The Songs of Antnio Botto
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
The Songs of Antnio Botto
By (Author) Antnio Botto
Translated by Fernando Pessoa
Edited by Josiah Blackmore
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
8th November 2010
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Anthologies: general
LGBTQ+ Studies / topics
821.92
Physical Properties
Paperback
168
Width 127mm, Height 203mm, Spine 20mm
Description
Antnio Botto was one of Portugal's first openly gay writers, a pote maudit whose unapologetic and candid verses about homosexual life and passion were both praised and reviled when they appeared in Portuguese in 1922 under the title Canes. Botto's poetic voice-confessional, personal, and intimate-revels and luxuriates in eroticism while expressing the ache of longing, silence, and suffering. Yet for all of his acclaim and notoriety-he was both hailed as one of the great poets of his day and condemned for his frank depictions of male-male desire-Botto and his work fell into oblivion after his death.
The Songs of Antnio Botto recovers this important, urgent voice in modern poetry by making available-for the first time since its private publication in 1948-the English-language translation of Canes that Botto's friend and artistic collaborator, Fernando Pessoa, completed in 1933. Pessoa, Portugal's preeminent modernist literary figure, considered Botto the only Portuguese poet worthy of the label "aesthete" and, as a critic and publisher, championed his work. Featuring an introduction to Botto's work and Pessoa's previously unpublished foreword to the 1948 edition as well as a new translation of Botto's 1941 elegy to Pessoa, The Songs of Antnio Botto establishes Botto as a pioneering figure in modern gay literature and places him alongside C. P. Cavafy and Federico Garca Lorca as one of the major poetic voices of the twentieth century.
Reviews
"In Antonio Bottos poems, the mouth trembles, kisses, lies, tells the truth, bites, bleeds, laughs, pleads, and sings, while the hand writes it all down trying to create something beautiful out of the dirty silences that surround unsanctioned love and sex. Even reading the poems a half century after they were written, one feels the flesh burn." Henri Cole
Author Bio
Antnio Botto (1897-1959) published more than twenty volumes of poetry, short stories, children's tales, and dramas during his lifetime. He worked as a civil servant in colonial Angola and Lisbon until, in 1942, he was dismissed from his post for lacking "moral character." In 1947, he emigrated to Brazil with his wife. He was fatally struck by a car in Copacabana in 1959.
