Eduardo Ferraz da Rosa, Author of Os Sinais da Escrita

Recently launched in Praia da Vitória, Os Sinais da Escrita – Ensaios Nemesianos brings together a wide-ranging selection of essays devoted to the life and work of Vitorino Nemésio. What dimensions of Nemésio’s legacy does this book seek to explore?

Among the texts gathered in Os Sinais da Escrita, alongside essays and critical studies that are more systematic and theoretical in nature, there are also pieces originally written as articles or conference papers. Some are concise and accessible to the general reader; others speak more directly to students—secondary, university, or academically advanced. What binds them is the abundance of material they offer for consultation, for sustained reading, for learning, and for disciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogue, considered both regionally and universally, as emphasized in the book’s Preface.

Taken together—nearly 350 pages comprising some 30 texts, along with an introductory note, a preface, and a postface—the essays are representative and decisive for an immediate or potential understanding of the themes at stake: socio-literary and socio-fictional imaginaries; questions of education, art, and science; history, geography, politics, ideologies, and mentalities; religion, philosophy, and theology. Above all, they foreground the singular and deeply formative presence of the Azores in general, and Praia da Vitória in particular, across Nemésio’s novels, short stories, poetry, symbolic-existential reflections, socio-critical writings, philosophical and religious thought, and even his historical and political analyses.

Born on December 19, 1901, Nemésio—paraphrasing what Ortega y Gasset once said about him and his Azorean insularity—carried Praia da Vitória within him throughout his life and across his entire body of work. This land, the cradle and matrix of his earliest human, emotional, passionate, and intellectual experiences, became a permanent point of reference in all his later creations: a touchstone of sensitivity and intelligence toward reality, of communal memory and cultural imagination. It was through this grounding that he both consecrated and projected the Azores into the multiple discursive, narrative, and stylistic registers—real and fictional—of his literary, essayistic, memorial, and academic production.

What mark did Nemésio leave on Portugal, and particularly on the Azores?

Nationally and internationally recognized and awarded, Nemésio was also an indefatigable scholar and a rigorous interpreter of both the proto-history of the Azores—within Portuguese history and universal historiography—and their “intra-history,” a concept he adapted, along with that of Açorianidade, from Miguel de Unamuno, with whom, as with Ortega y Gasset, he maintained a rich Iberian dialogue.

It was through the Azores, with the Azores, and from the Azores—always in fertile dialogue with nearly every thematic, disciplinary, and methodological branch of knowledge—that Nemésio saw the world and saw himself, in search of identity and meaning. In doing so, he wove a remarkable and sustained anthropological, cultural, and civilizational inquiry into the core structures of the Portuguese language and the broader language of Portuguese identity across all continents, with particular attention to Luso-Brazilian culture in the tropics. His work continues to challenge and invite us to reflective longing, to love of place, culture, education, and science—an example to be honored and followed.

Is Nemésio’s work still little known in Portugal? Has the country failed to give him his due recognition?

A certain public image of Nemésio—his expressive gestures, rhetorical theatricality, memorable intonations, and mimetic speech, especially through the famous RTP program Se bem me lembro and his celebrated teaching at the Faculty of Letters in Lisbon—once enjoyed strong media presence. Today, that image has largely faded, lightly museumized, and too often detached from what is most essential and revealing in his work.

Yet we are speaking of a major writer—poet, novelist, and short-story writer—who was simultaneously a serious academic: an intellectual, university professor, and tireless, interdisciplinarily cultivated scholar. He was far removed from the caricature of a quaint village storyteller, a vaguely theatrical regionalist collector of local curiosities. In other circles—where rivalry, academic intrigue, envy, and bad faith too often flourish—he was at times dismissed as a mere dilettante or superficial “figure,” a talent attributed more to luck than to substance.

There have also been regrettable local and national appropriations of his name and biography—social, political, and ideological—attempting to forcibly align him with banners and causes he never embraced. All of this has obscured the fact that Nemésio’s work remains, to a large extent, insufficiently known, studied, and activated in Portugal, in the Azores, and within institutions devoted to the Portuguese language.

Like all great literature, his work carries a spiritual, cultural, and civilizational force that reminds us of our shared humanity. It becomes an instrument of creation, illumination, beauty, and communion across the many dimensions of the human condition on Earth.

You have devoted much of your career to the study of Nemésio. What first drew you to the work of the writer from Praia da Vitória?

The texts collected in this book reflect a long familiarity with Nemésio’s entire body of work. That familiarity followed, on one hand, from the good fortune of having known him personally—both in Terceira and in Lisbon—an acquaintance facilitated early on by family ties on my mother’s side, by shared environments, lived situations, testimonies, teachings, and forms of complicity that need not be detailed here. On the other hand, it arose from the educational and cultural circumstances to which I had access from a young age, circumstances that undeniably shaped everything I later learned, studied, understood, taught, and wrote.

As I wrote explicitly in the book’s Introduction, if the publication and reading of these essays can spark—even briefly—the desire to read, study, and understand the life and work of Vitorino Nemésio, and by extension all great literature that reaches us or is reborn here, then the effort will have been worthwhile. It will have justified our expectations and the shared labor of reflection undertaken on behalf of our land, especially in these demanding and consequential times.

Finally, in our shared insular journey—spatially and temporally unsettled by the recurring winds of history and tides of spirit that separate but also unite us across this archipelago of nine islands, islets, and rocky outcrops—I found myself, through these texts, rereading and rethinking other domains as well. They led me back to old and new critical reflections on ways of reading literature and Portuguese identity—particularly our distinctly Azorean one, as embodied by Nemésio and others. This, perhaps, is the true challenge of our present insular, European, and global moment.

In Diário Insular–Translated by Diniz Borges.