Luiza Neto Jorge

Luiza Neto Jorge (10 May 1939 – 23 February 1989) was a Portuguese translator and poetess.

Biography

Early life and education

Maria Luísa Neto Jorge was born in the city of Lisbon, into a middle class family. After her parents separatation during her childhood, she lived at first with her father in the former freguesia of Anjos, and then with her mother in the Chiado area.

Due to health problems, he delayed his studies, and at the age of eighteen he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon, in the course of Romance Philology, which he did not complete, although he did get a bachelor's degree. During her stay at the university, he joined the left-wing student movement and was part of the Theatre of Letters Group, which she helped found, and where she met the future poet Gastão Cruz.

Career overview

She was in college until the early 1960s, when she married writer António Barahona da Fonseca. The couple moved to the Algarve, where they lived as a guest at the home of Gastão Cruz. In 1960 she published her first book, Noite Vertebrada.

Luísa Neto Jorge began her career as a teacher in the school year 1961 to 1962, at the Faro Lyceum. In that city, she was part of a group of artists that met at the Café Aliança, which was frequented especially by writers and poets, such as José Afonso, Gastão Cruz, Casimiro de Brito and António Ramos Rosa. At that time collaborated in the magazine Poesia 61. She was considered the most prominent personality of the group of poets that gathered around the Poesia 61 movement, under which she published the work Quarta Dimensão.

Her marriage to António Barahona only lasted about two years, as he left for Mozambique and Luísa Neto Jorge for Paris. In the French capital, she continued writing while working, and some of her poetry was published in Portugal. She returned to Portugal a few times during her stay in France, although she only returned permanently to Portugal about eight years later. In 1969 she published the poetry collection Dezanove Recantos, which was mainly inspired by the city of Silves, in the Algarve. She remarried, with the actor and theater critic Manuel João Gomes (1948–2007), with whom she had her only son, born in 1973. That year she published Sítios Sitiados (Places Under Siege). Although she didn't leave a large written work, she was one of the most well-known Portuguese authors in the 1960s to 1980s, having several of her books translated into modern languages, and published in most anthologies of contemporary Portuguese poetry. Except for sporadic poems in some publications, such as the journal Colóquio-Letras, she didn't publish any books in the last sixteen years of her life.

After her death, her family published several works in her name, based on drafts left by the author. In 1993, the complete work was collected.

Luiza Neto Jorge was also a noted translator, having worked on the Portuguese versions of Paul Verlaine, Marguerite Yourcenar, Boris Vian, Paul Éluard, Marquis de Sade, Arthur de Gobineau, Goethe's Faust, Jean Genet, Witold Gombrowicz, Apollinaire, Karl Valentin, Garcia Lorca, Ionesco, Oskar Panizza, among others. She stood out in this activity, having received the translation award from the Portuguese PEN Club for her interpretation of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Death on Credit.

Later life and death

Luiza Neto Jorge adapted texts for the theater, based on works by various authors, including Denis Diderot. She assisted several Portuguese filmmakers in the production of dialogues for movies, including Paulo Rocha and Solveig Nordlund, wrote the scripts for Os Brandos Costumes (1975), by Alberto Seixas Santos and was a literary assistant in Relação Fiel e Verdadeira (1989), by Margarida Gil.

She also distinguished herself as an artist in drawing and ceramics, and especially in painting, having held exhibitions at the Plastic Arts Circle, an entity where she was also a director. Luiza Neto Jorge also did several illustrations for book covers.

Luíza Neto Jorge died in Lisbon, victim of a lung disease.

Honors

Luísa Neto Jorge's name was placed on streets in the towns of Leça da Palmeira, Carnaxide and Lisbon, and on an elementary school in Marvila.

Works

• A Noite Vertebrada (1960)
• Quarta Dimensão
• Terra imóvel: poemas (1964)
• O Seu a Seu Tempo
• Dezanove recantos: epopeia sumária (1969)
• Os sítios sitiados (1973)
• A lume (1989)
• Poesia: 1960-1989 (1993)
• Par le feu (1996)
• Corpo insurrecto e outros poemas (2008)
• Poesia traduzida (2011)

References

• Marreiros, Glória (2015). Algarvios pelo Coração, Algarvios por Nascimento. Lisboa: Edições Colibri.

External links

• Luiza Neto Jorge at the Internet Movie Database