Jose Viale Moutinho is a personality larger than life, even in size. He is always attentive to the Portuguese world that surrounds him and that's what he writes about, collecting legends, tales and popular riddles. He is also a poet, novelist and translator of several literary works that always forgets because he has much to think in his restless mind.
In recent years you published several stories and legends of the culture of Madeira, why you felt the need to do it now?
Jose Viale Moutinho: It was not suddenly. For many years was one of the co-founders of the Portuguese society of anthropology and ethnography of Porto, it was an institution that was founded in 1927. Just long after the 25th of April, was rebuilt it in the 80s, because the institution because was in the hands of Professor Santos Junior and he made of that space his home, we called a general meeting and presented a different list with Victor Oliveira Jorge, an archaeologist and he was elected president. I was the general secretary of that organization, but even before that time I had already made other collections in 1978 a book about islands and novels of Madera, I have a songbook of the Portuguese people with the title "land, music and the others" and unpublished of Trinidade Coelho and the importance of her ethnographic work that came out in the anthropology works.
But what attracts these issues?
JVM: During my literary career I have always done research in the field of popular literature. It is the language of the people, what they like and that counts. This was important, nothing was systematized in Madera, there were collections around and some very incomplete, regarding the tales and legends. In the novel, this work was done by Pedro Ferrer and David Pinto Correia. There are also other literary possibilities, which are popular traditions of Madera that will come out now in a book.
You said that after writing the tales you forget all about them?
JVM: I wrote a book with the most popular Portuguese riddles are over a thousand and even knew some time and now I do not remember hardly any. It happens. Gets out of the head and it's over. I once did a review of a book that was a guide of the streets of Porto. I helped do that and then in the end did not know where they were. These things happen.
But, what publication will launch this week?
JVM: I will launch a translation that I made from a book by Balzac that was only in French and was not translated into Portuguese, speaks on how to pay the debts and satisfy your creditors without spending a cent. It's true! (Laughs)
Lately you haven't written any novel why?
JVM: I only wrote two novels in my life, normally I'm more a storyteller and I'm about to write about a false Don Sebastian. The disappearance of the king in Alcazar Quibir gave rise to four imposters who tried to replace the monarch. That did not work and so that gave me the idea for a novel I'm just finishing it and it will be publish maybe for the next year.
You wrote much poetry in your youth, there is an age for that?
JVM: I have published a book of poems in 2004. But, everything has it age. I am gathering the second part of my complete poetry and this too will come out in the end of the year. I am revising poems of 2004.
And changed them too?
JVM: I always change. I think I do it, because there are things that I dislike. I'll go back and rewrite them because the poem has to be rewritten. It has nothing to do with a hint of youth. All that poetry, even from my earliest period of 1975 and since then I have a new perspective and that's why I change a few words.
I know you have not lived much of your life on the island, is there something of islander on your writing?
JVM: There is. Perhaps the isolation, well I have no idea...
