There are weeks when literature merely accompanies the world, and there are weeks when literature becomes necessary to its survival. Today, Filamentos — Arts & Letters in the Azorean Diaspora begins one of those necessary journeys.
Over the next seven days, Words Against Darkness — Seven Azorean Women Poets Honored by the Cátedra Natália Correia will bring readers into the luminous presence of seven women whose poetry emerged from the Atlantic islands yet spoke always to the wider human condition. Their words crossed solitude, exile, memory, rebellion, tenderness, and freedom with the rare courage of those who understood that poetry is not an escape from history, but a way of confronting it.
At a moment when the world again trembles beneath intolerance, war, cultural amnesia, and the exhaustion of public language, these Azorean voices return with renewed urgency. They remind us that literature can still serve as conscience, refuge, resistance, and moral imagination. Their islands were never prisons of geography, but observatories of humanity.
Presented by the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at California State University, Fresno, through the Cátedra Natália Correia, this series also continues the enduring belief that culture must travel beyond borders, beyond nostalgia, and beyond silence itself. Through these seven poets, Filamentos invites readers into what might be called an Atlantic republic of words — a space where poetry becomes a bridge between generations, continents, and fragile human hopes.
For even in difficult times, language still carries light.
TODAY WE HONOR THE POET LEOCÁDIA REGALO
The Inner Archipelago of Leocádia Regalo
There are poets who write about islands, and there are poets who themselves become islands — solitary territories of wind, memory, silence, and luminous longing suspended between the sea and the unspeakable. Leocádia Regalo belongs to that rare and deeply Atlantic lineage of writers whose poetry does not merely describe the world, but listens to its hidden tides.
In her work, language moves like water against volcanic stone: patient, musical, eroded by longing, illuminated by contemplation. One senses immediately that her poetry emerges not from literary fashion or intellectual performance, but from an interior geography patiently cultivated through silence, introspection, and spiritual attention. The poems do not announce themselves loudly. They arrive as tides arrive — slowly, rhythmically, carrying fragments of dream, memory, eros, solitude, and revelation.
In “Port Pier Lighthouse,” the self becomes lighthouse and harbor simultaneously, a figure suspended between waiting and transcendence. The sea is not simply landscape but metaphysical condition — mystery, distance, and destiny. “I only resist / port pier lighthouse / point of arrival / shelter / destination.” In these deceptively simple lines, Regalo reveals one of the essential tensions of her poetic universe: the human desire to remain steadfast while everything else drifts upon uncertain waters. The boats returning “like prodigal sons / to the hearth of home” evoke not merely maritime imagery, but the eternal Azorean condition itself — departure haunted by return, exile softened by memory, the Atlantic transformed into emotional inheritance.
The second poem, “Singular Madrigal,” opens another chamber of her sensibility: the erotic and lyrical dimension through which desire becomes almost liturgical. Spring enters “by the hand” of the beloved; the rose ceases to be symbol and becomes living fire. Yet even in intimacy, Regalo’s language resists possession. Love appears suspended within astonishment, within that trembling instant “struck by / the raging flame of desire.” Her poetry inhabits the threshold between tenderness and metaphysical unease, between bodily warmth and spiritual yearning. There is always something hovering just beyond the visible image — an afterlight, an echo, a silence that enlarges the poem from within.
This is perhaps the distinguishing mark of Leocádia Regalo’s literary voice: her ability to transform simplicity into resonance. The diction appears transparent, almost austere, yet beneath it move profound philosophical and emotional currents. She belongs to the great Iberian tradition of poets who understand that the unsaid possesses equal weight to the spoken. Meaning emerges not only through words, but through the luminous spaces surrounding them.
The essayistic reflections surrounding her work reveal how consciously this aesthetic has been cultivated. Regalo writes slowly, inwardly, believing in what she calls “the epiphany of the verse.” Poems inhabit her for days before taking formal shape. They are acts of maturation rather than immediacy, revelations born from silence rather than spectacle. Her literary universe unfolds between Eros and Thanatos, terror and wonder, memory and transcendence. She understands poetry not as ornament, but as spiritual necessity — a way of resisting the flattening materialism and emotional velocity of contemporary life.
And perhaps this is why the sea appears so persistently in her poetry.
For the Atlantic, in Leocádia Regalo’s work, is not merely oceanic space. It is consciousness itself: immense, unstable, seductive, melancholic, carrying both the terror of distance and the promise of arrival. Her islands are never provincial landscapes. They are metaphysical territories where solitude acquires dignity and contemplation becomes resistance.
Reading Leocádia Regalo is thus akin to entering a quiet harbor at dusk: the winds have not ceased, the waters still move with invisible currents, but somewhere a lighthouse remains illuminated against the immensity.
And in that fragile, persistent light, poetry continues its ancient labor of saving the human soul from dispersion.
Diniz Borges
Translated by Diniz Borges and included in the Anthology, Into the Azorean Sea.
The Illuminated Fly of Natália Correia
by Leocádia Regalo
Who among us does not know Natália Correia’s immortal declaration that “poetry is meant to be eaten”? Like a stone hurled into still water, the line arrives at the close of the poem “The Defense of the Poet,” included in A Mosca Iluminada (The Illuminated Fly), published in 1972 — one more incandescent volume in the extraordinary literary journey of the great Azorean writer who transformed Portuguese letters through audacity, sensuality, and intellectual rebellion.
Possessed of a fiercely libertarian voice and an imagination unafraid of transgression, Natália gathers in this collection — divided into two movements, Fragments of an Itinerary and The Apparitions — a constellation of poems and poetic prose in which the lost paradise of childhood erupts with volcanic force. That childhood island, where she was born and remained until the age of eleven, returns not merely as geography but as mythic substance: telluric, maternal, sacred. The island becomes inseparable from the image of the Mother herself. “To lose one’s mother,” she writes, “is to possess an island, a branch of burning hydrangeas,” while to possess an island is “to hold an object unstained by distance.” Few writers in the Portuguese language have transformed insularity into such a metaphysical condition. In Natália, the Azores cease to be a peripheral territory and become an interior cosmos — lyrical, haunted, primordial instead.
A Mosca Iluminada refuses to be confined to any single emotional or literary register. It ventures boldly through the social, the intimate, the erotic, and the political, guided by the demiurgic vision of a sibylline and insurgent woman fascinated by the dreamscapes of Surrealism. Natália dedicates her existential voyage to the pursuit of knowledge — knowledge of things, of circumstance, of language itself, and of the sacred responsibility of naming the world. Perhaps more than any other of her books, this is the work in which the Azorean pulse of her imagination becomes fully visible: the Atlantic melancholy, the volcanic sensuality, the mystical hunger, the solitude of islands suspended between sea and sky.
Yet the book must also be read against the suffocating atmosphere of the Portugal in which it emerged. Under a conservative dictatorship that denied women even the right to vote, Natália Correia became what many contemporaries called “the most iconoclastic woman in Lisbon.” Fearless and dazzlingly modern, she forged an aesthetic rebellion, paradoxically nourished by the inexhaustible springs of Romanticism. She challenged ancestral institutions — family, marriage, conjugal morality, political orthodoxy — and exposed the hypocrisies hidden beneath words society had corrupted: happiness, charity, solidarity, virtue. Against the colonial war, she raised one of the most unforgettable cries in modern Portuguese poetry: “the masculine preference for death / offended by the intelligence of my breasts.” In lines such as these, her writing reveals itself as simultaneously erotic and political, visionary and insurgent.
Natália’s poetry survives because it is sustained by the authenticity of a life lived without compromise. Imagination, memory, rebellion, and love converge in her work to create a literature ablaze with moral and sensual intensity.
The volume closes with Romance da Paloma, a luminous autobiographical poem shaped in the cadence of the traditional Iberian ballad so beloved by Romantic writers. And lingering in the reader’s ears, like a song carried across the Atlantic wind, remains its haunting refrain:
Ai Paloma ai Palominha / mal soubeste Palomar.
It is impossible to read Natália Correia without sensing that poetry, for her, was never ornament. It was sustenance. Bread. Fire. Destiny.
Leocádia Regalo herself belongs to that enduring constellation of Azorean literary voices shaped by displacement and memory. Born in Norte Pequeno, on the island of São Jorge, in 1950, and living in Coimbra since the age of nineteen, she has devoted her life to literature as a teacher, critic, translator, and poet. In works such as Pela Voz de Calipso, she returns continually to the islands that formed her imagination — São Jorge, cradle of origin, and Terceira, where she spent her childhood and youth in Angra do Heroísmo — reaffirming that, in Azorean literature, exile is never the opposite of belonging, but another way of inhabiting the islands through language.
Translated by Diniz Borges -Published in Comunidades RTP
Leocádia Regalo: The Geography of Silence by Diniz Borges
There are writers who merely inhabit language, and there are those rare figures who seem to emerge from it the way islands rise from the sea — shaped by solitude, volcanic memory, and the long weather of contemplation. Leocádia Regalo belongs unmistakably to the latter tradition: one of the great Atlantic voices formed between silence and distance, between the inward pilgrimage of poetry and the luminous severity of the Azorean imagination.
Born in Norte Pequeno, on the island of São Jorge, and later transplanted to Coimbra, she carries within her work the paradox common to so many Azorean writers: exile not as rupture, but as another way of continuing to inhabit the islands. Her poetry unfolds like an interior archipelago — suspended between memory and transcendence, between the tangible world and the invisible forces that move beneath it. In her, one senses the Atlantic not merely as geography, but as metaphysical condition.
Across decades of literary creation — from Pela Voz de Calypso to Sob a Égide da Lua, from Passados os Rigores da Invernia to A Duas Vozes — Regalo has cultivated a body of work that resists noise, haste, and literary exhibitionism. She writes not with the urgency of production, but with the patience of inward gestation. In an interview granted to Mexican writer Beatriz Saavedra Gastélum, she confesses that poems inhabit her for days before they emerge formally onto the page. Poetry, for her, is not manufactured. It ripens. It descends almost epiphanically through moments of astonishment, crisis, memory, or spiritual disturbance.
This explains the extraordinary introspective density of her writing. Leocádia Regalo belongs to that increasingly endangered lineage of poets who believe silence is not emptiness, but preparation. “Without thinking,” she says, “it is impossible to create.” The poem becomes a dialogue with an alter ego, an interrogation of freedom, destiny, solitude, and transcendence. Her literary universe is woven, in her own words, between Eros and Thanatos, between terror and wonder, anguish and contemplation.
And yet, despite the philosophical depth of her work, there is nothing cold or academic in her voice. On the contrary, her poetry remains profoundly sensual and human. Music, painting, cinema, dance, eloquence — all the arts seem to converge in her sensibility. From childhood, she exhibited an instinctive creative force, sewing elaborate garments for dolls from scraps of fabric and improvising music by ear on the harmonium before ever learning formal notation. Creativity, for Regalo, is not profession but vocation — an almost sacred impulse through which the spirit resists the flattening materialism of contemporary existence.
This spiritual dimension permeates everything she writes. Her poetry does not seek simplistic answers but rather inhabits the fertile ambiguity of what remains unsaid. She speaks of “the magic of silence that generates enigmas and possibilities,” of meanings hidden between the lines, of the tension between what language reveals and what it deliberately withholds. Such an aesthetic places her firmly within the great Iberian and Latin American poetic traditions where mystery is not an obstacle to meaning, but its highest form.
At the same time, Regalo refuses the isolation of purely private lyricism. Her work remains ethically awake to the world. She sees poetry as “the practice of subtlety in a barbaric world,” echoing Roland Barthes, while condemning the spectacle-driven civilization that erodes sensitivity, solidarity, and moral imagination. In her vision, literature must return to the streets — not as propaganda, but as witness. The poet cannot remain neutral before war, migration, injustice, institutional abandonment, or the vulgarity of power. Her voice, though elegant and introspective, carries the moral restlessness of one who understands that beauty without conscience eventually becomes decoration.
The sea, naturally, remains omnipresent in her poetic cartography. Islands, cities, landscapes, atmospheres — these are not backdrops in her work but emotional geographies where memory and identity converge. Like many Azorean writers, Leocádia Regalo transforms insularity into a universal language of longing, reflection, and human fragility.
In an age intoxicated by speed, exposure, and immediacy, her poetry insists upon another rhythm — slower, deeper, more contemplative. It reminds us that literature is still capable of becoming refuge, resistance, and revelation.
And perhaps that is Leocádia Regalo’s greatest achievement: she writes as though protecting the last sacred territory left to modern humanity — the interior life itself.
Created from information in an interview published in Spanish by the newspaper El Diário de Madrid
Filamentos (artes e letras) 