Cesário Verde

The Poetry

In 1887, Cesário's close friend, António José da Silva Pinto, published a limited edition of two hundred copies of Verde's poetry under the title O livro de Cesário Verde, (Lisboa: Typographia Elzeveriana). This compilation included only twenty-two of the forty known works of the poet. The edition also included a number of textual alterations, deletions, additions and changes of title. The poems were also arranged in a non-chronological sequence, divided into two sections entitled Crise romanesca and Naturais, comprising six and sixteen poems respectively. For decades the Livro was accepted as the authoritative and complete works of Cesário Verde. Work by Luís Amaro de Oliveira, Pedro da Silveira and, later, Joel Serrão located a number of other extant poems and variants of those published in the Livro. These appeared in various editions of Serrão's Obra completa de Cesário Verde.

Left to right: The Verde ironmonger's shop, which became a bank, and which stands at the corner of the Rua dos Fanqueiros and the Rua da Alfândega, in central Lisbon; Cesário Verde's grave (July 1998) in Rua 7 of the Prazeres cemetery, in western Lisbon; the epitaph on Cesário's tomb. (This is easily reached by tram 28 or bus 774 from central Lisbon; both terminate at the cemetery gates).

The Need for a New Edition

In 1999 Ângela Marques produced an edition which was by far the nearest to this ideal in her Cesário Verde: obra poética e epistolografia, (Porto: Lello, ISBN 972-48-1767-9).

Also using a chronological approach is Canticos do realismo e outros poemas [and] 32 cartas, Cesário Verde, edição Teresa Sobral Cunha, Lisboa: Relogio d'Agua, 2006. (ISBN 972-708-881-3)

A so-called "texto definitivo" produced by Ricardo Daunt in Brazil in 2013 (based on his 2012 thesis) does not merit this self-description. It purports to produce the poems published in Cesário's lifetime, in chronological order, which is a laudable goal. But Daunt has arranged the poems which were not published in Verde's lifetime thematically by his own conjecture as to where they fit in the chronology. What is even more odd, although arranging the poems published in Cesário's lifetime in chronological order, he bizarrely uses the posthumous poem titles for those works culled from the 1887 Livro, for which we have zero evidence that these titles were the poet's rather than the editor, Silva Pinto's.

For instance, Daunt prints 22 stanzas which he has entitled "Setentrional" rather than "Cantos da tristeza", which was the title under which this longer version of the poem appeared during the poet's lifetime. "Setentrional" was a title only found in the posthumous Livro where it had only 13 stanzas.

Another illustration of inconsistency is that he also omits the original over-arching title, "Fantasias do impossivel", from the three poems that originally appeared under that name. And he inserts Humilhações into the known 1874 publications with no justification other than thematic conjecture. The work is entitled Obra poético integral de Cesário Verde, 1855-86: texto definitivo, Lisboa: Dinalivro, 2013.

Further Reading
John Laidlar, 'Cesário Verde: the need for a new edition of his poetry',Portuguese Studies, Vol.1, (1985)

Cesário Verde Today

L to R: One of a two-stamp set issued in 1957 to commemorate, belatedly, the centenary of the poet's death in 1955; Cidade Universitária station bears this quotation in ceramic tiles on its walls; another Metro station homage to the poet.

Links