Herberto Helder: the Funchal-born poet who said no

In 1994 the jury of the Prémio Pessoa chose a poet. The annual award, founded in 1987 by the weekly Expresso and now run with the state bank Caixa Geral de Depósitos, honours a Portuguese person for their part in the country’s cultural or scientific life. The prize came with 7,000 contos, seven million escudos. The poet did not want it.2 sources2 sources

The writer António Alçada Baptista later described how he and the journalist Clara Ferreira Alves, who used to visit the poet, tried to talk him round. They failed. As Alçada Baptista remembered it, the answer was short: “Don’t tell anyone, and give the prize to someone else.”1 source1 source

Alçada Baptista insisted there was no arrogance in it. “His refusal was not against anyone,” he wrote; it was a decision from the poet’s innermost self, and it at once earned their deepest respect. The refusal did not stay secret. Clara Ferreira Alves wrote about Helder in Expresso that December, soon after he turned the prize down, and three years later interviewers were quoting his words back to other writers.2 sources2 sources

The man who said no was Herberto Helder, born 64 years earlier in Funchal, on Madeira. By then many readers and critics thought him the finest Portuguese poet alive. He had also spent years refusing interviews, photographs and literary gatherings, and he treated silence as part of the work.4 sources4 sources

Helder was born on 23 November 1930 and went to school in Funchal until he was sixteen. His mother died when he was eight, in a house on Rua Aspirante Mota Freitas with a window over the sea. After her death he became a boarder at a Funchal school, the Colégio Lisbonense. He remembered the dormitory on the top floor, with a view over the whole city.3 sources3 sources

In October the family went up to Monte, the hill village above Funchal. A neighbour from those holidays told the writer António Fournier that the teenage Helder always had a book under his arm and recited Fernando Pessoa and Cesário Verde to the younger boys. Half a century later the neighbour could still quote lines of Cesário he had only ever heard from Helder.1 source1 source

In 1946 he moved to Lisbon to finish secondary school. His first poems appeared in Funchal, in the anthology Arquipélago in 1952, when he was 21. He is said to have helped write a manifesto to the islanders published with Poemas Bestiais, which the censors seized. In 1956 he and his friends paid for Búzio, a literary magazine that lasted one issue; Helder wrote to the Madeiran poet Edmundo de Bettencourt, who sent three poems by return. That year he left Funchal for good.2 sources2 sources

He started law and then Romance philology, and finished neither. Observador puts both courses in Coimbra; two later Lusa profiles put them in Lisbon. He went abroad and took poor, irregular jobs in France, the Netherlands and Belgium. In Antwerp, Observador’s obituary records, he lived clandestinely and worked as a guide for sailors looking for the port’s brothels.4 sources4 sources

Portugal was then ruled by António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship, the Estado Novo, with censorship of the press and books and a political police, the PIDE. In 1958 Helder took part in the presidential campaign of General Humberto Delgado, the opposition candidate. The same year he published his first book, O Amor em Visita, a single poem of about 220 lines in free verse, in an edition of 500 copies brought out by the publisher Luiz Pacheco.5 sources5 sources

Three years later came A Colher na Boca, a substantial book of poems written between 1953 and 1960. Juliet Perkins of King’s College London, who began a doctorate on Helder in 1977, notes that fellow writers regularly cite it among their favourite and most influential books.1 source1 source

Back in Portugal he ran one of the Gulbenkian Foundation’s travelling libraries, which took books to villages across the country. Several writers linked to the surrealists did the same job. Police files show that between 1960 and 1963 the PIDE and the public security police watched and reported on library staff and their friends, Helder among them, at Castro Verde in the Alentejo.2 sources2 sources

In 1963 he published Os Passos em Volta, short prose pieces drawn partly from his years of drifting through northern Europe. Observador credits it with much of his fame, and eleven editions came out in his lifetime. When Fournier pointed out that it had 23 stories, the number of letters in the Portuguese alphabet of the time, Helder confirmed that it was a kind of personal encyclopaedia from A to Z.4 sources4 sources

In 1964 he and the poet António Aragão edited the first Poesia Experimental anthology, which opened the way to Portugal’s experimental poetry movement. The same year his Electrònicolírica, later renamed A Máquina Lírica, used combinatorial rules to generate poems. Helder said it was influenced by the Italian poet Nanni Balestrini’s Tape Mark poems of 1961 and 1962, combinatorial experiments made with an electronic calculator.2 sources2 sources

He worked on the international news desk of the Emissora Nacional, the state radio. He lost the job over his part in publishing a Portuguese translation of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, which ended in court with a suspended sentence. In 1969 he became literary director of the publisher Estampa.2 sources2 sources

The worst blow was Apresentação do Rosto, a fictionalised self-portrait published by Ulisseia in 1968. The PIDE seized it straight away. The ban order of 22 July 1968 called it “the author’s autobiography, of leftist character” and cited passages “of great obscenity”. Almost all the roughly 1,500 copies were destroyed; Perkins, who owns one, puts the survivors at about a hundred. Helder later disowned the book and asked friends to destroy their copies.4 sources4 sources

In 1971, after travelling through Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, Helder went to Africa. Angola had been at war since 1961, when nationalist movements rose against Portuguese rule. In Luanda he wrote for Notícia, an illustrated weekly, from April 1971 to June 1972, signing his own name and a second byline, Luís Bernardes in one account and Luís Bernardo in others. His full name was Herberto Helder Luís Bernardes de Oliveira.5 sources5 sources

His son, Daniel Oliveira, was not yet two when his father left. In a preface written decades later he guessed that Helder, if asked, would have said he wrote for Notícia so that he could live in Angola, and that he was never a journalist because he was always something else.2 sources2 sources

The pieces were often ordinary assignments. He wrote about a Portuguese man cheated by a German company, the holes the rains left in Luanda’s streets and a local market. He described Sundays in the war at Nambuangongo. He interviewed the fado singer Carlos do Carmo and the Brazilian singer Nelson Ned, reviewed an exhibition of modern art and covered a Sporting–Benfica match. In one piece he admitted to reading a great deal in office hours.2 sources2 sources

In Angola he was also badly hurt in a car accident, which, in the words of the Brazilian scholar Bianca Dias, marked his body and his poetry. From Africa he went on to the United States, and he settled in Portugal for good only after the revolution of 25 April 1974 ended the dictatorship. He then worked for radio and magazines and edited the magazine Nova.4 sources4 sources

After Cobra, O Corpo o Luxo a Obra and Photomaton & Vox, the books of the late 1970s, “came silence”, in the words of Observador’s obituary. For roughly the last thirty years of his life he gave almost no interviews, would not be photographed and kept away from literary gatherings. Accounts of his last interview differ: Lusa dated it to 1968, while Fournier quotes one published in the newspaper Público in December 1990.6 sources6 sources

He had explained himself in a letter of 1977 to the critic Eduardo Prado Coelho. What could be quoted from a book or an author, he asked. “Surely his death may be quotable. And, above all, his silence.” Two years later he put the idea into Photomaton & Vox.1 source1 source

A late poem in Servidões (2013) turns on a magazine’s invitation. Asked to send a poem to a magazine everyone wrote for, the speaker answers that he will send one if nobody else does, since “I collaborate only in my own death”. They leave, wishing the devil would take him, and he writes the poem, “as short as possible”, content with nothing and no one.2 sources2 sources

Around the time he turned seventy, the mayor of Oeiras, Isaltino Morais, was planning a Parque dos Poetas with statues of Portuguese poets by the sculptor Francisco Simões. Helder refused to be one of them. “The power of a poem concerns the world, and that is why poetry is considered a dangerous activity,” he wrote in a statement quoted by the critic Serafim Ferreira. “Politics is anodyne because its object is not the world but a fiction of the world.” The surrealist poet Mário Cesariny threatened to go to Oeiras with a bulldozer.1 source1 source

He also kept rewriting. Each new edition of his collected poems added books, cut others and changed individual poems, so that no edition was final. Perkins counted five versions by 2004; two more full collections followed, in 2009 and 2014.2 sources2 sources

The Prémio Pessoa had been awarded since 1987, and the list of winners still shows Herberto Helder under 1994. He was not making an exception for it. Perkins wrote that, unconvinced that literary prizes were fair, he turned down every one awarded to him. His name was put forward for the European Literary Prize in 1991, and in April 2007 Portugal’s PEN Club backed him, with the poet António Ramos Rosa, for the Nobel Prize in Literature.3 sources3 sources

Some fellow writers admired the refusal. In December 1997 the novelist José Cardoso Pires, who had just won the same prize, was asked whether he understood Helder’s position.1 source1 source

Helder kept publishing to the end. In May 2014 came A Morte Sem Mestre, new poems in a limited edition with a CD of five poems read by the poet himself, the book that marked his move to the publisher Porto Editora. Poemas Completos followed the same year.3 sources3 sources

He died at home in Cascais, where he had lived for many years, on Monday 23 March 2015, aged 84. The cause was not made public. His last book, Poemas Canhotos, appeared two months later.3 sources3 sources

The critic Pedro Mexia said that Helder mattered as much to the second half of the twentieth century as Fernando Pessoa did to the first. Younger poets wrote about him: José Tolentino Mendonça, also from Madeira, called a poem “A infância de Herberto Helder”, Herberto Helder’s childhood. His experiments of the 1960s fed into the computer-generated poetry of Pedro Barbosa and Rui Torres.3 sources3 sources

He was a translator too, of an unusual kind. In 1997 he published three books of what he called “poems changed into Portuguese”, from Wolof, Amerindian and other traditions, worked up from existing translations in European languages. His own work travels less easily. Gallimard published an anthology in French, Le poème continu, in 2010, but Perkins called him notoriously difficult to translate into English and noted his scant exposure in Britain.3 sources3 sources

The books he hid have come back. Apresentação do Rosto was reissued in 2020 at the initiative of his widow, Olga Lima. In 2025, ten years after his death, the Buchholz bookshop in Lisbon showed 60 of his titles published between 1958 and 2018, and the sociologist João Pedro George published a biography, Se Eu Quisesse, Enlouquecia, after seven or eight years of work.4 sources4 sources