Poetry
Book of Sorrows
Livro de Mágoas
Florbela Espanca · 1919
Synopsis
Thirty-two sonnets of pain, sorrow and saudade. The collection presents itself as a bible of the sad, written for those who suffer and who will read it. The voice dreams of being someone in this world and wakes up being nothing, hears sobbing in the night, admits never knowing who it is or what it carries, and passes by, pale and sad, indifferent to what the world says of it.
Context
The collection was originally to be called Premiers Pas. Its author had sent the first poems to the critic Raul Proença in July 1916, had reworked and completed them on his advice, and it was he who had the book published in Lisbon in June 1919, at the Tipografia Maurício. The print run was two hundred copies, soon sold out. The volume opens with two epigraphs, one from Eugénio de Castro, the other from Verlaine, and is dedicated to the author's father and brother. Like all her sonnets published in her lifetime, the poems in it were often revised.
Who it is for
A collection of sonnets in Portuguese, translated into French in an anthology; the tone, painful and exalted, is that of fin-de-siècle decadentism.
Prizes and reception
First book by one of the major women poets of the language, fully recognised mainly after her death.
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