Fonseca Amaral

Poet and translator. He used to say he was from Cairo, but he was born in Viseu and moved to Mozambique when he was only three years old. There he completed his secondary education. In 1945 he was «discovered» by Augusto dos Santos Abranches, debuting with two poems in the final issue of the pioneering literary supplement «Sulco» (March 4, 1945), which Abranches ran in the newspaper Notícias in the Mozambican capital. The friendship between the two poets, despite the large age gap, allowed Fonseca Amaral permanent and important contact with what was happening literarily in Portugal and Brazil, making him a kind of ferment among the youth of his generation. Rui Knopfli called him «my master Fonseca Amaral». In November 1948, he appeared among the organizing committee of a «Programa de Cultura, Recreio e Desporto da Juventude Moçambicana», which prompted an Official Communiqué from Mocidade Portuguesa, which then held a monopoly on such endeavors, leading to the customary police actions of the time. In December of the same year, along with Rui Guerra, João de Sousa, and Guilherme de Melo, he edited the page «Início» – contributing poems, needless to say –, then created in the daily Lourenço Marques Guardian. Still introduced by Abranches, he contributed to Itinerário (1949-1954). In that final year he returned to Portugal, where he began living off his work as a translator. In 1951, several of his poems were published in an offprint of the magazine Mensagem, published by the Casa dos Estudantes do Império and organized by Orlando de Albuquerque and Victor Evaristo. He is also represented in the two Poetas Moçambicanos anthologies published by the same Casa in 1960 and 1962. He also contributed to A Voz de Moçambique (1960-1973), of which he became correspondent-editor in Portugal, and O Brado Africano (1966-1967), both based in Lourenço Marques. In 1971, in the same city, Rui Knopfli collected and published twelve poems by Fonseca Amaral in issue no. 2 of Cadernos Caliban, the last of which was meaningfully titled «Exílio», preceded by a well-deserved introduction by Rui. Except for his contributions to A Voz de Moçambique as a correspondent, everything published by him was done on the initiative of friends, never the poet himself. Upon Mozambique's independence, Fonseca Amaral returned excitedly to what he considered his homeland, which, as it did to others, rejected him. Back in Portugal, he continued his double exile here, after all «a native of Cairo», as he presciently claimed. He left a bookless body of work that, after several years of publication attempts by Imprensa Nacional / Casa da Moeda, has just been published (1999), with a preface by Eugénio Lisboa under the title Poemas.