Campo de Relâmpagos: leituras do excesso na poesia de Luís Miguel Nava by Ricardo Vasconcelos (review)

Luís Miguel Nava is among those writers who force critics to take into account a certain mythologization that surrounds their public, extra-literary personas.

During his brief life—1957–1995—and literary career, which took place, most visibly, during the eighties, he was perceived as an unclassifiable author—someone who presented a very original self-referential sensitivity in a time when casual referentiality coexisted with more experimental, language-centered approaches to poetry. Nava has been mostly known as a poet who created dark and imaginative worlds, peopled by viscerae, disembodied organs, framed by the meticulousness of his poetic language, which reminds one of Eugénio de Andrade’s formal rigor or of Herberto Helder’s experimentalism. His career was unfolding at a time—the eighties and early nineties—when Portuguese poetry was allegedly still enduring the side-effects of a tendency toward a certain cult of the referential, the realistic and the prosaic, and (what appeared to be) a loose, informal, relationship with language.

Luís Miguel Nava is somewhat of a cult figure (also) for extra-literary reasons (regardless of the considerable literary merits of his work). I am referring to Nava’s brutal and tragic assassination in Brussels, where he worked as a translator for the European Parliament. Unfair as it may be—similarly to authors that departed prematurely and/or tragically such as Antero de Quental, António Nobre, Mário de Sá-Carneiro—it seems to me that it is impossible to separate the reception to Nava’s work from the reactions of the public (casual and professional readers alike) to his unexpected death. Literary and extra-literary considerations, in cases such as this, become more inextricably, and mysteriously, linked than what should be expected.

Although Luís Miguel Nava’s work was the object of analysis by some of the most important poetry critics of his time (Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, António Guerreiro, Maria Lúcia Lepecki, Fernando Gumarães, Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre, Eduardo do Prado Coelho, Fernando Pinto do Amaral, Rosa Maria Martelo, etc), studies were not as abundant or as in-depth as its work deserved. His friend, poet and critic Gastão Cruz, was among the few that attempted to correct this injustice by devoting in-depth studies of his work. More recently, Carlos Mendes de Sousa has also made important contributions to the study of Nava’s work in some important articles and reviews.

Until the arrival of this book by Ricardo Vasconcelos, however, no critic had produced a volume exclusively devoted to Luís Miguel Nava. This study demands our attention—not only because it is the first volume available on such an important poet—but also because of the prestige of the publishing house (Assírio & Alvim) and the reputation of the preface writer—Rosa Maria Martelo—who happens to have been the director of the Master’s thesis upon which this book is based.

Rosa Maria Martelo claims that this study by Ricardo Vasconcelos is important for displaying two “old-fashioned” traits: an awareness of the literariness of the poems in question, and a belief in the concept of inherent, undeniable (even “absolute”) poetic quality. I agree with the preface writer. In a sense, methodologically, but not exclusively, this is a work indebted to certain aspects of structuralism in a time of post-structuralism. In the body of the work, for example, as well as in an exhaustive “Appendix,” the reader is presented with lists of lexems, statistically analyzed, which support of some of the bold claims of this study. It is, thus, a work that intends to analyze the poetry of Nava departing from its syntactical, metaphoric structures, and which arrives at insightful theorizations and timely comparisons with other authors.

Vasconcelos bases his reading on the premise that the poetry of Nava revolves around the notion of excess, which he analyzes both in what concerns the poet’s...