Last Saturday, another session of the ‘Return to Parnassus’ Cultural Cycle took place at the Mário Cláudio Centre in Venade (Paredes de Coura), directed by Professor Cândido Oliveira Martins, a lecturer and researcher at the Portuguese Catholic University (Braga). The writer honoured was António Carlos Cortez, born in Lisbon in 1976. The author is above all a poet, as well as a teacher, literary critic and essayist, with a strong involvement in the press in the field of Education and Culture. Since 1999, he has published around 15 books of poetry, celebrating 25 years of work in this field. In this spirit of celebrating 25 years of literary creation, António Carlos Cortez has just published a book of poetry entitled Os Sonetos (25 years of poetry: 1999-2024) (Gato Bravo, 2024). And in dialogue with previous books, his most recent poetry book, Condor (Caminho, 2025), renews the place of the long poem. More recently, António Carlos Cortez has published the essays Crítica Crónica - educação, cultura e política (Guerra e Paz) and Voltar a Ler - ensaios sobre Poesia (Gradiva); the novel Um Dia Lusíada (Caminho); and the book of short stories Cenas Portuguesas (Caminho). In the pipeline is Para Ler Camões: 50 Poemas Comentados, as part of the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the poet's birth.This small sample of his publications reveals the breadth of this author's interests and, above all, his deep commitment to intervening critically, in the periodical press and in various essays, on the direction of education and culture, society and politics today, in defence of a greater and more solid humanistic education (Literature, History, Philosophy, Arts, etc.). In successive speeches, the author never tires of emphasising the unique place of the humanities in the education of young citizens. The slow obliteration of the humanities largely explains the current failure of education. These latest publications are a way for writer and critic António Carlos Cortez to celebrate and revisit his considerable poetic oeuvre over a quarter of a century, oscillating between the classical matrix form and the reinvention of the poetic word. In fact, this is one of the many hallmarks of his writing - the relationship between tradition and contemporaneity. We took advantage of his presence at a cultural event at the Mário Cláudio Centre to conduct this interview.
António Carlos Cortez has had an extensive career as a poet since the late 1990s, having published around 15 books of poetry. With hindsight, how do you look back on this long career?
My 25 or 26-year career in poetry is the result of a natural commitment to what marked me from an early age: the arts and literature. It's a journey of fidelity to a trinity that, deep down, is the trinity I learnt in the classes of my teacher, Paula Morão, who received this trinity from her teacher, Manuel Gusmão: Memory, Tradition, Historicity. From fixed forms to modern, freer forms, I've never wanted to make a blank slate of the literary past and, in fact, contrary to what my generation has done in some cases, my path of words is the result of something simple: honouring literature.
It's always a demanding task, but it's always tempting to ask - who were the most representative Portuguese (and foreign) poets in your emotional library and writing career?
Camões and Sá de Miranda, Cesário and Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Jorge de Sena, Eliot and Pound, Fiama and Ruy Belo, Lorca and Leonard Cohen, Carlos de Oliveira and Gastão Cruz, Nuno Júdice, you name it. A Spanish poet, Alfonso Costafreda, is also an inescapable voice. There are many others: Kavafys and Gamoneda and Pavese, there are others I admire and read.
Why has Gastão Cruz achieved a special ascendancy in his relationship with contemporary Portuguese poetry, even prompting your recent PhD on his writing? And how do you see the current trends in contemporary Portuguese poetry?
I've been friends with Gastão Cruz for 24 years. I met him through Lídia Jorge in 1998, when I had a small set of poems I wanted to publish. David Mourão-Ferreira was the poet I had sought out about three years earlier, but his death in 96 made it impossible to have what would have been one of the meetings I most wanted to have. Gastão was a poet whose poetry I knew and whose images and expressive rigour fascinated me.
For me, in the footsteps of David and Camões, Carlos de Oliveira and Blake, Rimbaud and Jorge de Sena, Pessoa and Baudelaire, among others he admired, he was the most penetrating reader of the tensions and contradictions of our time. His work, which is structured in cycles or thematic trilogies, has such internal cohesion, a style that is both classic and inventive, and poetry that is so acute in the way it deals with time and love, death and the fury of living, nostalgia and the tragic feeling of the human that he, Gastão, soon became my master.
He is undoubtedly one of the greatest poets of this rare lineage of speculative poetry in Portugal. My thesis on ‘As Razões da Poesia ou o Mal Total em Gastão Cruz’ (The Reasons for Poetry or Total Evil in Gastão Cruz) is a reading of his work based on the problem of evil as a disease, a phenomenon that is necessary for the very existence of poetry, which Gastão considers to be a ‘virus’ in itself, a poison that the poet cannot escape, because this poisonous discourse is, paradoxically, the only palliative that the poet has in the face of the reality of evil. The reality of the evil that is, above all, an evil of modernity: the corruption of language to which the poet responds by writing, recreating that language and purifying it. Gastão's poetry seen from the perspective of the phenomenology of Evil, as understood by Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel: a phenomenon that only poetry, metaphor and image can verbalise.
I lived with GC and received an unforgettable teaching from him. He taught me poems I know by heart. The critical perspective I have of what poetry is derives from the critical thinking I received from Gastão and Ramos Rosa, with whom I was also friends.
Precisely because I have this background, this legacy of two central poets-critics in the 20th century, and also because Nuno Júdice is the third apex of this poetic trinity that has given me so much, I can't help but look at current poetry with many reservations. There's an inflation of talent with regard to certain poetic voices that certain cultural journalism elevates to the level of great revelations. But what I see is that, apart from two or three exceptions, in the poetry of the last 15 years there is no one who truly has the knowledge of a poetic workshop and who, at the same time, takes the risk of creating their own original, unique verbal world.
I would point to two or three exceptions, poets under the age of 40: Miguel Royo, João da Cunha Borges and Assunção Varela. A recent discovery, Sofia Sampaio, is a voice to remember. Most of what is published sometimes strikes me as unimaginative prosaicism, without any syntactical mastery, which I wonder if this flood of people writing and publishing poetry ever reads. And there is a pretentiousness in the younger generations - those between the ages of 20 and 35/40 today - that often irritates me deeply. They may even publish the lines they write. But poetry? That's rare. And it's not what you read and see out there.
One of your most recent poetic works - ‘Os Sonetos: 25 Anos de Poesia - 1999 - 2024’ (Gato Bravo, 2024) - celebrates a quarter of a century devoted to writing poetry. Why did you choose the anthology of 125 sonnets, a classical form (plus 4 unpublished sonnets and 4 sextets) to mark this date?
There was no distribution of this edition. It's a print run of 150 copies and I haven't launched it. I may do so in September. The reason for choosing 125 sonnets is because of the fascination and demand that this regular form has always exerted on me. I read Camões regularly. I could say obsessively. As well as poets from our own and other literatures who are great reinventors of this form. I would single out David and Sena, Gastão and Octávio Paz.
Brazilian poets, from Drummond to Paulo Henriques Britto, from Paul Valery to Mário Benedetti (‘El Soneto de Rigor’), without forgetting Graça Moura or Franco Alexandre, there are many sonnet makers whom I admire for their mastery and the power of syntactic manipulation that the sonnet demands. Well, in 25 years of poetry, the rhythm and demands of the sonnet have always been with me. I've selected sonnets from my own books. Other poems I rewrote to make them quasi-sonnets, as if to honour Carlos de Oliveira, another master.
The Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros wrote with humour that poetry was an ‘inutensil’. In a ‘time of indigence’ (to use Hölderlin's famous image, taken up by Hélia Correia), what is the place of poetry today?
The place of poetry today must not only be a non-place (I don't mean this in the sense that Marc Augé gives it), but the place of poetry must be the place of no. No to facilitism, no to poetic falsehood, no to artificialism, no to the corrupted word. Poetry will be an inuntensil in that higher sense that it has to be shock, strangeness, creative rigour, surprise and a textual object capable of stirring up the inner world of those who read it.
As well as being a poet, António Carlos Cortez is also a critic and essayist, having recently published ‘Voltar a Ler - ensaios sobre poesia, cultura e educação’ (Back to Reading - essays on poetry, culture and education) (Gradiva, 2018). You see the widespread cultural crisis we are going through as the result of a failure of humanistic education, among other factors. Can you explain this argument better?
Education has failed and fails every time the role of the teacher is distorted and, as is the case today, those who teach find themselves shackled in a bureaucratic-managerial straitjacket. What I'm saying is simple: the downgrading of the humanities, the dilution of the weight of subjects such as literature, philosophy and history, arts and music in the curriculum, all of this translates into the increasingly violent daily life in which we live. Dehumanisation is the result of social digitalisation. People, immersed in their screens, victims of this dictatorship of profit that only favours the Musk's and the Oligarchs of this world, all this is combined with a global educational programme that has transformed children and teenagers and young university students into insensitive, mechanical people, without language, completely surrendered to the most sordid individualism.
Now, if you don't read, if you don't know history, if you don't have the habit of reading, writing and reflecting, if everything is banal, if everything is the empire of opinion and hatred of true knowledge, then we have failed. Teachers without the habit of reading essays or literature, without curiosity, without a genuine love of life, this is what justifies - in addition to the direct responsibilities of an ignorant, ambitious and illiterate political class - the general degradation of the country. A country is made with books, with culture, not with football and screens. Not with the violence of this music that appeals to sex for sex's sake, that debases men and women to the level of the vilest animality.
The worrying diagnosis that there is almost no literary criticism in the Portuguese press is not new. The number of supplements or dedicated spaces has clearly decreased, and the names of recognised critics who regularly fill these spaces are rare, in contrast to a few decades earlier. How do you analyse this state of literary criticism?
There was a time when literary criticism existed because, deep down, in the midst of the dictatorship, literature was an avant-garde force that fought against obscurantism. Against fascism. Literary supplements, magazines, even television programmes about poetry, books - this was at a time when we had a lot of people fighting Salazar and Caetano and the rest of the regime's tyrants, both on the left and on the right. On the other hand, there was a strong ethical conscience. The newspapers were organisations in defence of an idea that is completely in crisis today: the culture of the spirit. In the name of progress and because everything is fast, because we haven't trained readers, we now have an endless crisis in cultural journalism. They wanted computers, didn't they? In a country without a book habit, the result has always seemed obvious. The figure of the critic has been swept away in this flood of crumbling literate culture. There is even hatred, even in academia, of those who try to write, think, have a memory, live, in short, as a function of the book.
What has happened is that, thanks to new, faster forms of communication, and because we have deceived ourselves, the newspaper, paper, the pen, underlining, thinking about language, meditating and weighing up words, criticising, examining, the demanding coexistence with the essay - all of that has come to an end. So let's not be surprised: in a 20th century that was a century of intellectuals, what we are living in today is the time of the new critical impressionisms. From gender theories to the question of identities, the text in its language has been secondaryised. Those who continue to criticise in newspapers can only be faithful. Or they sell out. That's not the case with me, who persists in criticising poetry and writing in newspapers. I want to read and write. To honour the lineage of poet-critics. To have a memory. Not to compromise, I insist.
In addition to these facets, António Carlos Cortez is also a teacher with many years of teaching experience. He has just published ‘O Fim da Educação - crise, crítica, ensino e utopia’ (The End of Education - crisis, criticism, teaching and utopia) (Guerra e Paz, 2025), following a critical, severe and continuous intervention on the subject. What are the possible solutions to this diagnosis of the bankruptcy of our education system?
I'll be brief: the only way forward is to return to texts and books in the classroom. To show students, who today have no memory, who are ignorant of history and literature, that collections, editions, titles and texts, poems and novels, plays and music are our common ground. The only way forward is to reject the impure lights of supposed digital progress. Digitalisation is the path to unemployment via the automation of work. In education, it will be the end of our profession. And it will be the end of the very idea of paideia, the founding concept of education. Anyone who defends digitalisation is, at heart, an enemy of humanity. A cold Excel sheet maker, a close relative of Eichmann.
Finally, as a correlation, we know that you have a volume in press with concerns directed towards a canonical example of literary education, precisely in the year commemorating the 500th anniversary of Camões' birth - ‘Para Ler Camões: 50 Poemas Comentados’ (To Read Camões: 50 Commented Poems). Why do we need books with this pedagogical-didactic objective?
My book on Camões is a contribution to teacher training. Without reading the essay genre, nothing rigorous can be taught. Every teacher should read this essay by Jacinto do Prado Coelho, ‘The education of poetic feeling’. It's all there. What to do and how to do it. Who knows this text? Well, my book of readings of poems by the lyrical Camões is for anyone who doesn't want to fall into new forms of interpretative superficiality.
It is a tribute to Aguiar e Silva, Manuel Gusmão and Óscar Lopes, Nuno Júdice and Gastão Cruz and to the teachers from whom I learnt and still learn: Paula Morão, Helena Buescu, Artur Anselmo, Paula Costa, Isabel Cristina Mateus, Vítor Serrão. I'm lucky: I had my teachers. What would it have been like without them? I'm a teacher by absolute choice of life: dedication to culture. To Camões. To faithful dedication and to the honour of being alive. And admitting that I make mistakes, that I fail, that to be human is to be and to be in life without assuming that everything we say is right. Literature, if it is loved, will always be a lesson. Life.
