César Rodrigues

Poet, son of a man from Madeira and an Irishwoman who were immigrants in British Guiana and possessed a great fortune. He was born at sea, aboard his father's sailboat on a voyage from Funchal to Georgetown, close to the latter city. Orphaned of his mother at a very young age, his father sent him to be educated in Lisbon, at the Colégio Parisiense (then one of the best in the country), from where he proceeded to Scotland to study medicine in Edinburgh. He lived in England for a few more years after graduating, but by 1889 he was in Lisbon with plans to practice medicine in Japan. However, he changed his mind and applied for a medical position in Vila Franca do Campo, on the island of São Miguel, at the suggestion of Gil Mont' Alverne de Sequeira, his former schoolmate, who was shortly to go to that island to occupy the post of surgeon at the Misericórdia of Ponta Delgada. He spent the rest of his life in the aforementioned Azorean town. He married twice. From his first marriage, he had a son who became the poet Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues. In his poetry, written mostly in his youth, he poured out his sorrow over the loss of his beloved wife and his pessimistic view of existence. It consists, in total, of half a hundred sonnets, of which a contemporary (Father Ernesto Ferreira) stated that they resembled those of Antero («at times, whoever reads him thinks they are reading Antero», he said). Although there is exaggeration in comparing the two poets, the «pronouncedly philosophical aftertaste» of César Rodrigues's poetry indeed places it among Antero's posterity in the Azores.