António Barahona

Poet and translator. Originating from the surrealist gatherings at Café Gelo, he published his first collections in 1957 and 1958, but excluded these titles from his bibliography. It was with Insónias e Estátuas (1961) that his name began to attract critical attention. He later contributed to the inaugural issues of Poesia Experimental, and in 1965, participated in Visopoemas, at Galeria Divulgação, in Lisbon. Later, in a completely different register, he would publish eclogues on loose sheets, under the pseudonym Pastor Lócio. This inflection, one might say religious, perhaps a result of his conversion to Islam, is observed from the seventies onwards. The «discovery» of Islam occurred during a long period (1973-74) spent in Mozambique, in the company of the actress Eunice Muñoz, then his wife. From then on, António Barahona – who had signed his first books as António Barahona da Fonseca – alternately adopted the name Muhammad Rashid. After all, «It no longer matters to me to know/ if I am António or Muhammad:/ I sign according to the serum». And it will not be surprising that, on the pretext of the publication of The Satanic Verses, he publicly supported Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie. His work, characterized by a discourse of great verbal plasticity (whatever the angle of observation: oneiric, erotic, or mystical), even when indebted to a certain formal and ideological orthodoxy, is not easily framed within the standards of his generation. This discrepancy is accentuated with the publication of the two volumes of Aos Pés do Mestre (the Livro Primeiro in 1974 and the Livro Segundo in 1975). It was Maria Estela Guedes who acutely noted that «the Poem begins to function as a sacred text, something like the Indian manual for the apprentice of love». He is also the author of an ambitious Portuguese version of the Bhagavad-Guitá / Poema do Senhor (1996). But he translated numerous other works, notably for theater, during a phase when he actively collaborated with the Teatro Experimental de Cascais (Racine's Phèdre is a good example). Essayistic texts, almost always of a theological nature, are scattered across various publications.