Jorge de Sena

Jorge de Sena (born November 2, 1919 in Lisbon , † June 4, 1978 in Santa Barbara ) was a Portuguese writer, literary scholar and translator. He is considered to be one of the most famous representatives of Portuguese surrealism .

Life

Jorge de Sena was born on November 2, 1919 in Lisbon. He began his school career at the Escola Vasco da Gama, after which he moved to the Liceu Luís de Camões. He later studied engineering at the Faculdade das Ciências in Lisbon, but finished the course in 1944 at the University of Porto . From 1946 he worked as a civil engineer, among other things, in the Portuguese road authority.

As an army officer, during the Salazar regime, he initially took part in a signature campaign for free elections ; In 1959, Sena took part in a later failed military coup. Because of this, Jorge de Sena left Portugal and went into voluntary exile in Brazil, where he worked on the opposition newspaper Portugal Democrático . In Brazil, de Sena embarked on an academic career and lectured as a professor of literary theory at the University of Assis , near São Paulo. In 1961 he taught Portuguese literature at the University of Araraquara, also not far from São Paulo . He also received his doctorate in Brazil with a thesis on the Portuguese national poet Luís de Camões .

Concerned about the political situation in Brazil, Jorge de Sena immigrated to the United States in 1965 to first teach at the University of Wisconsin in Madison . Five years later he took over the chairmanship of the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of California in Santa Barbara , which he held until 1978. In 1968 he regularly visited various European countries and in 1977 he received the Grand International Poetry Prize Etna-Taormina in Italy . A year later, on June 4, 1978, he died in Santa Barbara .

Posthumously he received the Grand Cross of the Ordem de Sant'iago for his services to the Portuguese people from the Portuguese Presidency , as well as the Order of Infante D. Henrique . In 1980 the University of Santa Barbara inaugurated the Jorge de Sena Center for Portuguese Studies in memory of the former professor at the teaching facility .

On September 11, 2009, Jorge de Sena's body was returned to Lisbon and buried in the Cemitério dos Prazeres cemetery.

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Poetry

Jorge de Sena's literary oeuvre comprises a total of eighteen volumes of poetry. He published his first poems in 1939. A year later he began to work on the literary magazine Cadernos de Poesia , which in 1942 supported the publication of his first volume of poetry. In the early fifties, Sena spoke here for ideological independence and tried to mediate between a "pure" and a "social" seal in order to arisen during the Second World War conflict between the Presença - writers and neorealists to mend.

He pleaded for a "poetry of witness", a poetry that is aware of its educational mission and that writes the truthfulness of the witness on the flag. It was precisely this principle that de Sena developed further in the sixties into the “poetry of opportunity”. In the foreword to Poesia 1 , Sena stated that poetry "has less of an obligation to understand the world than to change it". In doing so, he transferred the theses about Feuerbach written by Karl Marx to poetry and made them responsible.

prose

In addition to various smaller stories, de Sena left the posthumously published novel Sinais de Fogo . The work, which has clear autobiographical traits, takes place in the Portuguese port city of Figueira da Foz in the summer of 1936. The oppressive political climate of Portugal and a Spanish civil war that can be felt in the air coincide with the adolescence of the main character Jorge. At the same time he throws himself into the first great love, which questions his promiscuity, and gets involved in an underground campaign in support of the Spanish Republic. The protagonist is plunged into a deep crisis, which he finally overcomes by writing.

additional

Sena wrote various plays, including O Indesejado (António Rei) . The tragedy in four acts takes up the disappearance of the Portuguese King Sebastião I , whose hoped-for return was manifested in the faith of Sebastianism. In addition, Sena also wrote essays, wrote reviews and translated well-known poems from world literature into Portuguese. In 1995 the work by Luís Filipe Rocha was adapted as a feature film.

List of works

poetry

• Perseguição (1942)
• Coroa da Terra (1946)
• Pedra Filosofal (1950)
• As Evidências (1955)
• Fidelidade (1958, republished in 1968)
• Metamorfoses (1963)
• Arte de Música (1968)
• Peregrinatio ad Loca Infecta (1969)
• Exorcismos (1972)
• Conheço o Sal e Outros Poemas (1974)
• Sobre esta Praia (1977)
• Poesia I (1977)
• Poesia II (1978)
• Poesia III (1978)
• Visão Perpétua (1982, posthumous)
• Dedicácias (1999, posthumous)

prose

• Andanças do Demónio (1960)
• Novas Andanças do Demónio (1966)
• Os Grão-Capitães (1976)
• O Físico Prodigioso (1977)
• Sinais de Fogo (1979, posthumous)
• Génesis (1983, posthumous)

drama

• O Indesejado (1951)
• Ulisseia Adúltera (1952)
• O Banquete de Dionísos (1969)
• Epimeteu ou o Homem Que Pensava Depois (1971)

Essays

• Da Poesia Portuguesa (1959)
• O Poeta é about Fingidor (1961)
• O Reino da Estupidez (1961)
• Uma Canção de Camões (1966)
• Os Sonetos de Camões eo Soneto Quinhentista Peninsular (1969)
• A Estrutura de Os Lusíadas e Outros Estudos Camonianos e de Poesia Peninsular do Século XVI (1970)
• Maquiavel e Outros Estudos (1973)
• Dialécticas Aplicadas da Literatura (1978)
• Fernando Pessoa & Cia. Heterónima (1982, posthumous)

literature

• George Monteiro: Minotaur, Parrot, and the SS Man: Essays on Jorge de Sena. University of Massachusetts Press, Boston 2020, ISBN 978-1-933227-97-9 .
• Luís Adriano Carlos: Jorge de Sena, the word alchemist , in: Portuguese literature , edited by Henry Thorau, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1997
• Jorge Fazenda Lourenço: O Essencial sobre Jorge de Sena , Imprensa Nacional - Casa da Moeda, Lisbon, 1987
• Fátima Freitas Morna: Poesia de Jorge de Sena , Editorial Communicação, Lisbon, 1985

Web links

• Information, poems, bibliography by and about Jorge de Sena at astormentas.com (Portuguese)
• Jorge de Sena at Suhrkamp
• Literature by and about Jorge de Sena in the catalog of the German National Library