Orpheu is a famous magazine from the early 20th century in Portugal that brought on Modernism to the cultural forefront of the nation. Read the linked Wikipedia article for further information on this.

My parents, being language aficionados, have a really cool edition of the first volume of the magazine. Reading some notes on the pages, I can tell my mom read it and probably studied it, probably sometime in the past 3 decades.

I’ve decided to read it and analyse the poetry within.

Full disclosure: I haven’t looked up any analysis or translations of anything here, so everything is my interpretation and translation. I wouldn’t recommend taking what I say at face value, but I thought this would be fun so I’m doing it.

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The first section of the magazine is by Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and it’s called For the “Signs of Gold”.

At first, I was a little skeptical. For starters, these poems are over 100 years old, so the Portuguese they’re written in isn’t the Portuguese I’m familiar with; there are strange words, strange phrasing, strange spelling… It’s definitely readable, but not entirely intuitive. Still, with the help of an online dictionary and many, many read-overs, I managed to wrangle some semblance of meaning and coherence from the cryptic ramblings of Sá-Carneiro.

The first poem is titled Taciturn. Here, the author paints a beautiful picture, or rather, he builds an enormous structure and guides us through its intricate design over the course of 6 quatrains. Sá-Carneiro describes himself as being ornate in several ways, engraved with gold and various coats-of-arms, having drawbridges in the castle of his soul, rooms upon rooms with beautiful embroidery and divans… But, fundamentally, he’s empty and isolated. There is a lot, or maybe there’s the remnants of the lot that had once been there, but now there is only that. An illusion. My favourite quatrain says the following:

The dull drawbridge of I-had-been
Rusted - uselessly they’ll try to lower it…
Over moats of Vague, halfway of still-wanting -
Mornings of arms still in festivals of forgetting…

I feel that this passage really encapsulates the whole poem. There used to be something grandiose, worth protecting, worth fighting over and clamouring for, but it has gone to the wayside by the hand of time. There’s this feeling that it’s still there, in a way, that he still wants it, he wants to return to it, but it’s no use, and he regrets the situation he finds himself in.

This theme, I believe, finds itself repeated over the rest of the section in several other poems in varying ways and metaphors.

The second poem, a sonnet, is called Salomé, and, to me, this is by far the worst one of the section. Upon first reading, it was very hard to understand. Upon further reading, it seemed to be pretty clearly about sex - which I thought was rather crude. Now, I’m a little squeamish about these things, so that did leave a bad taste in my mouth. However, upon even further reading, I believe this is moreso about insomnia, rather than anything else, and about how the author feels a certain ambivalence about it.

The poem starts with the phrase «Purple insomnia». Then, he goes on to describe how the world changes with it, how the light changes and gains a soul, how everything becomes ephemeral. It’s hard to decipher.

My best attempt at summarizing the poem is as follows: a man gets drunk while he can’t sleep and feels intensely, if mysteriously inspired.

The third poem, another sonnet, is called A certain voice in the night, gingerly… This is where a pattern forms, which somewhat redeems the previous entry in the section. This sonnet describes a voice that was beautiful and intense, but that the author only experienced once. He describes the flesh as “purply.” This poem, combined with the previous entry, creates this image of a certain night where Sá-Carneiro experienced intense inspiration while being unable to sleep, and now looks back on it and fails to replicate it. It feels so ephemeral that it’s as if it doesn’t exist, so he doesn’t even wish for it again, he simply remembers it.

He describes this voice, this feeling, as a Princess. In the first poem, he described himself and his soul as somewhere where iron helmets had smashed Princesses. As such, one can conclude that he sees himself as being devoid of inspiration. Someone that experiences these random, fleeting bouts of genius, but that, inside, is empty. Inside, in his mind, there is only the scaffolding, the illusion of genius, of inspiration, of grandeur, but indeed there is nothing more than fleeting whispers of greatness and vague memories that are so thin it’s as if they don’t exist at all.

The fourth poem is perhaps the most confusing of all. It’s called Our Lady of Paris. The poems are all dated (1913-1914, by the way) and where they’re written is noted as well. There’s a pretty even distribution of Lisbon and, you guessed it, Paris. The first poem is Paris, the next two are Lisbon, and we’re back in Paris for number four.

This poem is very… Vague. It starts with sound and light fustigating our narrator, while he feels that all he can do is run from even the moonlight. Then, he gets reminded of the sea by smells. I like this contrast of the senses, by the way, where hearing and sight are hurtful, and smell provides some reprieve, even if temporary and fleeting - like seemingly everything in this man’s life. Then, he’s buried. It wasn’t enough, the smells weren’t enough, and he’s buried under cathedrals and church candles, under the grandeur and opulence of the city. His senses are overwhelmed. At the end, however, it seems the smell of lilies brought him back. He ends the poem by screaming, or praying, to our lady of Paris.

I find this one very hard to understand. I wrote in my notes that maybe he misses home, but frankly I’m really not sure in the slightest; it’s a guess more than an interpretation.

The fifth poem is titled 16 - yes, the number. It’s actually pretty good, but I can’t figure out why it’s called that. I thought it might be about the metric, but I don’t think so. Regardless, as I said, it’s pretty good. It’s about how Sá-Carneiro is so inconsistent and uncertain, how he’s in-between. It’s divided into three parts.

The first part paints the image of the author almost exploding. He’s vibrating, shaking, and then his dreams flow out of him like lions of fire which walk the desert, while the author is left behind in an oasis, where blade edges go to die. I like the last couple of lines of this part of the poem:

The frogs will eventually croak me in raspy human tones
Vomiting my flesh that they ate between shits…

It feels like he’s complaining that, while putting his greatness into the world, he’ll be remembered by bad and incomplete renditions of his work. People that don’t have the soul to replicate his work will instead croak it poorly, repeat it without sense, eating his flesh and shitting it out instead of understanding his art. I thought that was a pretty powerful image.

The second part of the poem is shorter than the first. It’s six lines, all ending in ellipsis, which gives this part a very lamenting feel. He says that he sees the world in half-light, things, life has lost its luster. He says that the path he’s following is no longer the golden path that was his. That, to me, feels like he’s saying that he was following the golden footsteps that he envisioned for himself, but can’t see anymore. Now, he wanders. It’s like he’s reached the end of the line, but there’s no line; the path just continues without its shine.

The third, and last, part of the poem is the shortest of all three. It’s separated into two stanzas, the first with three, and the second with two verses. The second one is in parenthesis. Here, the image is much more real. He’s in a cafe, something happened, someone showed up, and everyone went crazy. Someone important. It ends with the narrator describing himself climbing himself in a rope ladder, with his anxiety being a broken trapeze. It feels like he’s lost his soul, in a way. His greatness is past him.

The sixth poem is called Distant Melody, and it’s another one of those really good ones. He remembers another time, a time that was like wings and when his senses were colours. His soul was broad and he could follow in any way and find something great. He speaks of inspiration as a Princess again, and generally the architectural metaphors continue. However, this is a memory, a fleeting memory of another time that may or amy not have existed really. I particularly love the last quatrain:

Fluid memories… ashes of brocade…
Blue irreality that waves within me…
- Around me I am an exiled King,
Mermaid dream vagabond…

That metaphor of an «exiled King» speaks volumes. He has a castle within, but it’s empty. He remembers Princesses - inspiration - but the memories are so thin that they might as well not exist. He’s exiled from his own genius.

The seventh, eighth, and ninth poems are all one stanza each. The seventh is called Glimpse, where he describes «crying hours» at the end of the day, where his soul is cold water in golden amphorae, between crystals. I’m not sure what this means. The eighth is called Suggestion, and the narrator says he feels the companions (women) that he didn’t have crying for him; I feel that I shouldn’t interpret this as simple boasting of being a good lover, but I fail to read anything else in it. The ninth poem is called, somewhat confusingly, 7. I thought that this might be because of the metric, but the second line in the quatrain is eight syllables long, I’m pretty sure; the other three are seven, though. He says that he’s not himself nor the other one, but rather something in between; the peak of boredom.

Taking these poems as a group, I find that, maybe, he’s talking about the inspiration that he didn’t have. Those moments of inspiration that escaped him because he was in the in-between space, where he was neither the poor human, the real him in the real world, the exiled King, and the true King, the inspired one in his soul, living in the glorious castle. Maybe.

The tenth poem is called Angle, and it’s pretty good too. It’s divided in half. The first half talks about a false reality, a mirage of a world. The second half talks about the death of the Princesses, and the author trying to navigate this world and failing, because everything is a dead-end, everything is half-built, a lie. However, he talks about this other him, this other one that is also a mirage, and can actually navigate the world. This other him which he cannot contain.

I think this poem is very beautiful, really. It sounds just very melodic. I definitely recommend reading it, if you get the chance.

The eleventh poem in the section is called The Unmatched. It seems like a pretty straight-forward love-letter to someone or something. It’s dripping with want, with desire. It’s very intense. I think it’s Sá-Carneiro yearning for that great inspiration that he’s been exiled from.

Finally, the twelfth poem: Apotheosis. This one is really good, I felt like. This one seems like an acceptance of his creative demise. He’s mourning the loss of his creativity and inspiration, the golden sea with pillars and marble. Now, he’s just a marsh, a stagnated garden. I felt that it was very powerful imagery.

Overall, I thought this section was really good. I certainly didn’t understand everything, and I’ll work to unveil more details of the poems, but for now I’m satisfied with what I was able to wrangle out of the words.

It seems Sá-Carneiro was embodying someone struggling with their creativity and inspiration, feeling that they’ve lost their touch, so to speak, and over the course of the section they came to terms with it, culminating in the apotheosis of the past, and the lament of the current state of the poet.

Looking forward to reading the rest of the magazine.