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COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Humanities Research Association
The poet Adilia Lopes has become an increasingly prominent presence on the Portuguese literary scene since 1985 when her first volume of poetry, Um jogo bastante perigoso, was published. In 1999 her fourteenth collection of verse, Florbela Espanca espanca, appeared. It is hardly surprising that the provocative wordplay of the volume's title should lend itself to paraphrase in critical commentary, as demonstrated by the essay read by Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre at the book launch of Lopes's collection, which was subsequently published in the online journal Ciberkiosk. (1) In his 'Adilia Lopes espanca Florbela Espanca', Silvestre placed the metaphor of flagellation in a variety of figurative arrangements at the centre of the poet's creative practice by, as his title indicates, transferring the punitive and/or sexually perverse agency from Florbela's hands into Adilia's. Without ascribing excessive significance to what some may dismiss as a mere rhetorical flourish, we should note that one of the implications of Silvestre's critical maneuver is to deny or question Florbela's own putative proclivity to spanking, as postulated by Adilia Lopes's title. His gesture mimics thus, mutatis mutandis, a verdict on Florbela's poetry expressed nearly a century earlier by Raul Proenca, a well-established writer and brother of one of Florbela's father's friends, who in 1916 offered an encouraging assessment of the poems by 'Mr Espanca's daughter':
Quanto C filha do Sr. Espanca nao se pode dizer que espanque a poesia. Pelo contr[sz]rio: tem bastante talento e promete. As composices que me enviou nao sao s verso, sao tambem poesia na sua maior parte. Creio que dar[sz] alguma coisa se continuar e se se for purificando dos vicios inerentes aos principiantes. (2)
In the remaining fifteen years of her life and work, Florbela effectively continued to write, to refine her poetic discourse, and to steer clear of any such textual behaviour as might encourage accusations of 'spanking poetry': on the contrary, she cultivated it with utmost respect and a reverent dedication to what she regarded as its transcendent mission, while never attempting to deviate from the formally conservative mould of neo-Romantic sonnet. Even in the triumphant hour of Charneca em Flor, freed from the complex of derivative inferiority with regard to her male predecessors and contemporaries, which often vexed her imagination and lyric discourse in ways both painful and fruitful, Florbela always viewed the exercise of poetry from a perspective that was at once humble and spiritually elevated. In fact, her worshipful approach only intensified in her last volume of verse, as it became slanted towards the poet's apotheotic self-inclusion in the sacred sphere, with such sonnets as 'Mais alto' and 'Crucificada'. (3)
In an oppositional counterpoint to the two declarations cited above, which, in spite of their distinct contexts, perspectives, and degrees of explicitness, both qualify Florbela as someone who, contrary to the implication of her surname and, more importantly, notwithstanding the acknowledged transgressive thrust of many of her poems of unprecedented female affirmation, does not spank poetry or its readers (which is to say, does not traumatize, violate tender sensibilities, engage in offensive or painful behaviour), Adilia's verse has often been described in terms that emphasize the shock value of her discursive performances, encompassing both the poet's page-bound published verse and her public appearances. The shock effect may be 'mild'--witness Hugo Williams's testimony in the Times Literary Supplement, following an international gathering of poets at the Universidade de Coimbra in 1995 (4)--or in all probability acute, as in the case of the opening poem of Florbela Espanca espanca, with its notorious first lines paraphrasing Florbela's embrace of amorous abandon ('Quero amar | amar perdidamente'): 'Eu quero foder foder | achadamente'. (5) In this article I intend to take this initial contrasting juxtaposition of the two writers, bracket chronologically, as it were, the trajectory of Portuguese women's poetry in the twentieth century, along with Adilia's parodic study of Florbela's lyrical discourse in her 1999 collection, as a point of departure for a re-examination of genealogical (dis)continuity in the emerging historical narrative of female poetic authorship in twentieth-century Portugal.
As already noted, Silvestre's critical exploration of Florbela Espanca espanca focuses on the textual strategy of spanking ('espancamento') as a defining quality of the mode of poetic communication privileged by Adilia Lopes. 'Spanking', in this context, may be paraphrased as symbolic shock treatment, punitive and physically concrete, that collides with aesthetic expectations and value judgements habitually espoused by readers of poetry in contemporary Portugal. In Silvestre's words, Adilia's work performs 'um espancamento sistematico e desapiedado de todas as concepcoes disponiveis do poetico e dos regimes do seu agenciamento'; her writing and her ever more visible public persona have flown in the face of so many conventions, aesthetic as well as broadly cultural, social and psychological, that she has achieved a degree of popular notoriety few would consider accessible to a contemporary poet (of any gender), even in Portugal. (6)
Silvestre's comments cast Adilia in the role of a literary dominatrix who subjects the established models of poetic language, her reading public and, finally, the Muse herself to a verbal lashing: 'a musa, neste livro espancada por interposta Florbela Espanca'. For the critic, the function of Florbela in Florbela Espanca espanca is thus reduced to an essentially subsidiary purpose: besides the transfer or inversion, and therefore effective negation, of her agency (it is no longer Florbela who spanks an unspoken object, becoming herself either an object or an instrument of Adilia's spanking rampage), we also witness her relegation to the status of a rhetorical figure--a synecdoche--or a mere mediating third term in Adilia's confrontation with poetry and the world.
Such equivocal use of Florbela has not been without precedent in literary and critical narratives of the symbolic relationship between various generations of Portuguese women authors. In the revolutionary classic of feminist...
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