Recife, 1920 – Río de Janeiro (Brasil), 1999

By Flávio Aguiar

The writer from Pernambuco integrated into the intellectual world from an early age when he participated in literary circles. Known as the poet-engineer, he joined the diplomatic career, which led him to move numerous times both within and outside Brazil. In 1940, he met Murilo Mendes, with whom he claimed to have learned to “give precedence to the image over the message, to the plastic over the discursive,” in an increasingly refined language.

He composed his poetic project in two intersecting strands. One is recognized in O engenheiro (1945), whose substantive verses, with precise forms and semantic rigor, reveal a full awareness of the poetic process. The other is represented by Morte e vida severina (1956), a text about the saga of the northeastern migrants, in which he made social criticism without yielding to sentimentality, as well as in “O cão sem plumas.”

In 1969, he was inducted into the Brazilian Academy of Letters and received numerous awards for his body of work, including the Luís de Camões Prize in 1990. Widely recognized among the greatest poets of the Portuguese language, he was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Other works include O rio (1954) and Poesias completas, 1940-1965 (1968).