Natália Correia, in her poem “Manhã cinzenta” [Grey Morning], dated April 1946 (one of the first originals of her complete poetry), addresses the event that marked all of her life-work: the departure from the island of São Miguel, in the Azores – where she was born in 1923 – to Lisbon, where she would pass away about seventy years later, in 1993. In the book Poemas [Poems] (1955), the reader rediscovers the mildly nostalgic and lucid eye of Natália about her island in “Retrato talvez saudoso da menina insular” [Portrait, Maybe Nostalgic, of the Insular Girl]. This bio-bibliographic data will interlace with Natália’s vision of Europe: a heterogeneous and devastated space concerning which the Ilha [Island] acquires the symbolic value of a lost paradise, a new Ithaca one wishes to return to.

The first explicit reference to Europe is to be found in the book Comunicação [Communication] (1959). As an introduction to “Auto da Feiticeira Cotovia” [Act of the Witch Lark], Natália announces, with her singular humor, the discovery of a city called Lusitânia, located in Southwest Europe, buried by the ruling Salazarista regime’s oppression. The Luso reality that the author vehemently seeks to denounce is, by synecdoche, a portrait of a Europe destroyed by the Second World War. The continent will be referred to, together with Portugal, in the book Cântico do País Emerso [Chant of the Emergent Country](1961) – whose intertext is that of “Ode Marítima” [Maritime Ode], by Álvaro de Campos –, as an ancient place, ineradicably associated to a nation-ship, called Portugal, that time sank.

In O Vinho e a Lira [The Wine and the Lira] (1966), one starts envisioning Natália’s Europe with more clarity: a place that lost its identity. The poem “Requiem por nossa mãe Cibelanaítariadne” [Requiem for Our Mother Cibelanaítariadne] symbolizes that loss: Auschwitz, a place of destruction, was among the last to sight Ariadne, the figure of classical mythology whose ball of thread would lead Europe back to the center of the labyrinth, where its history started. Heir to a surrealist legacy, Natália always defended the annulment of the “obscene opposition between truth and myth” (Correia 1999: 325), wherefore Ariadne is possible in the symbolic place of the Holocaust. In fact, Natália’s Europe is a place of death, as one can confirm in the poem from the same work, “As silvas do mandala” [The Mandala Brambles]: to a white Africa, Natália opposes a black Europe. This color remits to a space consumed by fire. The Natalian poetry denounces, at every step, the precarious situation of a Europe repressed by fascism, a web-like regime where Portugal (dramatically) is also inserted. The sole salvation that seems to be left is given by the closing verse of this poem: “For love everything recommences” (idem: 275), understandable in poetry strongly influenced by the Camonian lyric.

This same Europe appears in the singular book Mátria [Motherland] * (1968). In poem I, one glimpses a “europe” in ruins, burnt, written with a lowercase letter. In poem IX, Natália declines the reason for the disappearance of Anaíta, the primitive goddess of earth and fertility, the root of a Europe marked by the triviality of evil, a famous expression of Hannah Arendt. In A Mosca Iluminada [The Lightened Fly] (1972), Natália returns to Auschwitz but does not forget Hiroshima either. Every place with visible signs of evil fits in Natália’s poetry. Right in the following poem, the desire for the Island, a place of absolute purity, materializes. The text “In the pit of the most accredited dictionaries” devalues the dictionary definition of the term island and emphasizes it as a unique, mysterious place, a perfect object, as distant, “a mother who encloses herself in her own insanity of a dead person treading daringly in our arteries” (idem: 315).

Natália reveals her vision of Europe in a dispersed way throughout her poetry. However, she centralizes her eye on the old continent in 1973 in a book titled O Anjo do Ocidente à Entrada do Ferro [The Western Angel at the Entrance of Iron]. In the text “In the saddest topaz of my clairvoyance”, the author cries “ash clovers throughout Europe” (idem: 361), a continent she describes as a “sad little widow”. The poem “Dedicatória” [Dedication] synthesizes Natália’s eclectic vision of the European continent. She addresses the classical myth of Europe, underlining the desire as central to forming the old continent’s identity, described as a place of heterogeneities profoundly associated with a Judeo-Christian tradition, a space of permanent fight for power. It was also the cradle of civilization, a scene of political and industrial revolutions, molded by many timeless myths that defined its identity. Europe is more than a geographic entity, for Natália, a cultural entity founded by pre-classic civilizations, symbolized in Crete, of which only ruins remain. It is this context that frames the poem “Excursão às ruínas da valsa” [Excursion to the Ruins of Waltz], where Austria appears as “the fallen jaw of Europe” (idem: 367).Further on, in “Do sagrado meretrício” [Of the Sacred Lewd], Natália dialogues with Rome and looks for a sense of the “putrid century” which the European culture flowed into. She wraps this book with a five-part poem, “Pranto dos europeus à saída do festim” [The Europeans’ Wails Exiting the Feast]; she clamors for a Europe that existed one day, lost in hatred and wars. Natália’s interrogations are significative of the inexistence of a route for the old continent, a day fertile in heroes and fed by a dream: “What direction to take?”, “What did we make of the trees?” “What is left of the field of recent sunflowers?” (idem: 400-402). An answer does not seem to be given to the reader. However, there is

The last poetry book in which Natália addresses Europe dates from 1976, titled Epístola aos Iamitas [Epistle to the Iamitas]. The poetic reflection is framed in the post-revolutionary context, where Natália keeps her critical voice and concludes her lack of propensity for revolutions like the one of the 25th of April that failed in its purposes, according to the poet. The main revolution remains undone: “the opening of the human psyche to the wholeness of the being” (idem: 413). The references to Europe appear, like in the first works, crossed with references to Portugal: in poem III, Natália projects the failure of the Portuguese revolution in Europe, and in the set “Urna Áurea” [Golden Urn], constituted by three sonnets, there are the last references to Europe, with clear traces of a mystic-Pessoan nationalism assumed by the author in the book’s introduction. Natália’s beloved Motherland, the face of Europe, does not see an end to the decadence denounced by Camões in the reflections of his epic poem and does not see an end to the fog announced in Mensagem [Message] by Pessoa. Resorting to motifs from the book Apocalypse de S. João [St. John’s Apocalypse], Natália prophesies a future Portugal, with a Pessoan tone, that will recover her dimension before Europe. After this book, we believe the references to the mythical continent disappear from the Natalian work. Driven by the urgency that “poetry may be practiced” (idem: 33), as in it “the transformation of humanity’s soul is incubated” (idem: 34), Natália clings to the hope of a reborn Europe, with a Motherland that will provide still more chants to be listened to, hope that surges from the synthesized faith in her sonnet “I believe in angels who crisscross the world” (idem: 616). After all, the poetry of Natália does not self-destroy. Still, it is renewed by a dream, by the word, and by the Love that does the Work: “I believe in the incredible, in amazing things / In the world’s occupation by roses / I believe that Love has golden wings. Amen.” (ibidem). It is left for the reader a possible image of the future paradise: a new Europe peacefully invaded by roses.

* Information added by the translator: In Portuguese, Portugal is referred to as Pátria, which corresponds to Fatherland in English. Calling it Mátria, which does not exist, corresponding to Motherland, Natália Correia conveys a socio-political message.

Brief Anthology

Dedicatória

To you, oh water dance thrusting banderillas into the bull

fountain of seven veils, gods’ well

art of lukewarm flanks versifying the heat

that kidnapped you in the river in the horn’s crescent

that the full praise you were of a quadruped desire

of God working the cross of your womb

the egg moulded to the vertical nap

of a history standing asleep in the cathedral

To you, from Crete raising the slow trunk

in centuries of ivory showed the patience

of the metal work that now chokes you

in fraudulent chronicle of a photograph

To you, that the rebellious gastronomical distances

of the oceans were the Summa Theologica

cruciferous and crusade of syphilis and blue

in the north garnering what you spend in the south

To you, who in an English commercial writing

the camphor you stole from the oriental sleep

in effect pepper of the exotic dishes

of a colonial menu gnawed by mice

To you, oh insatiable who to change the rings

of the kings decapitated the hazy capitals

with the capitalado of the new captains flouring the

face

pretending to be tetrarch (that another cloth does not keep the

intimacy of your arches)

ironing with the goo of the bourgeois bronchitis

when there at the Bastille won the spade of the

French Revolution

To you, hagiological

Of the sacristies blessed mouse when logic

between the incense and the silver of the cruets through which you

now drink petrol

unsteady of elephantiasis with a telescopical trunk

of the moons breaking in the lakes of paraffin

that heaven ends up empirical and rabid biting

the star lips

To you, laborious laboratory anther

with sages’ pollen in the rose test tubes verifying

the beast

To you, victorious who answered everything

In the cavernous language of examined wound

To you, oh polyphonic instrument of pistons

with swamp and quivering in the tuneless voice

by the spurious Decembers of machines that cradle

your limbs in frost

Oh, transistorised numbed of traffic

electric shoulders falling in brackets of bar and

barbituric

To you, illuminated by the gas of fie

of lacklustre brown of a Greek amphora

playing the blindman’s game with a blindfold of ads

To you, oh acrobat on the wire who goes from the bog to the armoury

With scrap flats from your requiem raising the

spiral staircase

To you, composite slut of ionic and of gain

Weighs again in the adage of Christ’s sonata

oh, canned Europe

oh, swan

oh, cist

oh, cyst

in an igneous membrane of clogged America

oh, varied repertoire of proletarian tapeworm

solitary work of famished projects

with final judgements painted on your ceilings

To You, however I dedicate

the reason of the Lira I inherited in globules

blood of your making cithara’s paragraph

raised in the horns of the god who, in musical

genital compass

boiled in the blast furnaces of the sky in liberty

the icy faience of immortality

To the leaven of the origin that provoked your breasts

Leather bottles of old wines that draining sangria

Ring in the tears you play in the ankles

To the zodiacal spaceship that tamed the curves

Of your infused hips of philosophical milk

curdled in semiquavers of concrete and metal

to the arcane patient who, with the syllable-like amble of the

colonnades

metrified your brain of fables and flutes

to the plane trees that suffer in the Cretan medal

from deep in your eyes, your rounded pain

in the gloomy pronunciation of phone lines

oh, oakum     oh, Europe from Europe separated!

in O Anjo do Ocidente à Entrada do Ferro (1973)

Pranto dos Europeus à saída do festim

V

We called Europe to the place where it stopped

the blood that the six-pointed star searched for

where the body’s thirst finally took it to the soul

Forgotten the letters that the obscure flame

they could extinguish bloodied the book

What is left of this field of recent sunflowers?

collapsed woods of fallen verticals

with plastic strawberries and lost children

in timid bodies like mustered numbers

by an arithmetic of voices without a destination

We certainly dressed up in premature flesh

and in this chiaroscuro of temples and disasters

we are saved by the action of our bones that look for

the centre of a chaste and eternal fixture

where the gods stare at us with the coldness of jewels

and life waits for us to resurge for good

in O Anjo do Ocidente à Entrada do Ferro (1973)

 

Selected active bibliography

CORREIA, Natália (1999), Poesia Completa. O sol nas noites e o luar nos dias, Lisboa, Dom Quixote.

Gil Clemente Teixeira (trans. Rui Miguel Ribeiro)

TEIXEIRA, Gil Clemente (2017), “Natália Correia”, trans. Rui Miguel Ribeiro, in Europe Facing Europe: poets write Europe. ISBN 978-989-99999-1-6. https://aeuropafaceaeuropa.ilcml.com/en/term/natalia-correia-3/