Through the Cátedra Natália Correia at California State University Fresno, at PBBI (Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute), we will be commemorating with many events, publications, and research. Starting this week and until September 2024, we will publish excerpts in English translation from the writings of Natália Correia. This will be done as a way to get the academic community, students, and faculty, as well as the community at large to be familiar with the works of Natálaia Correia, who was a leading poet, feminist, and cultural icon of Portugal and Western Europe throughout the latter part of the 20th century.

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE BOOK

 The book is like a river. It has its source and its mouth. And just as the river blends into the ocean’s vastness, the book merges into the mass of universal knowledge. Its source is the author. Its mouth is the reader. But this journey would not be possible without the publisher and the bookseller, sometimes obscure but no less important figures in the book’s march toward its universal destiny.

 However, it is not without reason that alarm bells are ringing today.  Technological omens, including MacLuan’s global village, predict, if not the liquidation of the book by the hypnosis of audio-visual media, at least the significant reduction of its space. Woe betide us if this is the case. Because audiovisual, no matter how highly cultural it may be, and it will hardly ever be, doesn’t allow for the retention of the word, the turning back that writing provides, indispensable elements for reflection, the exercise of memory and the awakening of subjectivity that is increasingly depleted by the tyranny of classification.

 Dignifying the book and promoting its expansion is the work of those committed to safeguarding the individualizing values that can resist the imbecilization of humanity sterilized by the egalitarianism of technological quantification.

 When Gutenberg invented the printing press, some saw this means of democratizing knowledge as the fanciful work of a pact with the devil. And even Lope de Vega denounced the danger of vandalizing by quantity what should be the inheritance of quality. However, today, ironically, because of the changing times and wills, it is in this noble product of the printing press that the virtues of defending the qualitative from the globalist technology that depersonalizes and disidentifies individuals reside. Congrats, then, to those on this island who confirm the tradition of bibliophilia that has illustrated it so much and provided it with yet another instrument of culture. This is the very condition for strengthening the Azorean personality and its invulnerability to the usury of a centralizing state, which, in its narcissism, condemns itself to sink in the fatal waters of self-contemplation, tragically oblivious to indefectible realities such as this: Azoreanness.

 Natália Correia

Translated by Diniz Borges

(From a presentation she made at the opening of a bookstore in the Azores)

Thanks to Dr. Carlos Melo Bento for the original text in Portuguese.

A poem read by Natália Correia in Portuguese