Vitorino Nemésio


Vitorino Nemésio Mendes Pinheiro da Silva was a Portuguese poet, author and intellectual from Terceira, Azores, best known for his novel Mau Tempo No Canal, as well as being a professor in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon and member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon.

Biography

Vitorino Nemesio was the son of Vitorino Gomes da Silva and Maria da Glória Mendes Pinheiro, and born in Praia da Vitória, on the island of Terceira.
His early education did not reflect the academic career that he would have; he encountered many problems as a student and was expelled from secondary school, repeating his fifth year of studies. Of his time in the secondary school in Angra do Heroísmo, Nemésio indicated his fondness for history classes, and attributed this interest to Manuel António Ferreira Deusdado, who introduced him to the social sciences.
At 16 years of age, for the first time, Nemésio travelled to the district capital of Horta, to complete his entry exams for the National School: he was barely able to accomplish a passing mark. He did complete the entry exams in the General Course on July 16, 1918. His stayed in Horta from May to August 1918. On August 13, the newspaper O Telégrafo published a notice about the young author's first book of poetry, Canto Matinal, which was sent to the editor Manuel Emídio. While at the school, he contributed to Eco Académico: Semanário dos Alunos do Liceu de Angra and helped to found the magazine Estrela d'Alva: Revista Literária Ilustrada e Noticiosa while completing his studies in Angra.
Although relatively young, Nemesio had already developed republican ideals, having participated in literary, republican, and anarchist-unionist meetings while living in Angra. He was influenced primarily by his friend, Jaime Brasil, five-years his senior, as well as others, such as the lawyer Luís da Silva Ribeiro and the author-librarian, Gervásio Lima.
In 1918, just before the First World War ended, Horta was a centre of maritime commerce with a vibrant night life. It was an obligatory port-of-call, a place for refurnishing chips and giving time off to the crew. The trans-Atlantic telegraph cable companies had installed themselves in Horta, contributing to a cosmopolitan environment, that much later would inspire his Mau Tempo no Canal, on which he was to begin working after 1939. In 1919, he volunteered for military service in the infantry, enabling him to travel outside the Azores for the first time.

Academia

In Lisbon, he worked as a coordinator for A Pátria, A Imprensa de Lisboa and Última Hora, while completing his secondary school studies in Coimbra. He eventually enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Coimbra, where he worked as an editor in the student newspaper. By 1923, he joined the Coimbra Revolta Lodge of the Grand Order of Lusitania, a masonic group. While working for the magazine Bizâncio, he learnt of his father's death. Three years later, he switched from Law to Social and Applied Sciences in the Faculty of Letters to concentrate on the Historical and Geographic Sciences. During his first trip to Spain, with the Academic Choir in 1923, he met the Spanish writer, philosopher and republican Miguel Unamuno, a leader in revolutionary humanist theory, and staunch anti-Francist, with whom he would continue to correspond for years. With Afonso Duarte, António de Sousa, Branquinho da Fonseca, Gaspar Simões, among others, he founded the magazine Tríptico. His studies turned to Romance Languages by 1925; at the time, he worked with José Régio, João Gaspar Simões and António de Sousa on the journal Humanidade: Quinzenário de Estudantes de Coimbra.
In Coimbra on 12 February 1926, he married Gabriela Monjardino de Azevedo Gomes, with whom he would have four children: Georgina, Jorge, Manuel and Ana Paula.
In 1930, Nemésio transferred to the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon, where, a year later, he concluded his course in Romance Languages and began offering classes in Italian Literature and, later, Spanish Literature. He obtained his Doctorate in 1934 from the University of Lisbon, with his thesis A Mocidade de Herculano Até à Volta do Exílio. Between 1937 and 1939, he lectured at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, returning in the last year to the Faculty of Letters in Lisbon.
His most complex, dense and subtle novel, Mau Tempo No Canal, remains one of the primary examples of contemporary Portuguese literature, which he would finally publish in 1944. Encompassing the islands of Faial, Pico, São Jorge and Terceira, the novel evokes the period of 1917-1919, when the author lived in Horta and where people such as Dr. José Machado de Serpa, Father Nunes da Rosa and Osório Goulart were contemporaries. After his seminal work, Nemésis never returned to writing novels; in an unpublished epilogue, under the title Morro autor de um romance único, he stated that Mau Tempo No Canal was the high-point in his long literary career.
On visiting Horta for a second time, in 1946, he wrote Corsário das Ilhas, in which he reflected on his schooling:
Thirty years later Nemésio continued to remember the village of Horta as his "first refuge, of patriarchal hospitality and gentility in everything, or for everything".
In 1958, he lectured in Brazil. On 12 September 1971, when he reached the public service retirement age, he gave his final lecture at the Faculty in Lisbon; a period of 40 years of service.

Later life

He authored and presented the television program Se bem me lembro, which contributed to popularising his literary importance, while at the same time directing the newspaper O Dia from 11 December 1975 to 25 October 1976.
He died on 20 February 1978 in Lisbon, at the CUF Hospital, and was laid to rest in his adopted home, Coimbra. Before his death, he asked his son to bury him in the cemetery of Santo António dos Olivais, and that the bells should play the Alleluia.

Public works

His early literary writings were inspired by the Azores. Afonso Lopes Vireira would later note the presence of "childhood memories, and loves, pains and figures of humility, who in these pages, are alive and obsessed with the sea". Vitorino Nemésio's personal experiences are generally present in his published works, beginning with his volume of stories in Paço do Milhafre, in 1924. Prefaced by Afonso Lopes Vieira, and later retitled O Mistério do Paço do Milhafre, the work has been in print since 1949. During his long literary career, the author has never stopped surprising readers. In his novels, for example, he transmitted a sense of originality, in particular, with his descriptions of places and complex characters, in which he was generously human, comprising three stories: O Tubarão, Negócio de Pomba.
Vitorino Nemésio was one of the great writers of contemporary Portuguese literature, receiving in 1965, the Prémio Nacional da Literatura, as well as the 1974 Montaigne Prize. He was a writer of fiction and poetry, a chronicler, a biographer, a historian of literature, a journalist, a philosopher, a letter writer, a language expert and a television writer. This was ironic in view of his terrible beginnings in the secondary school on Terceira.
Generally regional in his perspectives, his works elaborated on Azorean life, along with sentimental memories of his childhood, revealing a populist preoccupation with simple people who were profoundly human and living through aspects of human suffering. He published biographies, including his doctoral dissertation on Alexandre Herculano, and his biography of Queen Saint Elizabeth of Portugal. He also wrote of his journeys to Brazil, the Azores and Madeira, discussed diverse subjects associated with Portuguese and Brazilian history, including a dissertation on Gil Vicente, and wrote poetry criticism.
Nemésio was also a poet, publish works uninterruptedly from 1916 to 1976. Óscar Lopes, writing on his poetry, noted two currents of verse in his work Nem toda a Noite a Vida. The first current is mostly regional; in particular, nostalagia for island life, childhood, adolescences, his father and first forbidden love, which are obvious in O Bicho Harmonioso and Eu, Comovido a Oeste. In his later works there is a transformation, his themes are more metaphysical and religious in tone; he debated themes of life and death, of being and the search for the meaning of life: purely existentialist philosophy. In addition, the writer cultivates a populist poetry marked by Azorean symbolism, in which he was regularly accused of being a regionalist literary.

Poetry