Location, Location
Almada owns, right now, the first room
—a large foyer—of the exhibiting area
of the shiny new Centro de Arte Moderna.
Never mind the trifles on the back wall
to the left as you enter. Take a good look
at what’s on the facing walls, running left
and right, into the main room housing what
is permanent of the “others” (among whom
Negreiros also numbers). But back at the
foyer, see his African tapestries, a double
triptych, scenes of immigration (including
a steerage one) paired with those of a
Lisbon Sunday, cidade alfacinha busy at
play. Many faces and many torsos and limbs
show forth in these woven panels. Facing,
on the right wall, there sits at a table, in a
belated work big with design, the messenger.
This canvas, Almada’s deviant clone, no secret,
might affront these colorful carpets. But no, the
person in it doesn’t look out of his clean space, so
clean that you can’t see the smoke he has exhaled.
Imagined to a T, his people know less of Almada’s
splendid, niggard world, having come to their own
realization only by way of balloons spoken in zeal.
1984
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.
Image from http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/jose-de-almada-negreiros