1. “E-Treasure: my
lovely Europe”
3nd Transnational Project Meeting
2st Learning/teaching/training
Activities Meeting
Balvi, Latvia
23th to 27th April 2018
2. Luis de Camões
Born: in the mid-1520s (the exact year is unclear)
Died: June 10, 1580
Life: His life was a bit of a mystery – with parts reading like an epic drama.
Work:
Camões is Portugal’s greatest national poet, author of the epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572), which describes Vasco da
Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India.
The title Os Lusíadas means “The Portuguese” and is derived from the ancient Roman name for Portugal, Lusitania.
This work is about the glorious deeds of the Portuguese and their victories over the enemies of Christianity. Victories not
only over their fellowman, but also over the forces of nature, with the help of the gods of classical mythology.
Camões´ writing has been compared to Shakespeare and Homer.
3. Canto I
As armas e os barões assinalados,
Que da ocidental praia Lusitana,
Por mares nunca de antes navegados,
Passaram ainda além da Taprobana,
Em perigos e guerras esforçados,
Mais do que prometia a força humana,
E entre gente remota edificaram
Novo Reino, que tanto sublimaram.
in Os Lusíadas
4. Camilo Castelo Branco
Born: March 16, 1825
Died: June 1, 1890
Life/ Work:
Born illegitimately into a family believed to have had a hereditary tendency to insanity, Camilo was brought up by strict
relatives. He studied at Porto, first medicine and later for the priesthood, but eventually abandoned these professions for a
literary career.
He was a novelist whose most famous books were gothic tales such as Mysterios de Lisboa (1854) and O Livro Negro do
Padre Diniz (1855).
Living as intensely as he wrote, he engaged in a series of love affairs, culminating in his elopement with Ana Plácido, the
wife of a businessman.
5. Camilo Castelo Branco
The two lovers were imprisoned for adultery, during which time Camilo wrote, in two weeks, his
best-known work, Amor de Perdição (1862), the story of two lovers who fought against family
opposition and that eventually led the hero to crime and exile.
In 1864, after his release from prison, Castelo Branco settled with Ana in V.N. Famalicão, where he supported himself by
writing verse of indifferent quality, plays, works of erudition, and other polemical writings.
Due to his son’s insanity and his own ill health and impending blindness, he committed suicide in 1890.
6. Agustina Bessa Luís
Born: October 15, 1922
Died: --
Life/work:
Besides being a writer, she was the director of the daily newspaper O Primeiro de Janeiro
and the director of Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, a national theatre company.
Agustina was a novelist and short-story writer whose fiction diverged from the predominantly neorealistic regionalism of mid-
20th-century Portuguese literature to incorporate elements of surrealism.
The best-known of her novels is A Sibila (1954), in which the boundary between physical, psychological, and ironic reality is
tenuous and the characters gain an almost mythic quality.
In Agustina Bessa Luís’s fiction, notions of time and space become vague, dimming the sense of a logical order of events.
In 2004 , she received Prémio Camões, the most prestigious prize for literature in Portugal. In addition, several of her works
were adapted to the cinema by Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.
7. José Maria de Eça de Queirós
Born: November 25, 1845
Died: August 16, 1900
Life:
José Maria de Eça de Queirós served as a consul in Havana, Newcastle, Bristol, and in Paris.
He graduated in law, in 1866, from the University of Coimbra and then settled in Lisbon.
There his father helped the young man make a start in the legal profession. However, Eça de Queirós’ real interest was
literature, and soon his short stories - ironic, fantastic, macabre, and often shocking - on a wide variety of subjects began to
appear in Gazeta de Portugal.
8. José Maria de Eça de Queirós
Work:
Eça is considered to be one of the greatest Portuguese novelists, and he was committed
to social reform and introduced naturalism and realism to Portuguese literature.
By 1871, Eça had become closely associated with a group of rebellious Portuguese intellectuals
committed to social and artistic reform known as the Generation of 70s.
During this time he wrote the novels for which he is best remembered, attempting to bring social reform in Portugal through
literature by exposing what he considered to be the evils and the absurdities of the traditional conservative social order.
Caustic satire characterizes the novel that is generally considered Eça´s masterpiece, Os Maias (1888), a novel about the
degeneration of a traditional family whose last offspring are symbols of the decadence of Portuguese society.
9. Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
Born: June 13, 1888
Died: November 30, 1935
Life:
His father died when Pessoa was five years old, and the family moved with his mother’s new husband, a consul, to Durban,
South Africa, where Pessoa attended an English school.
With the hope of becoming a great poet in that language, Pessoa wrote his early verse in English.
In 1905, Pessoa returned to Portugal permanently. He studied briefly at the University of Lisbon, and began to publish
criticism, prose, and poetry while working as a commercial translator.
Pessoa died in Lisbon in 1935, and only after his death did his work gain widespread publication and acclaim.
10. Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
Work:
Fernando Pessoa is one of the greatest Portuguese poets, whose Modernist
work gave Portuguese literature European significance.
In 1914, the year his first poem was published, Pessoa found his three main literary personas, or heteronyms, as he called
them, which he would return to throughout his career: Alberto Caeiro, a rural, uneducated poet of great ideas who wrote in
free verse; Ricardo Reis, a physician who composed formal odes influenced by Horace; and Álvaro de Campos, an
adventurous London-based naval engineer influenced by poet Walt Whitman and the Italian Futurists.
In the Western Canon, critic Harold Bloom included Pessoa as one of just 26 writers responsible for establishing the
parameters of western literature.
11. Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
Born: November 6, 1919
Died: July 2, 2004
Life: Sophia was born in Porto to a wealthy aristocratic family. She received a strict Catholic upbringing,
and as a student, she was actively involved in Catholic movements. Politically, she defended constitutional monarchy and
openly criticized Salazar's dictatorship.
Work: Sophia was a poet and writer. She won acclaim as a storyteller and as a writer of children's books. She also
published several poetry books and anthologies. In 1999, she became the first woman to receive the highest Portuguese
award for poetry, Prémio Camões. She was also awarded many others national and international prizes.
"Poetry," she explained, "is my understanding of the universe, my way of relating to things, my participation in reality, my
encounter with voices and images.”
Besides her work as a writer, she translated Dante and Shakespeare into Portuguese, and her poetry has also been
translated into many other languages.
12. José Saramago
Born: November 16, 1922
Died: June 18, 2010
Life:
The son of rural labourers, Saramago grew up in great poverty in Lisbon.
After holding a series of jobs as mechanic and metalworker, Saramago began working in a Lisbon publishing firm and
eventually became a journalist and translator.
He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969, published several volumes of poems, and served as editor of a
newspaper.
13. José Saramago
Work:
He was the first Portuguese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.
His books often offer sharp criticisms on society and religion. Ensaio sobre a Cegueira
is one of Saramago’s most popular books, where the author tackles the themes of the
human condition and human values.
Saramago also wrote poetry, plays, and several volumes of essays and short stories, as well
as autobiographical works.
Saramago’s practice of setting parables against realistic historical backgrounds in order to comment ironically on human
nature is exemplified in many of his novels like in A jangada de pedra (1986), in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from
Europe and becomes an island.
14. Florbela Espanca
Born: December 08, 1894
Died: December 08, 1930
Life/Work:
Florbela Espanca was a poet and one of the first defenders of the feminist movement in Portugal.
She had a tumultuous and eventful life that shaped her erotic and feminine writings.
After graduating with a literature degree in 1917, she became the first woman to enrol at the law school at the University of
Lisbon. The works published by Florbela were greatly influenced by all the tragic events in her life (miscarriages, divorce,
psychological illness, attempted suicides).
Having been diagnosed with a pulmonary edema, Florbela died on December 8, 1930, on her 36th birthday.
(To listen to the poem Ser poeta, sang by Luís Represas go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJaNP_jzHRk)
