child and adolescent, he is said to have devoured books against loneliness, by the hundreds. At the age of thirteen he had his first publication of the poem "Itinerario" in a magazine in Mozambique. A stay in South Africa should have left a lasting impression on the young people. At the age of eighteen he left the colony and went to Lisbon in 1946 , where he began to study French and English philology .

London, Brazil, USA and again London

In 1951 he came to London, where he worked as a radio announcer for the Portuguese-language wave of the BBC . There he met numerous personalities and became part of the London literary scene and avant-garde . His first book, published in 1951, 77 Poemas ( 77 Poems ) was translated into English by the British sinologist Arthur Waley in 1955, published by Allen & Unwin and made known throughout the Empire and the English-speaking world. He got the job at the BBC because of the success of his book. Numerous British critics recognized the work, and magazines and newspapers such as The Encounter , The Times Literary Supplement and The Listener reviewed the work. Admirers were found throughout the kingdom, and word of the poet's fame even spread in the United States. Evelyn Waugh , Sir Alec Guinness , William Walton , Bertrand Russell , Benjamin Britten , Stephen Spender , Dylan Thomas , TS Eliot , Edith Sitwell , David Hockney , Thom Gunn met the young man and poet, many became admirers and friends. He lived in London for about fifty-six years, longer than anywhere else.

For about a year he lived in Brazil (1959 to 1960), where he also met many great minds such as Manuel Bandeira , Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Murilo Mendes .

Then came the call to the USA. From 1967 to 1993 he taught Brazilian, French and Portuguese literature at the universities of Austin (1967 to 1970), New York (1970 to 1972) and Boston (1970 to 1993 until his retirement ). The amazing thing was that he had a degree in philology, but no doctorate and no habilitation . Nevertheless, due to his enormous knowledge and his outstanding, almost lexical, autodidactic education, he had been hired as a visiting professor . After his guest appearance in the USA, where he met poets such as Robert Duncan , Anne Sexton , Rosanna Warren , John Ashbery and Marianne Moore , he returned to London in 1993, where he lived in a simple one-room apartment in the working class district of Battersea , many his neighbors knew nothing of the poet's prominence.

Friendships and short stays at home

After completing his studies, he had only visited his home country Portugal sporadically. One problem was the military dictatorship, which had him arrested for a short time after a stay in 1962, but he was released a few weeks later. In Portugal, too, he could count on a large circle of friends and admirers: Vitorino Nemésio , the painters Paula Rego and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva as well as their husband Arpad Szenes , Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen , Mário Cesariny , David Mourão-Ferreira , Júlio Pomar , Luis Amorim de Sousa , the South African poet living in Portugal Roy Campbell and Almada Negreiros . He was also in contact with Portugal's former President Mario Soares .

He also had a prominent fan in France : Jean Cocteau raved about the eccentric Portuguese and René Char . The only connection to the German-speaking area was between Lacerda and Michael Hamburger , who was in exile in Great Britain and both of them met there. The Mexican Nobel Prize winner and writer Octavio Paz also became a friend of Lacerda, and both met more often. He also met Jorge Guillén .

death

On August 27, 2007, a friend of Lacerda, the critic John McEwan , found the poet unconscious in his apartment. He was still alive, but was already gasping and died a few hours later in a hospital. Lacerda had had a heart attack. He was buried in a cemetery in the London borough of Chelsea . When his death was announced in Portugal, numerous radio and television broadcasts were interrupted. People and artists from all over the world took part in the funeral, many of whom came from Brazil or the USA. When he died, Mario Soares also spoke up. Lacerda was 79 years old.

The lyricist Lacerda

Lacerda published just twelve volumes of poetry in the period from 1951 to 2001 - that is, in around 50 years. But there is still a huge, unedited work waiting to be published, especially poems that were written a few months before his death. So far, their number has been estimated at a good one thousand pieces. In his poetry he processed topics such as painting, music, dance, theater, cinema, but also everyday life. His poem “A Língua Portuguesa” ( The Portuguese Language ), composed between 1961 and 1962 and published in 1984 in the poetry book Oferenda , is still read in schools in Portugal today. As an art critic, he wrote for newspapers such as Diario de Lisboa and Diario de Noticias, as well as for British newspapers such as The Encounterer and The Listener .

He wrote for various well-known magazines in Portugal, such as Cadernos de Poesia , Cadernos de Meio-Dia , Unicorno , Coloquio Letras . He was also co-founder and deputy editor-in-chief (1950 to 1954) of Tavola Redonda magazine .

During an eight-day trip to Venice , he wrote a book that included around 147 sonnets and broke through his other poetry, which was otherwise in free verse.

Many biographical poems have also appeared, for example about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , Pablo Picasso , Martha Graham , Margot Fonteyn , Igor Stravinsky , The Beatles , Jean-Luc Godard . But also about paradise, bullfighting and wine.

The eccentric

Aside from the fact that Lacerda was gay, there were a few things that made him an eccentric. So he didn't let anyone, not even his closest friends, into his apartment. As we have known since his death, this was replete with around a thousand paintings by great contemporary painters, hundreds of books, photographs, letters, records, manuscripts and autographs by Marcel Proust , Federico García Lorca , Stéphane Mallarmé , Pessoa and Walt Whitman , which he collected. In old age he broke off contact with almost all friends, stopped answering letters and lived in a trashed and almost inaccessible apartment in the working class Battersea district. He hadn't written any more poems for a long time, the last ones were taken a few months before his death. He refused to move to a newer, more spacious apartment. Throughout his life he suffered from loneliness, despite the immensely large circle of friends. He had never had a relationship with a man in his life, despite his very open approach to his homosexuality.

He was of the opinion that a poet should always be able to interact with other genres of art, since one learns from one another. He didn't think much of the literary industry or the actual publishing industry. He was of the opinion that amateur literature was true and genuine. It shows the real world and does not force anyone to read or buy certain books in order to be up to date. Lacerda often represented unpopular opinions, which he expressed bluntly and showed no shyness or fear, especially when he heard wrongly. Silence played a prominent role in his work. The affinity for painting and silent film and for poetry suggested a person who did not care about the noise of civilization.

Despite the huge number of works of art that were in his apartment, the fortune could not help in everyday life: He lived on the edge of poverty and had hardly any money. After viewing the apartment after his death, millions came to light.

Friendship and spirit were the most important things in life for him, as he once revealed to the poet Amorim de Sousa. There was a certain intangible melancholy in his life.

Aftermath

So far no schools or streets have been named after him in Portugal, Brazil, the USA or Great Britain. However, it can be assumed that this will be made up for in the next few years. In Germany, Lacerda, unlike his fellow countryman Fernando Pessoa, whom he admires, is completely unknown. Efforts to build a museum for the works of art by the art collector Lacerda have so far failed. An exhibition in New York commemorates him in the Poetry House. A former student has set up a memorial page on the Internet for his professor Lacerda and the man and poet. It is assumed that the epochal legacy will be sorted and sifted over the next few years and that Lacerda reception will only really begin then.

A biography was published in 2010 by the Fundação Gulbenkian under the title The sea that lies beyond my rocks - Alberto Lacerda in London and the US by Assiro e Alvim.

Works (selection)

  • Palacio , 1961, poetry.
  • Exilio , poetry, 1963, poetry.
  • Tauromagia , 1981, poetry.
  • Oferenda , 1984, poetry.
  • Elegias de Londres , 1987, poetry.
  • Meio-Dia 1988, poetry.
  • Sonetos , 1991, poetry.
  • Mecanica Celeste , 1994, poetry.
  • Atrio , 1997, poetry.
  • Horizons , 2001, poetry.

Web links and sources

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira: Elogios da língua portuguesa. In: Máthesis , Volume 15, 2006, pp. 271-273. Retrieved August 17, 2014 (Portuguese).
personal data
SURNAME Lacerda, Alberto de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lacerda, Carlos Alberto Portugal Correia de (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Portuguese poet, university professor, art collector, art critic, eccentric
DATE OF BIRTH September 20, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Lourenço Marques , (now Maputo ), Mozambique
DATE OF DEATH August 27, 2007
Place of death London