Martinho Brederode

A graduate of the Superior Course of Letters, he pursued a diplomatic career. Especially from 1906 onwards, he spent little time in Portugal, wandering through diplomatic missions and posts (Brussels, Tangier, Beijing, Paris, Rome), until settling in Bucharest (1919), where he continued to live after retirement. It is not surprising that, despite the affinity of his books with epochal trends, Brederode only sporadically appeared in literary periodicals and was detached from dominant groups. In 1894, he published, under the pseudonym Marco Sponti, the novel A Morte do Amor, centered on the Fradiquian figure of Jorge Freire and clearly influenced by Eça's style and language. In some passages of this novel, the characters showed the utmost appreciation for Verlaine and Mallarmé – and it is towards a poetry paradigmatically represented by these authors that Brederode would want to move. In 1896, no longer using a pseudonym, he published the volume of verses Charneca: one or another approximation to Verlaine's verbal art (which was translated there) did not redeem from mediocrity a book given to radical pessimism and allegorical representations of subjective depression. Curiously, with Heine being the other poet Brederode liked to translate, the ironic structuring of some poems reveals itself as the superior note of O Pó da Estrada (1898) – a collection of poems similar to Charneca, perhaps accentuating metaphysical unease before Time and announcing the Night-Isis of Orphic poetry in the sonnet «Elogio da Noite». Only in 1905 would Brederode's most interesting book of poems, Sul, appear, which altered the orientation of his work, in tune with the aesthetic-literary evolution in Portugal. According to Seabra Pereira, Sul is situated on the transitional plane of a new impressionism that attempts to merge the legacies of Cesário Verde and António Nobre: in a free-flowing discursivity, derived from Cesário but assimilating the evocative magic of Só, the descriptive is instrumentalized by introspective wandering and, within the picturesque Lisbon and southern settings, undergoes the injunctions of decadence and Lusitanian neo-romanticism.