Categories: POETRY

A WOMAN CALLED FLORBELA: The sadness that tears apart all, the love that everything blends

Today it is easy, even for a woman to talk about sex and femininity, but have the courage to express their intimate existential anxiety in the early years of the twentieth century, it was a challenge, and a Portuguese poet named Florbela – an illegitimate daughter, born and died in the same month and day, 8th December – had took exactly 36 years to tell us that things, but he had begun to write poetically at the age of nine.

“The wind starts to laugh, makes the pass,

In rough demented laughter;

And this tragic and sick my soul

Do not know whether to laugh there, if there is crying!

Wind mournful voice, plaintive voice,

Wind always making fun of me,

Wind risk in the world and love,

Your voice torture everyone! …

Worth crying over you, my poor friend!

Vents this pain alone with me,

And in the valleys not so! … The wind cries!

I well know, friend, this feeling

Our breasts be like a Calvary

and we walk out laughing inside life!”

Studying in high school in Evora, has known the works of Balzac and Dumas, Castelo Branco and Garrett, but also a classmate special, Alberto, what she married in 1913, at the age of 19 years. Three years later, she enclosed inside a book 85 poems and three short stories, works with a newspaper in Lisbon and continued his graduate studies. An involuntary abortion, at that time, breaks his latent anxiety, becoming neurosis, and from the depth of that sadness without a name, she published her first hit, “The Book of Sorrows.” She had 25 years old, when he leaves her husband, to go to live with a promising young artillery officer Portuguese, José Antonio, the one who married the following year, in 1920.

“My Destiny told me to cry:

“On the road of Life goes walking;

And you see the move, questioning

About Love, thou shalt find. “

Went down the road laughing and singing,

The accounts of parading my dream …

And night and day, rain and moonlight

I was always walking and wondering …

Even the old one I asked: “Old Man,

Visit the chance Love in your way? “

And the old man shuddered … looked … and laughed …

Now the road, already tired,

Return all back, discouraged …

And I stop to mutter: “No one saw him!”

Poems, short stories, diaries and letters, to Florbela Espanca open the doors of success, because the keys of his concern are those of love, where his audience appreciates the themes of loneliness and sadness, seduction and desire, but also those – typically Portuguese – of the nostalgia and death. Its pages collect the freshness of the kisses and the nostalgia of the beloved, containing love and passion, painted with whole chapters devoted to the biggest event of every human being: the soul that opens to love.

“The night comes slowly sitting

On Earth, which floods of sorrow …

And even the blessing Moonlight

The wanted to make divinely pure …

No one comes behind her to follow

Your pain that is full of torture …

And I hear the immense night sobbing!

And I hear sobbing Dark Night!

Why are you so black, so sad!

Is it, perhaps, O Night, in you there

Equal to Saudade I refrain!

Longing that I know where I come …

Maybe thee, O Night! … Or anyone! …

I never know who I am, nor what I have!”

Still a divorce in 1925, yet with a dip in falling in love and into a new marriage with a doctor (and poet) named Mario. The death of his beloved brother, had open to Florbela two ports (the publication of the book “The Masks of Destiny” and a suicide attempt in 1928), but she is entrusting his suffering to the pages of her diary, and she manages to survive, until 1930, the year of his new double-suicide attempt, the year which gives two things: the sweetness of his biggest publishing success, with “Blossom Heath”, and a diagnosis of pulmonary edema.

“It is so sad to die at my age!

And I will see my eyes, penitents

Purple dresses as believers

The grim convent da Saudade!

And then I will look at (how eagerly! …)

My slender hands, languidly,

White fingers, some sick babies

That they shall die in full youth!

And being up again is to have the Paradise

It is to have the broad road, the Sun, florida,

Where all is light and grace and laughter!

And my twenty-three years … (I’m so new!)

Say softly laughing: “What a beautiful life …!”

Answer my pain: “How beautiful the pit!”

Florbela hugging his death on the December 8, 1930, by ingesting barbiturates, but leaves a letter, begging to put on his coffin what remains of the aircraft of the much-loved brother. If you visit Portugal, add a stop in Vila Vicosa – the land of his birth – and remember to bring in your book travel what she gave you when you were not even born: “Do not be afraid, do not! Quietly, like falling asleep in an autumn night, close your eyes, simply, gently, while a dove falls asleep in the afternoon. “

“It’s sad, says we, the vastness

The boundless sea! And that voice fatal

With which he speaks, shaking our bad!

And the night is sad as Extreme Unction.

It is sad and tears the heart

A setting of our Portugal!

And they see that I’m … I … after all,

The most of which are hurt? Thing …

Sunsets of agony I bring them

Within me and all that is mine

It is a sad poetry d’bitterness!

And the vastness of the sea, all that water