Adília Lopes

Adília Lopes (1960-)

“I take my poetry very seriously. For me, it is a matter of life or death.”

Adília Lopes is one of the most interesting contemporary Portuguese poetry authors. I was given her "Obra" by Susana and Neia when I left Lisbon to Barcelona about 5 years ago. It had a Paula Rego painting on its cover, and the book is the collection of Lopes poetry until then. What really did it for me was that in her writing she doesn't need fancy words to write beautifully about life's tragedies and banalities.

I will now copy and paste some very interesting articles on Adília Lopes I came across while browsing the web.

Richard Zenith who has translated to English Fernando Pessoa, António Lobo Antunes, and Sophia de Mello Breyner writes on the Poetry International Web about Adília Lopes:

"(...)So what is poetry for Adília Lopes? A number of her poems mention entropy (‘Childhood Memories’, for instance), and her poetic oeuvre may seem, at first glance, like a kingdom of entropy, but in fact her poetry is an attempt to counteract chaos, to establish some order, make connections, put things back together. This recalls the ambition of Sophia de Mello Breyner, a poet much admired by Lopes, but whereas the former longed for prelapsarian perfection, the latter is more pragmatic: she’ll settle for a makeshift whole and doesn’t mind chips and dents. Sophia assumed the voice of an oracle; Adília calls herself a housekeeper (‘The Housekeeper’ is the title of one of her recent books), engaged in trying to straighten out some of the world’s (and her own) confusion. Housecleaning, not therapy. "


The IPLP (Portuguese Institute for the Book and Libraries) has published on its web a small biography on the Author from which I paste the first two paragraphs:

Adília Lopes, poetess, columnist and translator, is the pen-name of Maria José da Silva Viana Fidalgo de Oliveira, who was born in Lisbon on 20th April 1960. She has always lived in Lisbon, actually in the same house, which has belonged to her mother’s family since 1916. Since 1982 she has lived surrounded by cats. “Adília appeared with a poem I wrote in my diary when one of my cats, Faruk, disappeared”, she once said in an interview with Carlos Vaz Marques. Her mother was a biologist, a lecturer in Botany at the Faculty of Science of the University of Lisbon. Her father was a Drawing teacher and deputy headmaster of Pedro de Santarém Secondary School, in Benfica, Lisbon.

Adília Lopes attended two Catholic schools, where she was taught by nuns, and went on to study Physics at the Faculty of Science in Lisbon. However, she dropped out of the course shortly before completing it, due to a schizoid affective psychosis, an illness about which she has always spoken openly, whether in her poetry, columns, lectures or interviews. She gave up studying at the behest of her doctors and began writing, always with the intention of publishing her work.

"O poeta de Pondychéry" has been translated to Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, and German. None of her books has been translated to English yet.


Useful Links:
Portugal - Poetry International Web - Adília Lopes
Instituto Português do Livro e das Bibliotecas - Adília Lopes biography