For Vitorino
That the prose of António Lobo Antunes (1942-2026) is prose “written on the edge of a knife”, an expression that the author of Elephant Memory applied to the prose of José Cardoso Pires (1925-1998), this is, for those who read it, more than evident. But in this country of lack of culture served on the shiny platter of compulsory schooling, where one never learns to read authors of the difficulty and fascination of António Lobo Antunes; In this world of Bolognese degrees and master’s degrees offered by ChatGpt, and where politicians take courses on Sundays, that same expression is something that is not understood. What does it mean to write “on the edge of a knife”? And, in the specific case of the lyrics for music that Lobo Antunes wrote for Vitorino, this “writing on the edge of the knife” is, first of all, writing using a range of rhetorical resources that, for Portuguese poetry in vogue, and for the average reader we have in Portugal, is another dangerous road: Lobo Antunes’ lyrics, poems are a transport through time: the reader has to immerse themselves in the rhythms of popular tradition, in colloquialism – I would even say in certain taste for the proverbial, the orality coming from the streets, the slang, the slang – of a language that, today, many may no longer recognize as linguistic heritage.
Going through his little book of verses, in the edition that Dom Quixote published in 2002, entitled Song Lyricswhat we find are around 19 poetic compositions that, put in the southern Alentejo voice of the great interpreter (and also lyricist) that is Vitorino, gain, with the musical arrangements in which a South American modulation (the tango, the bolero), an emotion that comes from knowing how to write with memory of speech, with knowledge of the living scenes of a people.
Listen, or read, Bolero from the Sensitive Colonel Who Made Love in Monsanto and the verses in smaller redondilha, the construction of the rich rhyme, with subtle melodic games through which alliteration, assonance, tenses and verbal modes are unfolded that are combined with nouns, adjectives, ways of fixing in images full of dramatism the everyday truth of the “diverse cases” that Lobo Antunes learned from Camões and the poets he admired, all of this contributes to the edge of the knife of literature in these poems being synonymous with deep dive in life itself: “I, who was moved / by everything and nothing / left you standing / on the side of the road / used your body / paid your price / forgot your name / wiped myself with a handkerchief / looked at your waist / standing on the asphalt / lifted your skirts / laid down on the bench / in a beech forest / with / suitcase in hand / didn’t even speak / didn’t even kiss / didn’t even moan / bit, hugged / five hundred escudos / that’s what you said / you were fifteen / sixteen, seventeen /you smelled like the bush /the soup kitchen (…).”
Now, immerse yourself in life in terms of poetry – and particularly in that poetry of popular taste, which comes from cafes and taverns, which comes from the ships of History, or from the cacilheiros of a Lisbon “on the run”; poetry that thrives on words of use and does not seek to be excessively metaphorical, hermetic, enigmatic (and it is not that Lobo Antunes was not a reader of Herberto or O’Neill, Cesariny or Sophia, in whose works image and metaphor do not explain, but rather suggest or block access to an ideologically obvious or emotionally understandable message) – this also implies knowing how to theatricalize what is seen.
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