“For you I arrived and leave./My home is where you are” (Baptista, 1992: 9). In José Agostinho Baptista the dimension of the island-place opens up to the reader’s world, through personal conundrums. With an insular vocation – physical and spiritual – the subject presents itself as a wandering geography, measured by the mountains, the sea or the silence of primordial Madeira. The island moves like a home through other geographical mosaics.
With a pronounced mnemonic mark, the departure and arrival of this poetry will always be that idyllic place, between the romantic “locus amoenus” and “locus horribilis”, cohabited by the sea, by the father, by love and, above all, by the island-subject, in the sense of a non-place, becoming the place “where you are”. The writing process of José Agostinho Baptista, with a tendency to recover a romantic model, “is not only the process of the feeling or of the memory, it is the writing process itself that becomes a book ” (Magalhães, 1989: 256).
Born in Funchal (August 15th, 1948), José Agostinho Baptista is recognised as one of the most important Portuguese poets of his generation. For a long period of his life, he lived in Lisbon, having been a translator of essential authors, such as W. B. Yeats or Walt Whitman, and a journalist, in various newspapers of the Portuguese capital, A República and Diário de Lisboa. Previously he collaborated with Comércio do Funchal. Some time ago he returned to Madeira.
To approach José Agostinho Baptista, we must speak of his telluric relationship with Madeira, rarely harmonious, but simultaneously, of a clear dependence. We believe that the island is the path of a poetics marked by the search/epiphany of the subject’s identity, full of its insular mark, the telluric drive. There is a clear identification of the poetic subject/island with an initiatory journey through the nostalgia of a primordial, pure and suffering love.
For Ana Margarida Falcão Seixas, José Agostinho Baptista reveals a strong presence of nostalgia in his writing that “tells, in various episodes and in different narrative dimensions, the exile of a subject in himself, body and mind unfolded in multiple variants that sacralize the dream, the reverie and the traces of the past, providing the enunciation of representations essentially derived from absence” (Seixas, 2003: 398), which combined with the telluric dimension reveals the islander feeling. The telluric drive, verbalized in the sentimental entwining between subject and island, “He was an island, the endless basalt” (Baptista, 1992: 19), scales the perspective of insularity in themes dear to Portuguese literature, such as exile, unrequited love, madness/reverie, nostalgia and memory.
The father figure, linked to the memory of the primordial island, is also another leitmotif, as is the case in Agora e na hora da nossa morte, “Nobody shuts up the stormy rivers deep/in my eyes,/when I think of the worms, the viscosities/which seek you through the satin” (Baptista, 1998: 102), a long (non-)prayer until the final “Amen”, or in poems like “Memória”, in Deste lado onde.
Other places take over the face of this primordial island, the most significant being Mexico: “Mexico, which is characterised by its most perennial essence, its gods, its parallel tattoos, which, in the symbolic and metaphorical universe of the “I”, configure this new land of the fathers, a vast homeland, where the “I” spreads its imaginary, in the romantic perspective of vastness and of recreating the originality of the first island”1 .
José Tolentino Mendonça speaks of the poetry of José Agostinho Baptista as fundamental to the understanding of Madeira, “the roughness of its time, the unbridled rapture of the landscape, the tireless streams, the mystery of the fruits, the helpless truth of its silence”2, because “The island is all the land. And, in the dark secret of its name, it holds the most significant ambivalence”3.
Of José Agostinho Baptista’s books, we highlight: Deste lado onde (1976), O último romântico (1981), Morrer no sul (1983), Autoretrato (1986), O centro do universo (1989), Paixão e cinzas (1992), Canções da terra distante (1994), Debaixo do azul sobre o vulcão (1995), Agora e na hora da nossa morte (1998), Biografia (2000), Afectos (2002), Anjos caídos (2003), Esta voz é quase vento (2004), Quatro luas (2006), Filho pródigo (2008), O pai, a mãe e o silêncio dos irmãos (2009) and Caminharei pelo vale da sombra (2011).
The public recognition of his work includes distinctions such as: the Grand Officer of the Order of Infante D. Henrique (2001 – Presidency of the Republic) and the Medal of Distinction awarded on the day of the Autonomous Region of Madeira (2015 – Regional Government of Madeira). Other prizes worth mentioning are the Pen Club – Poetry (2003), for Anjos Caídos, and the Grand Prize for Poetry CTT – Correios de Portugal (2004), for Esta Voz é Quase o Vento.
[1] Paulo Figueira (2020). José Agostinho Baptista, “le sentiment de soi”. In TRANSLOCAL. Culturas Contemporâneas Locais e Urbanas, nº 5.
Digital access: https://translocal.cm-funchal.pt/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/JoseAgostinhoBaptista-le-sentiment-de-soit5.pdf. Vd. José Agostinho Baptista, Debaixo do azul sobre o vulcão.
2 José Tolentino Mendonça, “Um sopro, uma leve pancada no coração”, in A Phala nº 81. Digital access: https://joseagostinhobaptista.com/a-phala.html.
3 José Tolentino Mendonça, “Um sopro, uma leve pancada no coração”, in A Phala nº 81. Digital access: https://joseagostinhobaptista.com/a-phala.html.
Bibliography
Falcão, Ana Margarida (2011). O Funchal na poesia insular do séc. XV ao séc. XX. In Funchal (d)escrito: ensaios sobre representações literárias da cidade. Vila Nova de Gaia: 7 Dias 6 Noites, 77-113.
Figueira, Paulo (2020). José Agostinho Baptista, “le sentiment de soi”. In TRANSLOCAL. Culturas Contemporâneas Locais e Urbanas, nº 5. Funchal: UMa-CIERL/CMF/IA. Digital access:
Consulted on 21-Dec-2021.
Figueira, Paulo (2008). Percursos da subjetividade pós-modernista: um contributo para a análise das poéticas de José Agostinho Baptista e Eduardo White [masters dissertation]. Funchal: Universidade da Madeira.
Magalhães, Joaquim Manuel (1989). Um pouco da morte. Lisboa: Presença.
Mendonça, José Tolentino (2000). Um sopro, uma leve pancada no coração. In A Phala – José Agostinho Baptista, nº 81. Digital access: https://joseagostinhobaptista.com/a-phala.html. Consulted on 21-Dec-2021.
Seixas, Ana Margarida Falcão (2003). Os Novos Shâmanes. Um Contributo para o Estudo da Narratividade na Poesia Portuguesa mais recente [dissertation]. Funchal: Universidade da Madeira.