Luz Videira

Poet and short story writer. Born in Coimbra, Maria da Luz Monteiro Videira Murta began publishing her poems at an early age, first in Diário de Lisboa Juvenil and later in República Juvenil. Among her early publications, she also contributed as a student to Via Latina. Holding a degree in Germanic Philology from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra, she worked as a secondary school teacher in her hometown and ventured into translation (Reiner Kunze, Poemas, 1984). She debuted in 1970 with the publication of the poetry anthology entitled Maré Cheia, and the 1970s would also see the publication of two more of her poetry books. In addition to being a poet, Luz Videira also found in prose a writing medium that allowed her to blend, with equal balance, an essentially dramatic expressive force (her characters constantly struggle between guilt and repentance, suffering and impossibility) and a poetic of containment that is scarcely diffuse, cooled into a placid narrative horizontality. Her short stories revisit forgotten themes and reunite pairs of characters such as Ariadne and Theseus, Orpheus and Eurydice, Calypso and Ulysses. This encounter stands at a crossroads that dramatizes and merges a classical tradition and a Judeo-Christian tradition (themes such as expiation, guilt, suffering, and betrayal are recurrent). The result is a restoration of mythic-classical material through transposing those same mythicized experiences into contemporaneity. The poet Vasco Pereira da Costa, in the preface to Isolda e Outras Histórias, pays tribute to her: «giving chosen words the beauty indispensable to art, imbuing them with a portentous seduction of magic, charging them, within the melodic fabric, with enticing suggestions capable of detaching the reader from the paper and transforming them, on an unpredictable journey, into the most debasing and the most sublime that occurs—that is what is demanded of literature, that is what Luz Videira provides.»