Poetry
Suspiros poéticos e saudades
Not translated into English
Gonçalves de Magalhães · 1836
Opening lines
Quando da noite o véo caliginoso
Do mundo me separa,
E da terra os limites encobrindo,
Vagar deixa minha alma no infinito,
Como um subtil vapor no aéreo espaço;
When the murky veil of night
Parts me from the world,
And, hiding the bounds of the earth,
Lets my soul wander in the infinite,
Like a subtle vapour in the airy space;
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from pt.wikisource.org
Synopsis
The collection opens with a preface dated from Paris, July 1836, in which the poet says he is abandoning neoclassicism, and then with an invocation to the angel of poetry. Written for the most part in Europe, the pieces blend religion, nature and melancholy with the stages of a journey: the Jura mountains, Rome and its Colosseum, Tasso's prison at Ferrara, Paris. Others tell of the sighs of the distant homeland or exalt heroes, such as Napoleon at Waterloo.
Context
The book appeared in 1836; the Bibliothèque nationale de France holds the edition in the name of the bookseller J. P. da Veiga, of Rio de Janeiro. The same year, its author founded the journal Niterói with two friends. Literary history regards the collection as the inaugural work of Romanticism in Brazil and its preface as the movement's manifesto; the journal Cerrados notes the price it pays for spontaneity, to the point of a certain prosaicism. A second edition, corrected and enlarged, appeared in Paris in 1859.
Who it is for
A collection in Portuguese, with no French translation; the brief preface says what the book sets out to do and reads as well as the poems.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by Brazilian literary history as the birth certificate of romanticism and personal lyricism in that country.
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