António Pereira Nobre (16 August 1867 – 18 March 1900) was a
Portuguese poet
A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...
. His masterpiece, ''
Só'' (Paris, 1892), was the only book he published.
Life
Northern Portugal
Nobre was a member of a wealthy family. He was born in
Porto
Porto (), also known in English language, English as Oporto, is the List of cities in Portugal, second largest city in Portugal, after Lisbon. It is the capital of the Porto District and one of the Iberian Peninsula's major urban areas. Porto c ...
, and spent his childhood in
Trás-os-Montes and in
Póvoa de Varzim
Póvoa de Varzim () is a Portugal, Portuguese city in Norte Region, Portugal, Northern Portugal and sub-region of Greater Porto, from its city centre. It sits in a sandy coastal plain, a cuspate foreland, halfway between the Minho River, Minho ...
.
Coimbra
He studied
law
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a science and as the ar ...
unsuccessfully at the
University of Coimbra
The University of Coimbra (UC; , ) is a Public university, public research university in Coimbra, Portugal. First established in Lisbon in 1290, it went through a number of relocations until moving permanently to Coimbra in 1537. The university ...
from 1888 to 1890 when he dropped out. As a student in
Coimbra
Coimbra (, also , , or ), officially the City of Coimbra (), is a city and a concelho, municipality in Portugal. The population of the municipality at the 2021 census was 140,796, in an area of .
The fourth-largest agglomerated urban area in Po ...
, and according to his own words, he only felt at ease in his "tower" (referring to the ''Torre de Anto'' - Anto Tower, in upper Coimbra, where he lived) during the "sinister period" he spent studying law at the
University of Coimbra
The University of Coimbra (UC; , ) is a Public university, public research university in Coimbra, Portugal. First established in Lisbon in 1290, it went through a number of relocations until moving permanently to Coimbra in 1537. The university ...
. An unknown fiancée, more fictitious than concrete; a friend — Alberto de Oliveira, and a brief intervention in the literary life, through some magazines, did not conciliate him with the academic city of Coimbra where this predestined poet flunked twice.
Paris
He went to Paris where he earned a degree in
political science
Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and Power (social and political), power, and the analysis of political activities, political philosophy, political thought, polit ...
at the
École Libre des Sciences Politiques
Sciences Po () or Sciences Po Paris, also known as the Paris Institute of Political Studies (), is a public research university located in Paris, France, that holds the status of ''grande école'' and the legal status of . The university's unde ...
. There, he came in contact with the French coeval poetry — he met
Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine ( ; ; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolism (movement), Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the ''fin de siècle'' ...
and
Jean Moréas, among others. He also met the famous Portuguese writer
Eça de Queiroz in Paris, who was a Portuguese diplomat in the city. It was from 1890 to 1895, that Nobre studied political science in Paris, where he was influenced by the French Symbolist poets and it was there that he wrote the greater part of the only book he published.
The Paris exile, sad by his own words ("poor Lusitanian, the wretched", lost in the crowd that does not know him), was not a time for happiness. The aristocratic shutting up caused nausea or indifference. Frustrated and always marginal experiences made him bitter. He was far from the sweat and from all sorts of fraternity, from desire and hate, and from the wailing of the breed, a childlike, lost, instinctive and princely life, a souvenir of the sweet old landscape that memory seems to encourage. In his tender but never rhetorical mourning Nobre manifests himself and mourns over himself as a doomed poet, with a hard soul and a maiden's heart, which carried the sponge of gall in former processions.
Style, work and last days
His verse marked a departure from objective realism and social commitment to subjective lyricism and an aesthetic point of view, walking more towards symbolism; one of the various modernist literary currents. The lack of means, aggravated by his father's death, made him morbidly reject the present and the future, following a pessimistic romantic attitude that led him to denounce his tedium. However excessive, this is a controlled attitude, due to a clear aesthetic mind and a real sense of ridicule. He learned the colloquial tone from
Almeida Garrett
João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, 1st Viscount of Almeida Garrett (; 4 February 1799 – 9 December 1854) was a Portuguese poet, orator, playwright, novelist, journalist, politician, and a peer of the realm. A major promoter ...
and
Júlio Dinis, and also from
Jules Laforgue, but he exceeded them all in the peculiar compromise between irony and a refined puerility, a fountain of happiness because it represents a return to his happiest of times — a kingdom of his own from where he resuscitates characters and enchanted places, manipulating, as a virtuoso of nostalgia, the picturesque of popular festivals and of fishermen, the simple magic of toponyms and the language of the people.
In his prescience of pain, in his spiritual anticipation of disease and of agony, in his taste for sadness, in his unmeasured pride of isolation, António (from Torre de Anto, at the centre of old Coimbra where the poet lived an enchanted life, everywhere writing his mythical and literary name: Anto) keeps an artist's composure, always expressing the cult of the aesthetic life and of the elegant personality. In his courtship of death (to whose imminent threat he would later answer with dignity), he takes his spiritual dandyism to extremes, like in the “Balada do Caixão" (The Coffin Ballad). His poetry translates the lack of a total maturation, an adolescent “
angelism” present in fabulous confirmations: he is “the moon”, “the saint”, “the snake”, “the sorcerer”, “the afflicted”, “the inspired”, “the unprecedented”, “the medium”, “the bizarre”, “the fool”, “the nauseated”, “the tortured”, “D. Enguiço”, “a supernatural poet.”
Narcissus in permanent soliloquy, whether he writes nostalgic verses to Manuel or speaks to his own pipe — António Nobre (A. N.) makes poetry out of the real, he covers what is prosaic with a soft mantle of legend (“My neighbour is a carpenter/he is a second-hand trader of Mrs. Death”) and creates, with a rare balance between intuition and critique, his familiar “fantastic” (“When the Moon, a beautiful milkmaid/goes deliver milk at the houses of Infinity”). His catholic imaginary world is the same as in a fairy tale, a crib of simple words but with an imaginative audacity in the scheming of those words that separate him from the consecrated lyrical language. His power of “invention” comes forth in the inspired, yet conscious, use of the verbal material (“Moons of Summer! Black moons of velvet!” or “The Abbey of my past”). Between the Garrettian and the symbolic aesthetic, the most personal and revealing feature of his vocabulary is naturally — even for his longing for the childhood aesthetical retrieval -, the diminutive. A man of sensibility rather than of reflection, he took from French symbolism, whose mystery and deep sense he could never penetrate, the repelling of oratory and of formal procedures, original imagery (“Trás-os-Montes of water”, “slaughter house of the planets”), the cult of synaesthesia, rhythmic freedom, and musical research. A. N. had a very thick ear. All his poetry is rigorously written to be heard, full of parallelisms, melodic repetitions, and onomatopoeias, and is extremely malleable. Its syllabic division depends on the rhythm that obeys feeling. However, the images or the words of his sentences rarely have the precious touch of symbolic jewelry. Evidently, in “Poentes de França”, the planets drink in silver chalices in the “tavern of sunset”; however, his transfiguration of reality almost always obeys not a purpose of sumptuous embellishment, like in
Eugénio de Castro, but an essentially affectionate eager desire of an intimism of things (“the skinny and hunchbacked poplars”, etc.).
António Nobre died of
tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB), also known colloquially as the "white death", or historically as consumption, is a contagious disease usually caused by ''Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can al ...
in
Foz do Douro
Foz do Douro (; meaning "Mouth of the Douro") is a former civil parish in the municipality of Porto, Portugal. In 2013, the parish merged into the new parish Aldoar, Foz do Douro e Nevogilde. The population in 2011 was 10,997, in an area of 1.88& ...
,
Porto
Porto (), also known in English language, English as Oporto, is the List of cities in Portugal, second largest city in Portugal, after Lisbon. It is the capital of the Porto District and one of the Iberian Peninsula's major urban areas. Porto c ...
, on 18 March 1900, after trying to recover from the disease in
Switzerland
Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...
,
Madeira
Madeira ( ; ), officially the Autonomous Region of Madeira (), is an autonomous Regions of Portugal, autonomous region of Portugal. It is an archipelago situated in the North Atlantic Ocean, in the region of Macaronesia, just under north of ...
and
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
.
Other than
Só (Paris, 1892), two other posthumous works were published: ''Despedidas'' (1st edition, 1902), with a fragment from O Desejado, and ''Primeiros Versos'' (1st edition, 1921). António Nobre's correspondence is compiled in several volumes: ''Cartas Inéditas a A.N.'', with an introduction and notes by A. Casais Monteiro, ''Cartas e Bilhetes-Postais a Justino de Montalvão'' with a foreword and notes by Alberto de Serpa, Porto, 1956; ''Correspondência'', with an introduction and notes by Guilherme de Castilho, Lisbon, 1967 (a compilation of 244 letters, 56 of which were unpublished).
Recognition
A monument for António Nobre can be found near the Boa Nova beach in
Leça da Palmeira
Leça da Palmeira () is an area in the Portuguese city of Matosinhos north of the Leça river. It was a civil parish until 2013, when it was merged with the parish of Matosinhos, forming Matosinhos e Leça da Palmeira. The parish covered and had ...
. It was designed by
Álvaro Siza Vieira and erected in 1980. The inscription reads: «farto de dores com que o matavam foi em viagens por esse mundo - a António Nobre, 1980».
References
* --------, ''Memória de António Nobre'', in ''Colóquio — Letras'', nº 127/128, Lisboa, 1993;
* Buescu, Helena Carvalhão, ''«Motivos do sujeito frágil na lírica portuguesa (entre Simbolismo e Modernismo)»'', ''«Metrópolis, ou uma visita ao Sr. Scrooge (a poesia de António Nobre)»'' e ''«Diferença do campo, diferença da cidade: Cesário Verde e António Nobre»'' in ''Chiaroscuro — Modernidade e literatura'', Campo das Letras, Porto, 2001;
* Castilho, Guilherme de, ''Vida e obra de António Nobre'', 3ª ed. revista e ampliada, Bertrand, Lisboa, 1980;
* Cintra, Luís Filipe Lindley, ''O ritmo na poesia de António Nobre'' (edição e prefácio de Paula Morão), Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda, Lisboa, 2002;
* Cláudio, Mário, ''António Nobre – 1867-1900 – Fotobiografia'', Publicações Dom Quixote, Lisboa, 2001;
* Cláudio, Mário, ''Páginas nobrianas'', Edições Caixotim, Porto, 2004;
* Curopos, Fernando, ''Antonio Nobre ou la crise du genre'', L'Harmattan, Paris, 2009;
* Morão, Paula, ''O Só de António Nobre – Uma leitura do nome'', Caminho, Lisboa, 1991;
* Morão, Paula, ''«António Nobre»'', in ''Dicionário de Literatura Portuguesa'' (organização e direcção de A. M. Machado), Presença, Lisboa, 1996;
* Morão, Paula, ''«António Nobre»'', in ''Dicionário do Romantismo Literário Português'' (coordenação de Helena Carvalhão Buescu), Caminho, Lisboa, 1997;
* Morão, Paula (organização), ''António Nobre em contexto'', Actas do Colóquio realizado a 13 e 14 de Dezembro de 2000, Biblioteca Nacional e Departamento de Literaturas Românicas da Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa, Colibri, Lisboa, 2001;
* Morão, Paula, ''Retratos com sombra – António Nobre e os seus contemporâneos'', Edições Caixotim, Porto, 2004;
* Pereira, José Carlos Seabra, ''«António Nobre e o mito lusitanista»'', in ''História crítica da Literatura Portuguesa'' (volume VII — Do Fim-de-Século ao Modernismo), Verbo, Lisboa 1995;
* Pereira, José Carlos Seabra, ''«Nobre (António Pereira)»'', in ''Biblos – Enciclopédia Verbo das Literaturas de Língua Portuguesa'', volume 3, Verbo, Lisboa, 1999;
* Pereira, José Carlos Seabra, ''António Nobre – Projecto e destino'', Edições Caixotim, Porto 2000;
* Pereira, José Carlos Seabra, ''O essencial sobre António Nobre'', Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda, Lisboa, 2001.
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nobre, Antonio
1867 births
1900 deaths
19th-century Roman Catholics
Catholic poets
Writers from Porto
19th-century Portuguese poets
Portuguese male poets
Portuguese Roman Catholic writers
19th-century deaths from tuberculosis
19th-century Portuguese male writers
University of Coimbra alumni
Tuberculosis deaths in Portugal
Symbolist poets
Decadent literature