Poetry
Amor
Not translated into English
Mário António · 1960
Synopsis
Poems about love: its construction, memory, waiting, separation and reunion, the gap between dream and lived life. The poet says he did not invoke the dream in order to love and that he wants to make the moment a whole life; the setting is that of the tropics, acacias in flower, cicadas, ears of maize, sorghum and city buses, and Kimbundu surfaces even in the title of one of the poems.
Context
The collection appears in Lisbon in 1960, the first title in the series Autores Ultramarinos of the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, printed by Minerva, with a cover by Henrique Abranches, painter and novelist. The poems, dated from 1954 to 1957, are arranged in six groups, including a sonnet, “A construção do amor”, “Sob as acácias floridas”, in four parts, and “O henda i xala”, whose title is in Kimbundu.
Who it is for
Poems in Portuguese, sprinkled with words from Angolan speech; no French or English translation exists.
Prizes and reception
Counted among its author's principal collections; its 2014 reissue, printed in forty-five thousand copies and distributed with a newspaper, brought it back to a wide readership.
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