Cesario Verde

Cesario Verde

José Joaquim Cesário Verde (born February 25, 1855 in Lisbon , Portugal , † July 18, 1886 in Lisbon) was a Portuguese poet . He inspired Fernando Pessoa and is considered one of the most important young poets in Portugal in the second half of the 19th century.

Life

Verde came from a middle-class background. He studied philology . His father had an export business for iron goods, in which the eldest son of the family had a modest living as a trade correspondent until his death; the family owned a country estate in Linda-a-Pastora , 15 km from Lisbon. He published his first poem at the age of 18 in the feature section of a newspaper.

The poet died of tuberculosis on July 18, 1886 at the age of 31 . Most of the poems had appeared in scattered Lisbon and Portuguese newspapers and literary journals. It was not until 1887 that his best friend brought out a volume with around twenty verses - half of the forty or so poems by Verde known to date. The author remained completely unknown during his lifetime . In 1919 a fire destroyed his original manuscripts .

City poet

As a reader of Charles Baudelaire , who also strongly influenced him, Verde dealt primarily with life in the big city, especially in Lisbon and Porto , and the question of the first, delicate industrial developments in Portugal during his time. He is considered a forerunner of Portuguese literary modernismo. Verde was also a stroller in Lisbon, where he walked the streets at night and in the melancholy of the dark devised or even wrote his verses. But the dark sides of the city of Lisbon, its filth, its noise, its misery, interested him and were portrayed by him.

Posthumous honors

Alongside Antero de Quental , Verde is considered the most important poet of the Portuguese language in the 19th century. His young and short life fascinated generations of epigones to whom he was a role model as a person and poet, especially Fernando Pessoa, who often referred to him expressly. His most famous poem is O sentimento dum ocidental ( The feeling of a Westerner ), which appeared in a newspaper in 1880, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the death of Camões . The state honored him by naming a street in Lisbon, his verses were immortalized on the wall of a metro station, postage stamps with his likeness were printed, extensive literary research was also carried out, which resulted in the 1964 edition of his complete oeuvre, a bust stands in a park and reminds of the poet. His grave was discovered in a Lisbon cemetery in the mid-1990s and has been cared for ever since. His verses have also been translated into Spanish and Italian.

Works

• O livro de Cesario Verde , edited by Manuel Jose de Silva Pinto, 1887, (posthumous).
• Obra completa de Cesario Verde , edited by Joel Serrão , 1964.

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• Kindler's new literary dictionary - major works of Portuguese and Spanish literature, p. 691ff.
• Literature by and about Cesário Verde in the catalog of the German National Library
• www.poetryinternationalweb.net/piu/site/poet/item/14821
• www.personal-u.net.com/-luso/cesario.htm