(Artur Bual – ‘Natália Correia’)
Power Points
•1. Rooting out stupidity and shouting down unkindness, Natália suffers the common doom.
•2.Loose cannon in the search for truth, Natália contradicts herself (like Whitman, like Pessoa).
•3.To be within earshot of Natália is to be subject to insult, invective, and laceration.
•4.Speaking out on everything under the sun, Natália shouts best when she insists that her only concern is Culture.
•5.Given that nothing human is alien to Natália, she takes everything personally.
•6.Natália speaks out: (a) to share in the pleasure of hearing Natália talk, (b) to keep from hearing the inane talk of others, and (c) to shatter the sometimes shameful silences on matters that do or do not matter.
•7.Natália’s deeds threaten everybody, the potential adversary, even those who think death will put them out of reach.
•8.Natália offers mariological bones to contend with, for hers is the bold fool’s dint, the foolish sage’s dream of suasion.
•9.Like Icarus or Sappho or the Man of La Mancha, Natália holds fast to a once and future self, though not without fear.
1993/94
George Monteiro is Professor Emeritus of English and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University, and he continues as Adjunct Professor of Portuguese Studies at the same university. He served as Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Brazil–Sao Paulo and Bahia–Ecuador and Argentina; and as Visiting Professor in UFMG in Belo Horizonte. In 2007 he served as Helio and Amelia Pedroso / Luso-American Foundation Professor of Portuguese, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Among his recent books are Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, The Presence of Pessoa, The Presence of Camões, and Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop and Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Among his translations are Iberian Poems by Miguel Torga, A Man Smiles at Death with Half a Face by José Rodrigues Miguéis, Self-Analysis and Thirty Other Poems by Fernando Pessoa, and In Crete, with the Minotaur, and Other Poems by Jorge de Sena. He has also published two collections of poems, The Coffee Exchange and Double Weaver’s Knot.
