"My poetry is an epic of a lesser life. It is not the discovery of a sea route to India. It is the path of the hallway in my house between the room where I write and read and the kitchen. It is domestic. It is feminine." (Photo from Quatro Cinco Um)
Adílio Lopes lived in her head, writing in a notebook every day, a poem never far away, according to Público (February 20, 2015). Her poems provoked contradictory reactions: surprise, distrust, enthusiasm, discomfort, amusement, irritation, indignation and contestation, as Sol (January 4) tells it.
"The truth that prefers not to leave the neighborhood", as her friend, Cardinal José Tolentino Mendonça, described the Lisbon native in an eponymous poem, did not sway from strong opinions. She believed that "money, sex appeal, intelligence (and) snobbery are the four faces of the monster of success". "Better to go with the fallen than with the risen," she summed up with grace and clarity, according to Sol.
"There is always a great deal of violence, pain, seriousness and holiness in what I write," said Adílio Lopes, reported RTP News (December 31, 2024). "Writing poems is good," but "listening to the Muse is exhausting, a frenzy," she says at the end of Dias e Dias (Days and Days) (2020).
The frenzy stopped on the day before New Year's Eve. Adília Lopes died at age 64 in Hospital de São José, in Lisbon, where she had been hospitalized for some time.
In his homily at her funeral Mass on January 2, Cardinal José Tolentino Mendonça said:
"The strangeness (of her writing) that remains is because she makes a shift, a disruptive gesture: she constructs the poem from points of view which, politically or culturally, we consider secondary, uninteresting, banal, impure, absolutely discardable . . .
"She tells the story of a house from the perspective of the gecko on the wall! She tells the story from the perspective of the woman who is a day old! Or she tells the story from the perspective of the woman, from what women live, from what they experience! It is a great transformation!"
Adília Lopes writes:
Louvor do Lixo Praising of Garbage
a poetisa é a mulher-a-dias the poetess is the everyday woman arruma o poema she arranges the poem
como arruma a casa as she arranges the house
-- A Mulher-a-dias (2002) -- Everyday Woman (2002)
"My poetry is an epic of a lesser life. It is not the discovery of a sea route to India. It is the path of the hallway in my house between the room where I write and read and the kitchen. It is domestic. It is feminine," she said in an interview, three months before her death, by email, to the Brazilian literary magazine Quatro Cinco Um, according to Público (December 30, 2024).
"It is a question of mysticism and monastic life, in fact. A Christian ideal is that all of life becomes a prayer. I strive for this."
Nunca choraremos bastante We will never cry enough
termos querido ser belas to have wanted to be beautiful
à viva força with all our will
eu quis ser bela I wanted to be beautiful
e julguei que para ser bela And I figured that to be beautiful
bastava usar canudos meant just having ringlets
pedi para me fazerem canudos I asked to have my hair done in ringlets
com um ferro de frisar e papelotes with a curling iron and endpapers
puxaram-me muito pelos cabelos they pulled my hair a lot
eu gritei I screamed
disseram-me para ser bela I was told to be beautiful
é preciso sofrer you have to suffer
depois o cabelo queimou-se afterwards, my burnt hair
não voltou a crescer did not grow back
tive de passar a andar com uma peruca I had to walk around with a wig
para ser bela é preciso sofrer to be beautiful you have to suffer
mas sofrer não nos faz forçosamente belas but suffering doesn't necessarily
um sofrimento não implica make us beautiful
como consequência suffering doesn't imply reward as a
uma recompensa consequence
Wordplay
The writer often uses wordplay.
POETISA-FÊMEA, POETA-MACHO FEMALE POET, MALE POET
(cliché em papel couché) (cliché on coated paper)
1
Eu estou nua I am naked
eu estou viva I am alive
eu sou eu I am me
Eu uso gravata I use a tie
e, olhe, não foi barata and, look, it wasn't cheap
2
Sou uma poetisa-fêmea I am a female poet
falo do falo I talk of the phallus
Sou um poeta-macho I am a male poet
sacho a hoe
3
Sou um poeta-macho I am a male poet
sou um desmancha-prazeres I am a killjoy
sou um empata-f---- I am a f---up
Sou uma poetisa-fêmea I am a female poet
para mim for me
é tudo bestial it's all wonderful
4
Sou um poeta-macho I am a male poet
sou arrogante I am arrogant
sou um pé de Dante I am a foot of Dante
Sou um poeta-macho I am a male poet
sou um facto I am a fact
sou um fato I am a suit
5
Sou um poeta-macho I am a male poet
tenho um gabinete I have an office
sou uma poetisa-fêmea I am a female poet
escrevo na retrete I write on the toilet
Sou um poeta-macho I am a male poet
sou um badalo I am a coc-
sou uma poetisa-fêmea I am a female poet
calo-me shut up
6
A poetisa-fêmea The female poet
toca viola plays the guitar
o poeta-macho the male poet
viola-a violates her
7
Senhora doutora, Madam Doctor
os seus seios your breasts
são feios they are ugly
O poeta-macho the male poet
assina o despacho signs the order
8
Não tenho culpa I don't have blame
não tenho desculpa I don't have apology
não tenho custo I don't have costs
não tenho tempo I don't have time
9
Natália Correia, Mário Soares Natália Correia, Mário Soares
antes me ponha put before me
um cacto a cactus
mas não me mato. but I don't kill myself.
-- A Mulher-a-dias (2002) -- Everyday Woman (2002)
Literary Influences
Adília Lopes told Quatro Cinco Um that she discovered the "enchantment of literature" and of cinema when she was a child. As a writer, some of her influences were Nuno Bragança, Ruy Belo and Roland Barthes as well as Emily Bronte, Condessa de Ségur and Enid Blyton, according to RTP News. To Quatro Cinco Um, she also cited Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, whom she never met, Marcel Proust, Agustina Bessa-Luís and Fernando Pessoa. Sometimes, in her work, she responds to the work of other writers.
For example, in the poem, As Pessoas Sensíveis (Sensitive People) (1962), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen begins:
As pessoas sensíveis não são capazes Sensitive people are not capable
de matar galinhas of killing chickens
Porém são capazes But they are capable
de comer galinhas of eating chickens
Years later, Adília Lopes responds:
Uma tarde Maria Cristina One afternoon Maria Cristina
obrigou-me a comer osgas forced me to eat geckos
e a repetir and to repeat
com a boca cheia de osgas with my mouth full of geckos
as pessoas sensíveis gostam de comer osgas sensitive people like to eat geckos
mas não gostam but they don't like
de ver matar osgas seeing geckos killed
por isso têm de comer so they have to eat
as osgas vivas live geckos
se querem fazer na vida if they want to do in life
aquilo de que gostam. what they like.
The President's Tribute
President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa paid tribute to her on the President's official website (December 31, 2024):
"Since her first books, in the 1980s, Adília Lopes has extended the concept of the poetic in contemporary Portuguese poetry, playing, in a playful or painful way, with the trivial, the confessional, the falsely innocent, the humorous, the disarming and even the perverse, without failing to maintain a worldview that is more benevolent than sceptical, and never cynical.
"There was in her verses and diary entries a dimension of amusement and a subtext of helplessness that made her unique in her generation and in any generation.
"She had a life as intense as it was discreet, and her apparent prosaism gave us an alternate vision of what poetry is."
Seclusion
The poet's world fit into a radius of 200 meters in the house where she always had lived in Estafania, Arroios, according to Acervo Pernambuco.
"The longest I have been away from home was a month and a week, in France, when I was 17," she told Público (February 20, 2015).
Then, during the Covid-19 pandemic, her seclusion became a necessity. In Acervo Pernambuco, she said:
"It's the coronavirus quarantine. I can't leave the house. I'm 60 years old. I have high blood pressure and diabetes. I live alone. I don't have Internet; I don't have television. I don't even have a lamp to read or write by. I don't have much money. But I'm happy. I have a battery-powered phone that a friend gave me. At four in the afternoon, I listen to the programs, Pausa para Dança and Há 100 Anos on Antena 2. I really like these programs. I learn a lot and listen to beautiful music."
It seems that solitude served her writing well:
Deus não me deu God didn't give me
um namorado a boyfriend
deu-me He gave me
o martírio branco the white torment
de não o ter”. of not having one.
She also writes:
Foi bom não me ter casado. Não tenho cabeça para outra cabeça.
(It was good that I didn't get married. I don't have a head for another head.)
Her Beginnings
Adilia Lopes, the daughter of a Botany assistant at the University of Lisbon and a secondary school teacher, happened into existence in 1983, when Maria José da Silva Viana Fidalgo de Oliveira was searching for a pseudonym with which to enter a literary competition.
"I had a hard time with my name. I had problems with my parents and my real name, the one on my identity card, was my parents'. . . . I needed a name of my own choosing, and I wanted everything on the cover of my book to be my choice," she said in 2005, according to Acervo Pernambuco.
When she was still Maria José, she studied Physics. She finished three years of the course but dropped out, on the advice of a doctor, after her condition was diagnosed as schizoaffective psychosis.
"In 1981, I went mad for the first time," she said in one of her Crónicas de vaca fria (Accounts of unresolved subjects), published in Público, according to Acervo Pernambuco.
Elsewhere, she said: "I have done many stupid things in public, but, according to the psychiatrist who is treating me now, I have a compensated mental illness. This, to me, is like having one shoe’s heel higher than the other because one leg is shorter than the other. There is no exhibitionism or shameless confessionalism in this text.”
Two years later, Maria José returned to college, this time to study Portuguese and French Literature, and Linguistics at the University of Lisbon, specializing in Documentary Sciences, reported Observador (December 30, 2024). She worked on the estates of Fernando Pessoa, Vitorino Nemésio and José Blanc de Portugal, which were deposited in the National Library, according to Esquerda (December 31, 2024).
Adília Lopes self-published her debut book, Um Jogo Bastante Perigoso (A Very Dangerous Game) in 1985. In the following years, her poems began to be printed by independent publishers. Today, the poet is published by one of the most traditional houses in Portugal, Assírio & Alvim, which in 2014 brought together her work in a 700-page volume entitled Dobra and was updated in September 2024 to include all her 36 books.
Her work has been translated and published in many languages. It is studied in academic circles and celebrated in literary publications.
In 2000, Obra (Work), a collection of 15 poetry books, was published with illustrations by Paula Rego. The painter had found in the poems a striking parallel with her own imagination. In return, the poet translated, into Portuguese, Nursery Rhymes, an album of engravings by Paula Rego based on English nursery rhymes.
Funeral Mass
To close Adília Lopes' funeral Mass, writer and theater professor Miguel Castro Caldas read four of her poems, including the following:
Se tu amas por causa da beleza, então não me ames!
Ama o Sol que tem cabelos doirados!
Se tu amas por causa da juventude, então não me ames!
Ama a Primavera que fica nova todos os anos!
Se tu amas por causa dos tesouros, então não me ames!
Ama a Mulher do Mar: ela tem muitas pérolas claras!
Se tu amas por causa da inteligência, então não me ames!
Ama Isaac Newton: ele escreveu os Princípios Matemáticos da Filosofia Natural!
Mas se tu amas por causa do amor, então sim, ama-me!
Ama-me sempre: amo-te para sempre!
If you love because of beauty, then do not love me!
Love the Sun that has golden hair!
If you love because of youth, then do not love me!
Love the Spring that becomes new every year!
If you love for the sake of treasures, then do not love me!
Love the Woman of the Sea: she has many clear pearls!
If you love because of intelligence, then don't love me!
Love Isaac Newtown: he wrote the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy!
But if you love for the sake of love, then yes, love me!
Love me always: I love you forever!
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