Poetry
A Ilha de Próspero
Not translated into English
Rui Knopfli · 1972
Synopsis
An itinerary in poems across the island of Mozambique, which the poet has loved since adolescence. He evokes the fortress, the churches and the minarets, the gravestones and the monuments, and, at the tip of the island, the hidden descendants of Caliban; in “Muipíti”, the name the Macua gave the island before the arrival of the Portuguese, his memories become a meditation on colonisation and memory. Published, it is said, for the four hundredth anniversary of the Lusiads, the book takes the opposite view: to the triumphal epic, it opposes the quiet heroism of the humble.
Context
The book appeared in 1972 under the subtitle “roteiro poético”, with a preface by the historian Alexandre Lobato; it had been conceived as a dialogue between photographs of the island, taken by the author, and his poems. Ten years later, he explained that editorial reasons forced him to give up the images and that he hoped the texts would outlive them. A second edition appeared in Lisbon in 1989, enlarged with a poem of 1959 about the island.
Who it is for
Poems in Portuguese, not translated into French, attentive to stones and places; knowing a little of the island's history and Os Lusíadas helps in reading them.
Prizes and reception
Critics see in it the invention of a poetic mythology of this island and one of the major texts on the meeting of Prospero and Caliban in the poetry of the country.
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