José Bruges de Oliveira

Hailing from the house of the Viscounts of Bruges and Counts of Praia da Vitória, he studied in Coimbra, leaving his Law degree unfinished. It was there that he revealed his literary vocation, associating himself with the promoters of Ícaro magazine. In 1917, his first collection of poems, Da Terra e do Mar, decidedly followed the path of the later Lopes Vieira, who would always be his lyrical master and would favor his second book with a preface letter. Meanwhile, the reception of this debut was mainly marked by the resounding praise it received from A. Sardinha, who, in A Monarquia, considered it the announcement of a generational influx towards the «great traditionalist synthesis». Furthermore, José Bruges was then an editor for the integralist magazine A Tradição and always remained faithful to this ideology, sealing the authenticity of his militancy with several prison stints. Already at that time, he tended to collaborate widely with Portuguese and foreign press; and he would maintain this publicist inclination, both in political-literary periodicals (Ilustração, Contemporânea, Fradique, Bandarra) and in widely circulated national and foreign newspapers (from A Noite, a Rio de Janeiro paper, to The New York Times). Until 1922, he published collections of verses densely, though of wavering quality: As Minhas Cantigas (1918), Missal do Amor (1919, under the pseudonym José Lupi de Mena), Versos Fúteis (1920), Ophir (1921), Canções do Longe e do Perto (1922). Between 1928 and 1930, he lived in Canada and the United States, where he did not miss the opportunity to deliver a lecture on Poe's influence on Portuguese literature. Later, he lived in Paris, returning to Lisbon in the 1940s and to the literary gatherings at A Brasileira café. After publishing Baladas ao Vento (1929), he contributed poetry to Atlântico magazine and chronicles «Da cor do tempo...» to Diário Popular; but above all, from 1930 to 1945, he collected poems of promised maturity, which were published in 1950 in a superior Memorial. He went on to serve in consular functions in Tangier; but, with his suicide, he soon ended this new experience. Da Terra e do Mar offered promising variations on the themes of Lusitanian neo-romanticism and, in particular, Franciscan sensibility and political-religious fervor with motifs from national history (under the predominant influence of Ilhas de Bruma, as A. M. Couto Viana observed). Soon, As Minhas Cantigas caused this inspiration to decline into a banal lament of amorous sorrows, which the evocative quatrains of Coimbra do not redeem. Even Ophir, after drifting towards a new poetry of «folgar e gentileza» (joy and gentleness), barely rises a little, thanks in part to the personal tone that the phenomenology of existential time begins to acquire in the mournful song (cf. sonnets «Horas», «Consolação», etc.). With the poems «Ampulheta», «Hoje», «Pensamento», etc., this became the main theme of Memorial, under a mnemonic impulse that overflowed from the title into the body of poems of discreet disenchantment («Ilusões», «Canção», «Nem»). Memorial illustrates the lyrical aspect of a psychologist literature disseminated by Presença, to which it is further approximated by the reconciliation of fidelity to neo-romantic poetics («Poeta», «Post-scriptum»...) with prosodic novelty, sometimes opting for epigrammatic containment, sometimes advancing towards the non-coincidence between meter and syntax, which lends effectiveness and vigor to ancient topics and traditional forms: see the Franciscan influence in «Benedicite», the expectation of death and the allusive romance «Por noite velha: truz, truz...», amorous exclusivism and this stripped-down «Poema»: «O teu silêncio cobre as vozes todas./Só ouço que não falas.../A tua ausência inunda o Universo/Só vejo que não estás...»