The slaughtering of portuguese poetry in the 1950s

The cases of “Cancioneiro Geral”, Egito Gonçalves and Bernardo Santareno

Abstract

This article focuses on Portuguese poetry published and censored in book form during the 1950s. It departs from my previous research on the Directorate of Censorship Services’ reference library from Salazar’s dictatorship. In 1974, hours after the Carnation Revolution, around 1 000 copies from this archival library were rescued. The copies contained stamps, book seals, underlined passages and cuts made by the censors. However, these books were first shown to the public only in 2022, within the exhibition Obras Proibidas e Censuradas no Estado Novo (Forbidden and Censored Books during the Estado Novo), at the National Library of Portugal. Thus, out of a selection of 10 recovered poetry books, it analyzes in greater detail three case studies. First, it considers “Cancioneiro Geral” (1950-58), a formative collection of the second generation of neorealist authors published by the cooperative Centro Bibliográfico. Second, it analyzes the penultimate volume in this collection: Egito Gonçalves’ A viagem com o teu rosto (1958). Finally, it examines the censorial cuts and replacements in Romances do mar (1955), by Bernardo Santareno. The study further explores issues of literary memory, and censorship’s impact and legacy, by investigating whether there were changes, or even rewriting, in Gonçalves and Santareno’s later editions during and after the dictatorship.