Nadie has written as António Lobo Antunes | Culture | EUROtoday

António Lobo Antunes repeated for years a phrase that many have interpreted as a provocation or a gesture of vainness: “No one writes like me.” As time has handed, nonetheless, that assertion has come to appear much less like a boutade than a easy statement. His work, constructed over greater than 4 a long time, has profoundly reworked up to date Portuguese narrative. There is, definitely, a Lobo Antunes type: a writing that fractures the standard narrative, multiplies voices and turns time right into a round house the place reminiscence, consciousness and expertise coexist with out hierarchies. His novels transcend the bounds of the style and create a novel literary territory.

Paradoxically, this author who enjoys extraordinary recognition overseas has at all times been an uncomfortable determine in his personal nation. Lobo Antunes by no means hid his opinions on Portuguese literature or on Portugal itself, and his frankness – usually harsh and even hostile – has made him a presence that’s troublesome to digest for the cultural milieu. For years, Portuguese critics (and particularly educational critics) have had severe difficulties separating the work from the character, and his public determine (“since Camões there has been nothing interesting in Portuguese literature… until me”) has definitively conditioned the reception of his books.

The basic themes it addresses make up an unmistakable territory. Firstly, Portugal and its colonial struggle, reworked into an open wound and fixed delirium. In its pages, the struggle seems as a ghostly house of dehumanization and traumatic reminiscence that marks the person and collective future of the Portuguese. In parallel, Lobo Antunes has turned sickness – bodily or psychological – right into a metaphor for time, human fragility and the persistence of reminiscence. Added to those themes is a continuing consideration to injustice and forgotten lives: the defeated, the marginalized, those that inhabit the margins of historical past. But I wish to consider that the deepest key to his work is its poetic dimension. Although offered as novels, a lot of his books will be learn as immense prose poems of a whole lot of pages. His writing is constructed by means of photos, ellipses, repetitions and lyrical associations that drag the reader right into a verbal present of huge emotional depth.

Since 2011 I’ve had the privilege of translating his work into Spanish. Translating Lobo Antunes is coming into that very same torrent of language, listening to the voices that intersect in its pages and making an attempt to breed his music in one other language. I confess right here that no different creator has taken me so many instances, whereas translating it, to a state of unusual, virtually dreamlike emotion, on the verge of tears. Because within the literature of António Lobo Antunes there’s something that goes past the refined method or the unmistakable type: a human depth, with its virtues and its miseries, that crosses the web page and reaches the reader in a direct, visceral method. Perhaps that’s the reason the phrase that for years was interpreted as conceitedness has ended up buying the load of proof. Nobody has written like António Lobo Antunes.