PLCS 11 (2003)

Vitorino Nemésio and the Azores
Guest editor - Francisco Cota Fagundes (UMass Amherst)

Equating Vitorino Nemésio to “Azoreanity,” universality, iridescence, confluence, and eroticism, draws inspiration from the content of the essays herein included and will not surprise anyone familiar with Nemésio’s non-posthumous works, with the possible exception of the very last of the lexemes, “eroticism.” Nemésio’s oeuvre, starting with the collections of short stories Paço do Milhafre (1924) and Mistério do Paço do Milhafre (1949), and extending to the poetical collections La Voyelle Promise (1935) and Festa Redonda (1950), to the novel Mau Tempo no Canal (1944) and the travelogue Corsário das Ilhas (1956), encompasses a range of subjects profoundly rooted in the Azorean archipelago. At the same time--and here, besides Mau Tempo no Canal, we must emphasize the poems of Nem Toda a Noite a Vida (1952) and O Verbo e a Morte (1959)--the thematic and formal scope of Nemésio’s oeuvre does in no way distance itself from the totality (and, to the extent that the word is valid, centrality) of Portugese culture and, as well, from the western Great Tradition of which it is an inextricable part.