Cordeiro de Brito

Poet. Full name Joaquim Monteiro Cordeiro de Brito Faria. He began his literary career at seventeen in O Comércio do Porto (afternoon edition), with prose poems that were soon praised by critics such as Leonardo Coimbra and Sant' Anna Dionísio. He subsequently published poetry in O Primeiro de Janeiro and in Presença. «Moreover,» writes Eugénio Lisboa regarding Cordeiro de Brito, «his entire poetry breathes somewhat the atmosphere and some of the most constant thematic concerns of the movement whose main representative was José Régio.» At the end of the 1930s he was exiled for political reasons to Mozambique, where he worked as a land surveyor, returning to Porto in 1965. In 1966 he went to London to undergo heart surgery and died there. During his stay in Mozambique he published poetry in the newspapers Lourenço Marques Guardian, O Brado Africano, Itinerário, Notícias, A Voz de Moçambique, and Diário, in the magazines Miragem and Capricórnio, and in the poetry broadsheet Msaho, all from Lourenço Marques (today Maputo). He is included in the anthology Poetas de Moçambique, organized by Luís Polanah and published by the Casa dos Estudantes do Império (Lisbon, 1960). It should also be noted that Cordeiro de Brito was the first translator of Chekhov in Portugal, having translated O Duelo, A Estepe, a História de um Desconhecido, and A Sala nº. 6, published in Porto from 1938 onwards. He has not been published in book form, but it was his project to publish a volume of poems entitled Desvio, which would be followed by another to which he attached great importance and intended to call Sonetos Emotivados. Two projects that death frustrated.