Eugénio de Andrade Biography
Eugénio de Andrade (the pseudonym of José Fontinhas) was arguably Portugal’s best-known poet, translated into well over twenty languages. He adopted this pseudonym after a brief writing carreer under his true name. De Andrade won all of Portugal’s major literary awards: the prestigious Camões Prize, France’s Prix Jean Malrieu (1989), and the 1996 European Prize for Poetry. Marguerite Yourcenar has referred to “the well-tempered clavier” of his poems, and Spanish critic and poet Ángel Crespo has written that “his voice was born to baptize the world.”
Children grow in secret. They hide themselves in the depths and darker reaches of the house to become wild cats, white birches.
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Wherever the earth is crag and scrub, the goats are there—the black ones, girlishly skipping, leaping their little leaps from rock to rock. I've loved their nerve and frisk since I was small.
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The gaze lets go from ripeness.
I don't know what to do with a gaze
overflowing from a tree,
what to do with that ardour
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Far off I see my docile animals.
They are tall and their manes are burning.
They run, searching for a spring,
and sniff the purple among broken rushes.
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