He is a poet, novelist, essayist, scholar, and above all a great defender of his language, Portuguese. His name? Vasco Graça Moura.
no one dies of love, I once
walked around there, I was almost the same,
was a time of moods and shakes,
of syncopated and serious depression, my dear,
but ultimately I did not die, you see, oh, no,
spent time listening to God and jazz music,
I emaciated, but just got away, oh yes,
ah, yes, go into the night, my dear.
we just blow and don't get it right, there is a tightening
of the heart, a tension in the clarinet and
so unhappy was what I felt
but really I never had the way, oh no,
I never had a penchant for kamikaze,
it's all a matter of swing, swing, my dear,
find out the time leave, the time to go, of course, but knowing,
and I do not regret, my dear, oh no, oh yeah.
I'm not really an avid reader of poetry, but there are some authors who I open a big exception, Vasco Graca Moura is one of those names. His writing has a great poetic lyrism, we see in each stanza, the domain that he successfully has on a tongue that loves and worships. It's not that kind of poet who wastes the Portuguese language on rhymes so predictable and needlessly boring. On the contrary, he surprises us in each poem. He sings on this verses life. Even between the lines we imagine the episodes of the daily account of others, and guess his thought. It is a writer who deserves to be enshrined in the pantheon of the monsters of Portuguese literature. It is also one of his greatest champions. It is our Don Quixote fighting the windmills that insist on tampering with the mother language he respects, as an expression of culture, its greatest treasure. In this anthology of the sixty years is evident the maturing that the poet has experience and the development of a writing that has grown over the decades. Happy reading!
