O formato mulher: A emergência da autoria feminina na poesia portuguesa (review)

Anna Klobucka's O formato mulher: A emergência da autoria feminina na poesia portuguesa, presented to the Portuguese public in January 2010, first in Porto (by Rosa Maria Martelo) and then in Lisbon (by Ana Luísa Amaral), immediately received the attention of the Portuguese media. Raquel Ribeiro (Público) reviewed it and engaged in conversation with the author in a compelling interview; a few weeks later, Eduardo Pitta, widely acclaimed poet and literary critic, published a very shrewd critical commentary in Ípsilon, the Friday cultural supplement of the same daily paper. Meanwhile, two excellent, extended critical readings of Anna Klobucka's remarkable book, resulting from their respective public presentations, have been published in highly respected literary journals in Portugal: Ana Luísa Amaral's came out in JL [Jornal de Letras Artes e Ideias], n.º 1026, 27 Jan. 2010; Rosa Maria Martelo's appeared in Colóquio-Letras, n.º 175, Set. Dez., 2010. Rosa Martelo is well known in Portugal and abroad as a fine literary scholar and critic, focusing mainly on Portuguese poetry and poetics. Ana Luísa Amaral, a first-rate literary scholar and critic, specializing mainly in English and American poetry and poetics, is a celebrated, internationally prize-winning poet, indeed, one of the six Portuguese women poets studied by Klobucka in O formato mulher. Both these critics being lovers and readers of poetry in many languages, their insightful commentaries benefit from their comparative perspectives, thus doing justice to the book's solid theoretical framework.

Portuguese language readers will no doubt be moved to pay due attention to O formato mulher by Pitta's, Martelo's and Amaral's assessments, and, hopefully, to become interested enough in the poets Klobucka critiques to want to learn more about them and about Portuguese poetry as a whole. By writing this review in English, my aim is to make those who do not know Portuguese realize what they are missing. Of course, the best thing would be for Klobucka's book, formerly a doctoral dissertation submitted to Harvard in 1993, to be published in English as well, and I do hope this will eventually happen. It should not be difficult. Klobucka is a fine transatlantic scholar. Her Mariana Alcoforado: Formação de um mito cultural (IN-CM, 2006) first appeared in English as The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a Cultural Myth (Bucknell, 2000). Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality (Toronto, 2007), a collection of essays she co-edited with Mark Sabine, just came out in Portugal as O corpo em Pessoa: Corporalidade, género, sexualidade (Assírio & Alvim, 2010). I also hope that Klobucka's very original and perceptive readings will inspire a team of competent and sensitive translators to take up the task of translating these and other Portuguese women poets into English. It would be fruitful, for example, to have such a shrewd reader of contemporary American poetry by women as Lynn Keller to consider the specificities of women's poetic voices and compositional strategies elsewhere (Thinking Poetry. Readings in Contemporary Women's Exploratory Poetics [Iowa, 2010]).

The poets dealt with at length in O formato mulher - Florbela Espanca (1894-1930), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1919-2004), Maria Teresa Horta (1937-), Luiza Neto Jorge (1939-89), Ana Luísa Amaral (1956-), and Adília Lopes (1960-), the last two added to the enlarged and revised Portuguese version - are six very different women poets. In their distinct ways, they are, all of them, very fine and inspiring poets. But they become truly alive and challenging in Klobucka's very well-informed, learned, and insightful analysis. As her subtitle suggests, Klobucka is concerned with identifying an emergent female authorship in twentieth-century Portuguese poetry. She does so in five well-developed chapters. Besides the theoretical introduction, she devotes a chapter to Florbela Espanca and another to Sophia Andresen, in which she deals with the old problematic relation (in the tradition) between woman and poet. In the...