Jorge de Sena: the Lisbon engineer who became Portugal’s poet in exile

At ten o’clock on the morning of 11 September 2009, a ceremony was due to begin around a coffin in the Basílica da Estrela in Lisbon. The programme, as the Diário de Notícias announced it that morning, had the actress Eunice Muñoz reading two poems, music from the soprano Raquel Alão and the organist Nuno Lopes, and speeches by the essayist Eduardo Lourenço, the culture minister José António Pinto Ribeiro and the former president Ramalho Eanes. The prime minister, José Sócrates, was to attend.1 source1 source

A funeral procession would then take the coffin to the Prazeres cemetery. The man being buried had been dead for three decades. Jorge de Sena, poet, novelist, playwright, critic and translator, had died in Santa Barbara, California, in 1978, after almost nineteen years of exile. That June, at the ceremony at which his papers were donated to the Biblioteca Nacional, the minister had announced that his body would come home.3 sources3 sources

He had been born ninety years earlier in the same city, on 2 November 1919, the Dia de Finados or All Souls’ Day. A military coup when he was six put Portugal under a dictatorship that lasted most of his life. He spent the last part of it outside the country, and much of his writing was an argument with it.2 sources2 sources

Writers worked under a censor, and the political police, the PIDE, watched the regime’s opponents. Sena never joined a party, but from his youth he backed opposition movements and spoke against the regime in public. That made him a target of censorship and of the pressure that would end in exile, as the historian Paulo Rodrigues Ferreira puts it in the national library’s dictionary of Portuguese historians.1 source1 source

Jorge Cândido de Sena was the only child of Augusto Raposo de Sena, a merchant navy captain, and Maria da Luz Teles Grilo. His biographer Jorge Fazenda Lourenço describes a lonely childhood, with a protective mother, a father who was mostly away and cousins he rarely played with. His mother had him taught music. He played the piano and improvised for the family, to the disapproval of his father’s relatives, while a green parrot roamed loose about the house. A green parrot is also at the centre of one of his stories, “Homenagem ao papagaio verde” (Homage to the green parrot), which draws on that unhappy household.1 source1 source

After the Colégio Vasco da Gama and the Liceu Camões, a Lisbon secondary school, he entered the Escola Naval at 17, to follow the naval career his father had planned for him at birth. He came top of his course, and in early October 1937 he sailed as a cadet on the training ship Sagres, his first sight of Africa, Brazil and the Canary Islands.2 sources2 sources

The Navy then expelled him, in a process never fully explained. Fazenda Lourenço links it to his unease with military discipline at a time when the regime was hardening and Spain was at civil war. In September 1936, sailors on three warships had risen against the dictatorship, and some of them were among the first prisoners sent to the new camp at Tarrafal, in Cape Verde.3 sources3 sources

He had been writing since 1936, but he dated the start of his poetry to 1938, when he heard Debussy’s piano prelude La Cathédrale engloutie. “It was from music that I leapt into poetry,” he said.1 source1 source

His family would not let him try the merchant navy, mathematics or humanities, so from October 1938 he took the preparatory courses at the Faculty of Sciences in Lisbon and then moved to the engineering faculty in Porto. He graduated in civil engineering in 1944, the year his father died, with friends helping to pay his way.1 source1 source

His first book of poems, Perseguição (Persecution), came out in 1942 from the Cadernos de Poesia, a poetry review. He wrote for the leading literary journals of the time, from Seara Nova to Vértice, and lectured on Rimbaud, Florbela Espanca, Fernando Pessoa and Luís de Camões.3 sources3 sources

Politics came early too. In October 1945 he was among the democrats who met at the Centro Escolar Republicano Almirante Reis in Lisbon to ask the government to postpone elections, abolish the PIDE and end censorship, the meeting that gave birth to the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD). As a reserve officer he signed public lists demanding free elections. Fazenda Lourenço writes that he escaped deportation to Tarrafal thanks to a Brazilian diplomat, Rui Couto.2 sources2 sources

After a short contract with the national monuments service in 1947, he worked from 1948 to 1959 as an engineer for the Junta Autónoma de Estradas, the roads authority. The job took him all over the country, which he came to know, he said later, “as few others will, because few will have used such an opportunity with the aim of seeing it culturally”.2 sources2 sources

The steady wage let him marry. On 12 March 1949 he wed Maria Mécia de Freitas Lopes, a history and philosophy graduate who had trained at the Porto music conservatoire and was the sister of the critic Óscar Lopes. They had nine children.2 sources2 sources

He also wrote theatre criticism, translated Hemingway’s Fiesta and Erskine Caldwell in 1954 and Malraux’s La Condition humaine in 1958, and edited Fernando Pessoa, starting with the first collection of his writings on aesthetics, Páginas de Doutrina Estética (1946). In 1956 he was among the founders of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Escritores, the writers’ society.3 sources3 sources

The presidential election of 1958 set off a wave of protest across Portugal. In its wake came the Revolta da Sé, the Cathedral Revolt, an armed rising planned for the night of 11 to 12 March 1959. Catholics, monarchists, socialists and other opponents took part, civilians alongside officers such as Pastor Fernandes and João Varela Gomes. The PIDE broke it up, and plotters were held in the Aljube and Caxias prisons before a military court tried them.2 sources2 sources

Sena was one of the civilians. According to Fazenda Lourenço, he was to have been minister of public works in the provisional government. Once the plot failed, the consequences for conspirators still at liberty were easy to foresee.2 sources2 sources

An invitation came at the right moment. The Brazilian government asked him to present a report at the IV International Colloquium of Luso-Brazilian Studies, organised by the University of Bahia in Salvador in August 1959. He travelled with only what he could carry and stayed. His wife and children followed later, after some trouble getting out of Portugal. He was a few months short of forty.3 sources3 sources

Brazil gave Sena what Portugal had not: a career as a university teacher. He taught literary theory at the newly founded Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters in Assis, in São Paulo state, and then Portuguese literature at Araraquara. His colleagues included the Portuguese poet Adolfo Casais Monteiro, who had also left Portugal, and Brazilian scholars such as Antonio Candido.4 sources4 sources

He kept up the fight from abroad. Through the Committee of Portuguese Intellectuals he joined the newsroom of Portugal Democrático, an exile paper in São Paulo, for about three years, and his articles caught the PIDE’s eye. A statement of support for the MUD that exiled opponents signed in October 1961 led to the arrest warrant.1 source1 source

Academic life had its own obstacles, and one of them required him to take Brazilian citizenship, which he did in 1963. His first thesis, Uma Canção de Camões (A Song by Camões), finished in 1962, could not be presented at Belo Horizonte. The second, Os Sonetos de Camões e o Soneto Quinhentista Peninsular (Camões’s sonnets and the sixteenth-century Iberian sonnet), won him his doctorate at Araraquara in October 1964.2 sources2 sources

By then Brazil had changed. The military coup of 1964 was followed by a wave of persecution, and Sena accepted an invitation from the University of Wisconsin. He moved his family to Madison in October 1965.2 sources2 sources

At Madison he became a full professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in 1967. In 1970 he moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, as professor of Portuguese and Brazilian literature and of comparative literature. He chaired both the Spanish and Portuguese department, from 1974, and comparative literature.3 sources3 sources

The move from Brazil produced what Fazenda Lourenço calls one of the most radical exile poems in Portuguese, “Em Creta, com o Minotauro” (In Crete, with the Minotaur). The poet sits down to coffee with the monster; neither of them, he writes, has a country, and he declares that he himself is his homeland.3 sources3 sources

Between September 1968 and February 1969 he came back to Europe and, for the first time in nine years, to Portugal. The Lisbon review O Tempo e o Modo had given him a special issue that April, a rare honour for a living poet. In Paris, shortly before he set foot in Portugal again, he told the Diário de Lisboa how he saw himself.2 sources2 sources

The visit left him low. Writing to the poet Eugénio de Andrade, he said his house had seemed shrunken and the country had saddened him deeply “with its air of shabby decadence”. What he missed were his friends.1 source1 source

The revolution of 25 April 1974 ended the dictatorship, but Sena did not move back. The Yale scholar Kenneth David Jackson, who knew him, writes that the turmoil that followed made a permanent return unwise and that illness soon set in. In March 1976 he had a severe heart attack and began organising his work for posterity.2 sources2 sources

He did come to speak. On 10 June 1977, during the celebrations of the Day of Camões and the Portuguese Communities, he gave an address at the liceu, the state secondary school, in Guarda, a text he had written in Paris a week before. José Saramago later said that Sena had not been afraid to pour “ice-cold water on the patriotic fervour” that people expected that day.1 source1 source

That year he went to Sicily to receive the Etna-Taormina International Poetry Prize for his life’s work. He died in Santa Barbara on 4 June 1978 of a cancer diagnosed too late. He was 58.2 sources2 sources

Sena studied Luís de Camões, the sixteenth-century author of the epic Os Lusíadas, and Fernando Pessoa for the rest of his life. His lectures on the two in the 1940s announced subjects he never gave up.1 source1 source

Under the dictatorship, the official reading of Camões was a political battleground. Sena read him historically, as if he were a contemporary, and gave him the weaknesses of an ordinary man. He placed him in Mannerism, the restless style that followed the Renaissance, against what Ferreira calls an academic habit of seeing Camões through a patriotic filter. The scholar Burghard Baltrusch credits Sena with rescuing Camões from the Estado Novo’s ideological discourse.2 sources2 sources

On Pessoa, his essays were gathered after his death as Fernando Pessoa & Cª Heterónima (1982), which Baltrusch, who wrote his doctorate on Pessoa, still calls one of the clearest guides to that poet. Sena also translated hundreds of poems, from Cavafy to Emily Dickinson, and novels and plays by Molière, Poe, Brecht, Faulkner, Hemingway, Graham Greene, Malraux and Eugene O’Neill, among others.3 sources3 sources

His one novel, Sinais de Fogo (Signs of Fire), was unfinished when he died and appeared in 1979. He had meant it as the first volume of a larger cycle. The narrator, also called Jorge, tells of his adolescence in Lisbon and then at the seaside town of Figueira da Foz in the summer of 1936, when civil war broke out in Spain and the Spaniards in town were more refugees than holidaymakers.3 sources3 sources

Poetry International describes it as both a fresco of Portuguese society during the Spanish Civil War and a detailed portrait of the education of a poet. Ferreira adds that it reproduces the stock Portuguese images of Spaniards as loud and festive, and that it records the fear of life under dictatorship.2 sources2 sources

The director Luís Filipe Rocha, who made a documentary about Sena, Sinais de Vida, in 1984, filmed the novel as Sinais de Fogo in 1995.1 source1 source

Much of what readers know of Sena was published after his death by Mécia de Sena. Her brother, Rui Silvino de Freitas Lopes, wrote that she was left with “a monumental quantity of unrealised projects” and “tons” of manuscripts. Every title that appeared after 1978 began with her, including his letters with writers from Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen to Vergílio Ferreira and Eduardo Lourenço. She died in Los Angeles on 28 March 2020, aged 100.1 source1 source

In Santa Barbara, where he had built up the Portuguese programme, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation gave the university an endowment after his death to start a Center for Portuguese Studies, now named after him. In 2009 his papers went to the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon and his body to the Prazeres cemetery.4 sources4 sources

His centenary in 2019 was marked on both sides of the Atlantic. Scholars met at Santa Barbara for a colloquium on his itineraries through Portugal, Brazil and the United States, the Portuguese post office issued a stamp with his face, and the airline TAP named a new airliner after him.2 sources2 sources

Sena believed Portugal undervalued him, and from America he attacked what he saw as the mediocrity and provincialism of its literary life. His letters complain that friends and publishers ignored his books. His collections of satirical essays, O Reino da Estupidez (The Kingdom of Stupidity), turn that grievance into a portrait of a closed culture.2 sources2 sources

The reputation has since caught up. Poetry International noted in 2007 that the prose-like registers which once made critics call his technique weak are what younger Portuguese poets now find attractive in him. Writing in Público in 2019, the journalist Luís Miguel Queirós called him the “indigestible giant” of Portuguese culture, with no intellectual equal since Pessoa.2 sources2 sources

His life also tracks the history of the opposition to the Estado Novo, from the MUD of 1945 to the exile press in Brazil. Ferreira argues that his life is relevant in itself to understanding contemporary Portuguese culture and the history of resistance to the regime.1 source1 source