Luis Miguel Nava

Luis Miguel Nava (born December 29, 1957 in Viseu , Portugal , † May 10, 1995 in Brussels , Belgium ) was a Portuguese interpreter and writer. As an author, he was best known as a poet and essayist . He is still considered Portugal's most avant-garde and modern young lyric poet of the 1980s.

Live and act

Nava was born in Viseu, pulled a student to Lisbon , where he Romance studied and from 1981 to 1983 as a lecturer acts. Then he went to Oxford from 1983 to 1986 , where he taught the Portuguese language. From 1986 until his death he was one of the official interpreters at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg .

On May 10, 1995, at the age of 37, Nava was found brutally murdered in his active city of Brussels. Whether his murder is connected with his open homosexuality or his work as an interpreter has not yet been fully clarified. A good friend of Nava's was the poet Gastão Cruz .

Lyricists of the body and man

He was active as a writer since his adolescence . He mainly published poetry and essays. He is often considered the most important young Portuguese poet of the 1980s. Throughout his life he was surrounded by a certain premonition of death, which led him to suspect that he would die relatively young. As a result, he wrote a will as a young man in which he wanted a Luis Nava Foundation to be set up. Many of his poems are driven by a permanent death instinct and the last three volumes are permeated by darkness, chaos and melancholy.

In this form, his work was new for Portugal: he used almost hallucinatory synaesthetics , described the (male) body from the outside and inside in all the most precise details and did not shy away from sexual descriptions. From everyday objects, over the ocean and the sky to nature and landscapes, past, present, future and memory, there was nothing that he did not describe in his poetry, which was unique in Portugal in this vehemence. In his poetry he wanted to connect the whole world, everyone with everyone and everything with everything. It is strongly metaphysical and has often been the point of attack of conservative-reactionary-bourgeois circles. His work has so far only been translated into French.

The Luis Miguel Nava Foundation

In his will, Nava wanted a poetry foundation to be set up after his death, which would on the one hand administer his legacy and estate and on the other hand research poetry on a popular science level and make it tangible for the present. In addition, a magazine for poetry was published and a prize was donated.

Today the foundation's board of directors includes the friend von Nava, the poet Gastão Cruz, as well as the poet Luis Quintais and other poets. The monthly magazine " Relâmpago " (dt .: lightning) often provides detailed and scientifically sound portraits of Portuguese lyricists and poets in easily understandable language. These include classics such as the national poet Camões as well as modern and contemporary authors such as Alexandre O'Neill , António Ramos Rosa or Eugénio de Andrade . The Luis Miguel Nava Prize, which has been advertised since 1998 and has only been awarded every two years since 2007, is endowed with 5000 euros (Prémio Luis-Miguel-Nava) and was awarded to such well-known personalities as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1998), Luis Quintais (2005), Antonio Ramos Rosa (2006) or Pedro Tamen (2007).

Award

• Prémio of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores , 1979.

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Poetry

• Películas, 1979.
• A Inércia da Deserção, 1981.
• Como Alguém Disse, 1982.
• Rebentação, 1984.
• O Céu sob as entranhas, 1989.
• Vulcão, 1994.
• Poesia completa- 1979 to 1994, published in 2002.

Essay writing

• O pão a culpa a escrita, 1982.
• Poesia de Rodrigues Lobo, 1985.
• O essencial sobre Eugenio de Andrade, 1987.
• Anthologie de poesie portugaise- 1960-1990; 1991.
• Ensaios reunidos, 2004, (posthumously).

Web links

• Website of the Relâmpago magazine
• Luís Miguel Nava at the Instituto Camões
• Entry in the Infopédia , the online encyclopedia of the Porto Editora
• Luís Miguel Nava on the Poetry International Rotterdam website