Madeira: the poetry of Herberto Helder

It is both a privilege and a daunting prospect to speak of Herberto Helder’s poetry. When, in

1977, I started research for my doctorate, the critical field was wide open and sparsely

populated. Secondary reading, none of it in English, was constituted by a handful of

published articles and essays, some newspaper features and reviews, and one doctoral

dissertation.1 I was fortunate to have a meeting with Herberto Helder that year. If some of my

naive questions were met with a smile and a shrug, he was forthcoming about certain themes

and developments in his work. He proved to be kindness itself in the following months and

years, giving written responses to my enquiries and sending a copy of every new volume of

poetry and prose.

In the decades since, critical output has increased enormously (and in step with the

unanimous acceptance of his high status in contemporary Portuguese literature), with masters

and doctoral dissertations, journal articles and conference papers, still mainly in the

Portuguese-speaking world, or in universities with a strong Portuguese presence in countries

such as France, Spain and Italy. 2 Notoriously difficult to translate into English, his poetry has

had scant exposure in Britain,3 but more is now being tackled by some brave souls in the

United States and here in Ireland with hopes of its wider dissemination.

1
The pioneering thesis in question was Maria Lúcia Dal Farra’s A Alquimia da Linguagem: leitura da cosmogonia poética de
Herberto Helder (University of São Paulo, 1979), later published by Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1986. Her insights
greatly helped to form my own reading of Herberto Helder’s work.
2
Witness the bibliography compiled by João Ribeirete and Margarida Reis, ‘Herberto Helder: Bibliografia Activa/Bibliografia
Passiva’, Textos e Pretextos, 1 (Inverno, 2002), 25-35.
3
Inevitably in specialist publications reaching a small readership, for example, Modern Poetry in Translation, 13/14 (1972); and
Contemporary Portuguese Poetry, ed. by Helder Macedo and E.M. de Melo e Castro (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1978).
 When Herberto Helder reached the age of seventy, there was a rash of publicity in

Portuguese newspapers and on websites, even a picture or two. Whether this was welcomed

by him is another matter. Although far from being a recluse, he remains an extremely private

and modest figure, not given to publicity, interviews or literary gatherings. Unconvinced of

the fairness of literary prizes, he has turned down all those that have been awarded to him,

including the Prémio Pessoa (1994). Nominations have not been exclusively for Portuguese

awards. For example, his name was put forward for the European Literary Prize in 1991. The

announcement in April 2007 that the Portuguese PEN Club was supporting his nomination

for the Nobel Prize for Literature, together with that of another poet, António Ramos Rosa,

put Herberto Helder under a strong spotlight. Of course, every time that his name is

mentioned, so is Funchal on the island of Madeira, where he was born on 23 November 1930

and had his schooling up to the age of sixteen. As he has written: ‘Ao princípio era uma ilha.

Em seguida o conhecimento de tudo: infância e adolescência. Depois venho por sobre as

águas sem me afundar. Chego a Lisboa.’ 4

His position of respect in Portuguese letters was signalled in 1958 with the publication

in a folheto of ‘O Amor em Visita’, a lyrical poem of some two hundred and twenty lines of

free verse. It was consolidated in 1961 with the publication of A Colher na Boca, a

substantial volume of poems written between 1953 and 1960 (which is cited regularly by

fellow writers on their lists of favourite and influential books).

4
Photomaton & Vox (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 1979), p. 27.

2
 The 1960s and early 1970s were extremely productive, with a volume of poetry being

published almost every year: after A Colher na Boca came Poemacto, Lugar,

Electronicolírica, Húmus, Retrato em Movimento, O Bebedor Nocturno (a collection of

translations, or versões) and Vocação Animal. The first of his collected works titled Poesia

Toda (though later to be designated ‘antologia’) was published in two volumes in 1973.

Another busy phase started in 1977, so that a new one-volume edition of Poesia Toda in

1981 incorporated the books Cobra and O Corpo o Luxo a Obra, six poems from a mainly

prose collection titled Photomaton & Vox, and Flash. Further individual volumes, A Cabeça

entre as Mãos, Última Ciência, together with a selection of translations, As Magias, and a

new section titled Os Selos, were in turn added to the massive 1990 edition of Poesia Toda

whilst earlier books of poetry were trimmed down or omitted. In 1994, Herberto Helder

published Do Mundo, comprising additional poems related to Os Selos and a drastic

revisiting and rewriting of material from Retrato em Movimento, a volume that had first

appeared in 1967, was included in the 1973 and 1981 collected works, but excluded from the

edition of 1990. The 1996 edition of Poesia Toda incorporated Do Mundo in its entirety. In

2001, he published a severely pruned collection of his poems, Ou o poema contínuo –

súmula. This was trumped by the appearance in 2004 of a large volume with this title, no

longer the ‘súmula’ but another collected works. Ou o poema contínuo is thus the fifth

edition or version of Herberto Helder’s collected poems. It is the current but not necessarily

the final record of substantially most of his poetry. At each publication the reader will find

amendments, slight or significant, to a number of poems, or the omission of poems or groups

3
of poems. 5 However, I think it is true to say that a poem normally goes through just one

revision. Once changed, that version seems to remain.

Apart from the aforementioned O Bebedor Nocturno, Herberto Helder has published

three more books of translations and adaptations from a variety of poetic and quasi-poetic

sources, ranging from the proverbs, spells and meditations of tribal societies, to texts by

writers such as Mallarmé, D.H. Lawrence, Artaud, Cocteau and Michaux. He has published

three prose collections: Os Passos em Volta (first published in 1963, but augmented and

subsequently revised from 1970 onwards); Apresentação do Rosto (1968 – seized by the

censor on publication, only about a hundred copies escaping – one of which is now in my

possession); and Photomaton & Vox (1979), a mixture of autobiographical and metapoetic

texts (many recycled from Apresentação do Rosto), interspersed with poems. He also has a

considerable output of critical and journalistic pieces, has contributed prefaces to others’

poetry, and has edited several anthologies and literary magazines.

Apart from brief visits to Madeira, he has been permanently resident in Portugal since

the mid-1970s. One will search in vain for explicit references to his birthplace in his poetry

(though his prose work is another matter) despite its being intensely self-referential. His

voice is not that of the community, the folk. Nor is it the voice of Portugal the country, let

alone Madeira. Unlike José Saramago, he does not speak out on matters related to Portuguese

social, historical or political issues. It is almost irrelevant that the language is Portuguese, so

much are the subject matter and cultural references common to twentieth- and twenty-first-
5
Compare what the poet wrote, in a prefatory note to the 1973 Poesia Toda, vol. 1: ‘Introduziram-se neles [os textos] algumas
alterações de composição, e outras ainda na organização dos conjuntos, havendo a indicar terem mesmo determinados desses
conjuntos sido absorvidos por outros. Esta edição pretende-se completa e definitiva.’ [p. 5].

4
century Western Europe. By inclination, his sympathies are Romantic with a strong dose of

symbolist, surrealist and experimental technique. The labels ‘Orphic’ and ‘satanic’ have both

been applied to him. Ever restless and enquiring, he has drunk from the introspective yet

linguistically extrovert and innovatory Camilo Pessanha and Mário de Sá-Carneiro.

However, if one cannot speak of him as a poet of the islands, certainly not in the sense that

Vitorino Nemésio or João de Melo are so designated, one can discern an islandness that is not

insularity. More particularly, as I hope to show, the notion and structure of the archipelago lie

somewhere behind the poems and the poet.

As just indicated, it is in his prose work that we find clues to his biography, especially

Apresentação do Rosto, although it would be a mistake to take the episodes literally. This is a

book that to all intents and purposes has no existence, given its publishing fortune. Here, the

island is a backdrop to experiences of bereavement, sexual discovery and puberty, in a

largely female household with scarcely a paternal presence. These are evoked elliptically but

memorably by phrases such as, ‘Minhas primas voltam das aulas e riem loucamente, a cabeça

para trás, e depois ficam muito sérias.’ or, ‘E era o barulho do mar, e a salsagem picava as

narinas.’6 The geography of the archipelago also went deep, as seen in a long piece

beginning, ‘É uma ilha em forma de cão sentado’ (pp. 205-17). It was later transferred to

Photomaton & Vox with several lexical and syntactical changes as well as to paragraph

structure and punctuation. The text dissects the island and islanders of Porto Santo, an arid,

isolated place where the men do the bare minimum to keep themselves and their families

6
Apresentação do Rosto (Lisbon: Editora Ulisseia, 1968), pp. 46 and 75.

5
alive, and when famine strikes, it is the women who protest and seek help from the

authorities. It is a poetic recreation of a place, of men staring vacantly out to sea, women

working to keep their families together, of children entertained by little except the lizards that

they torture and kill. A place of desolation, where life has no meaning.

In his first volume of poetry, A Colher na Boca, Herberto Helder set a pattern which

has been followed through his career: the grouping of poems, usually about five to ten of

them, under titles such as ‘O Poema’, ‘Ciclo’, ‘Fonte’, ‘Elegia Múltipla’, ‘Lugar’. These are

not intended to be cycles but poems composed individually and later organized into sets.7

Whatever we may understand by a ‘cycle’, there is the notion of a common theme and a

sense of returning to the starting point. The six poems of ‘Fonte’ are linked through their

focus on the feminine as fons et origo, and more specifically, though obliquely, through the

poet’s relationship with the mother. Elsewhere, I have written of the relationship in these

early poems as characterized, or grounded, in a mythic view of the feminine, as source both

of life and of language to the child. 8 In the seven poems of ‘Elegia Múltipla’, the main focus

is on death and resurrection. In ‘As Musas Cegas’, the link between the eight poems (not

nine, as might be expected), is perhaps more abstract: that of inspiration.

These sets of poems are analogous to archipelagos in that they are separate entities

within a group identity and geographical location. So, despite explicit references to ‘islands’

being rare in Herberto Helder’s poetry – and there is only one group with ‘arquipelago’ in its

title, the resistant and fragmented poems of ‘Os Brancos Arquipélagos’ – something of the

7
See note 4.
8
The Feminine in the Poetry of Herberto Helder (London: Tamesis Books, 1991).

6
island notion persists in the organization of his work. I have drawn attention above to the

poet’s constant amending of his writings, and would now like to appropriate this for the

islands and insularities theme of this colloquium. By incorporating new material in each new

anthology, whilst deleting a poem, group of poems or even a whole book, Herberto Helder

carries out a continuous reassessment of his output. This is in accordance with one of the

major impulses behind his poetry: self-knowledge and enquiry through fluidity and change.

As he wrote in 1978: ‘A transmutação é o fundamento geral e universal do mundo. Alcança

as coisas, os animais e o homem com o seu corpo e a sua linguagem. Trabalhar na

transmutação, na transformação, na metamorfose, é obra própria nossa.’ 9 The evolution,

addition and disappearance of poems and complete groups are analogous to geographical and

geological change, such as that when an atoll is thrown up by cataclysmic underwater

activity. On a superficial level, this protean process serves to distance him from the reader,

who must constantly readjust his familiarity with the new landscape.

More revealing in relation to the poet himself – whose inextricable physical

relationship with language lies at the heart of his work – is the epigraph to his prose poem

‘Comunicação Académica (written in 1962), published in the 1973 volume of Poesia Toda.

This is attributed to Charles Fort (whom I assume is the magus-like figure who wrote on all

kinds of strange phenomena) but I have not located its source. The epigraph was dropped

from the 1990 Poesia Toda onwards, but it remains pertinent: ‘A minha posição é esta: todas

as coisas que parecem possuir uma identidade individual são apenas ilhas, projecções de um

9
O Corpo o Luxo a Obra (Lisbon: Edição & etc., 1978), [p. 21]. This ‘afterword’ was reproduced in Photomaton & Vox (Lisbon:
Assírio e Alvim, 1979), p. 158.

7
continente submarino, e não possuem contornos reais.’10 It invites us to look at the poems as

these ‘things’: they are islands, projections of an underwater continent, the identity of which

is blurred, overlapping. The ‘contornos’ of the poems change but their anchoring does not,

the appearance of separateness being merely superficial. As an islander, he is aware that

water joins rather than divides. A brief phrase from ‘Fonte II’ hints at this: ‘as águas / estão

ligadas entre si’, whilst from ‘As Musas Cegas V’ comes the unifying embrace of language:

Esta linguagem é colocada e extrema e cobre, com suas

lâmpadas, todas as coisas.
As coisas que são uma só, no plural dos nomes. 11

Given his oft-repeated identification of self, body and poem, this ars poetica may be

extended to the human being. On the surface ‘uma ilha’, a man from the island of Madeira,

but in reality part of a ‘continente submarino’ which is more than mainland Portugal. The

poetic instrument, Portuguese, is a manifestation of one of those ‘projecções’ but what it

signifies is universal.

The persona of the isolated individual, writing in his lonely room – which is implicit in

so much of his poetry and explicit in the prose texts of Os Passos em Volta – is

counterbalanced by this instruction in the epigraph to engage with others. This tension

between approximation and distancing was noted by Ruy Belo in his essay on the publication

of the volume Lugar (1962):

10
Poesia Toda, II (Lisbon: Plátano Editora, 1973), [p. 8].
11
Poesia Toda, I (Lisbon: Plátano Editora, 1973), pp. 61 and 103.

8
 Embora sempre parta da vida e no momento da arte até, como
vimos, se preocupe por fornecer sistemas de acesso às suas
metáforas ou aos seus símbolos, Herberto Helder sempre acaba por
se distanciar irremediàvelmente da experiência. Um dos meios por
que deliberadamente o consegue é a sujeição da emoção esparsa a
um princípio de indeterminação evidente na construção dos seus
versos. 12

In terms of the civilizational context from which he embarks on his depersonalizing

journey, there is a wide range of reference points and themes. These include myth, religion

and magic; nature, animals; houses, the domestic environment and the city; transport and

machines; books and newspapers; workshop and studio; alcohol and drugs; crime and

violence; acting, the theatre, music, the plastic arts and cinema; astrology and modern

astronony; space, time and the cosmos; photography and cartography; disease, medicine,

anatomy and surgery; geology, botany and zoology. In terms of life experiences related to the

poetic subject, there are: childhood, the death of the mother, erotic episodes, poverty and

terror, mental instability, solitude, hallucinations, birth, the most naked exposure of the

physical and mental self. All serve the overall purpose of self-discovery, yet this is in turn

transformed into the impersonal, general or universal. (This is especially the case with the

major theme of eroticism. Love and sexuality are directed not at a woman, but Woman –

nameless, depersonalized, representative.)

In the spirit of this colloquium on islands, insularities and the wider world, and

applying the rhetorical figure of synecdoche, I would now like to single out a few

representative islands from their archipelagos.

12
Ruy Belo, ‘Poesia e Arte Poética em Herberto Helder’, in Na Senda da Poesia (Lisbon: União Gráfica, 1969), p. 245.

9
 The early poem ‘O Amor em Visita’ gives little hint of the metaphoric and syntactic

experimentation to come, but even in the first stanza (given here with a translation by John

Kinsella), there is a refusal of the banal:

Dai-me uma jovem mulher com sua harpa de sombra

e seu arbusto de sangue. Com ela
encantarei a noite.
Dai-me uma folha viva de erva, uma mulher.
Seus ombros beijarei, a pedra pequena
do sorriso de um momento.
Mulher quase incriada, mas com a gravidade
de dois seios, com o peso lúbrico e triste
da boca. Seus ombros beijarei. […]

Give me a young woman with her harp of shadow

and her shrubbery of blood, with her
I shall enchant the night.
Give me a living blade of grass, a woman.
I shall kiss her shoulders, the small stone
of her momentary smile
Woman almost uncreated, but with the gravity
of two breasts, with the sad and sensual weight
of her mouth. I shall kiss her shoulders. 13

From the group ‘Teoria Sentada’, comprised of six poems, 14 I have chosen the second

one as a textbook illustration of Herberto Helder’s movement from concrete to abstract, the

exploration of language and naming, the interpenetration of literal and figurative, the analogy

between learning and love, and the theme of silence:

13
Poesia Toda (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 1990), p. 18. I am grateful to John Kinsella for allowing me to read out this unpublished
extract at the colloquium.
14
Published in Lugar (Lisbon: Guimarães Editores, 1962).

10
 Alguém parte uma laranja em silêncio, à entrada
de noites fabulosas.
Mergulha os polegares até onde a laranja
pensa velozmente, e se desenvolve, e aniquila, e depois
renasce. Alguém descasca uma pêra, come
um bago de uva, devota-se
aos frutos. E eu faço uma canção arguta
para entender. [...]

Porque o amor também recolhe as cascas

e o mover dos dedos
e a suspensão da boca sobre o gosto
confuso. [...]
Aniquilar os frutos para saber, contra
a paixão do gosto, que a terra trabalha a sua
solidão – é devotar-se,
esgotar a amada, para ver como o amor
trabalha na sua loucura.

Uma canção de agora dirá que as noites

esmagam
o coração. Dirá que o amor aproxima
a eternidade, [...]
Porque é com nomes que algúem sabe
onde estar um corpo
por uma ideia, onde um pensamento
faz a vez da língua.
— É com as vozes que o silêncio ganha. 15

Departing from the homely image of peeling an orange or other fruit, the poet transfers to it

the cognitive process. The dissection of an orange becomes the equivalent to metaphysical

dissection. The song is written in order to learn, a visceral exploration of the emotions. How

love works is equivalent to how the universe works (the round orange fluttering back into

one’s mind as a global image). Working against the pleasurable sense of taste, knowledge

15
Poesia Toda (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 1990), pp. 149-50.

11
emerges from destruction and reveals the rhythms of the planet, its darkness. But in turn,

naming and language are overtaken, or rather superseded, by pure thought and silence.

During the 1960s, most particularly in A Máquina Lírica and A Máquina de

Emaranhar Paisagens, Herberto Helder experimented with repetition and permutation to

produce incantatory verse, akin to magic spells, freeing words from reality, signifier from

signified. He also produced poems of stammering, hesitant, elliptical syntax. This extract is

from ‘Para o leitor ler de/vagar’:

Sou fechado
como uma pedra pedríssima. Perdidíssima
da boca transacta. Fechado
Como uma. Pedra sem orelhas. Pedra una
reduzida a. Pedra.
Pedra sem válvulas. Com a cor reduzida
a. Um dia de louvor. Proferida lenta.
Escutada lenta.16

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the poetry became increasingly fragmented, troubled

and syntactically pared-down. An extreme example of this is ‘Os Brancos Arquipélagos’

(1970). Its ten blocks appear to overlap through enjambement but this is not so. Each section

ends in mid-thought without a full stop, but in such a way that the reader is invited to carry

over that sentence into the next section.

This is the end of the first block and beginning of the second:

16
Poesia Toda (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 1981), pp. 152-53.

12
 e então exalta-se o mel algures quieto,
linhas arquejam, costura-se o ar, atormentado
*
toda, a doçura trepida, toda ameaçada,
um sítio relampejante, roupa atacada pela febre,17

A spurious interdependence between the sections is indicated. But there is no connection, the

broken sentence really does convey a refusal to carry on the same thought. One can see the

isolation of the blocks, yet the link is through common imagery: light, explosion, fire, the text

and the spaces between it. The creative effort on an isolated, frenetic individual, whose mind

and body are engaged in a painful reckoning of the self – what can only be called a mystical

experience (avowedly drug-induced), pure thought, a procession of images both painful and

beautiful – all this suggests an analogy with an archipelago: connections yet isolation.

Following a period of silence, Herberto Helder returned in 1977 to sumptuous

metaphors, dizzy-making in the accumulation of images, conveying an obsessive awareness

of the body as material for poetry. Attempts to ‘explain’ these poems are themselves fated to

end in incoherence, but one may note the images related to alchemy and the reconciliation of

opposites; also, the use of the body as a febrile, painful conveyer of sound or the word; or the

apocalyptic visions that have the mind-bending quality of hallucinogenic drugs. This is an

extract from the book, Flash (1980):

17
Poesia Toda (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 1990), p. 311. The publishing history of this group of ten poems typifies the changing
contents of Herberto Helder’s collected works. Published in Poesia Toda, 2 (Plátano, 1973), the last two ‘blocos’ had previously
appeared in a catalogue for an exhibition by the painter Maria Paulo in February 1971, and the last of those two reproduced in the
Diário de Lisboa, 12 May 1972. They were subsequently included in the single volume Poesia Toda (Assírio e Alvim, 1981 and
1990). None of the ten made it into the pruned anthology, Ou o poema contínuo – súmula (Assírio e Alvim, 2001), but were back
in the 2004 ‘full’ edition, Ou o poema contínuo (Assírio e Alvim), where the amendments made for the 1990 volume are
maintained.

13
 Em quartos abalados trabalho na massa tremenda
dos poemas.
Que me olham de tão perto que eu ardo.
Um dia hei-de ficar todo límpido,
ou calcinado nervo a nervo. […]18

The last poem that I put forward comes from Última Ciência (1988), when the physical

body of the poetic ‘I’ is increasingly assaulted and exposed to pain and chaos, whilst the

syntax and external form are severely controlled. In imminent contact with reality, there is a

reticence, a withdrawal from familiarity inspired by terror. At the same time, he appears to be

declaring a prohibition that he is bound to disobey. Knowledge and naming, separation and

contact, are brought together as the poet approaches his task with a wariness born of previous

pain:

Não toques nos objectos imediatos.

A harmonia queima.
Por mais leve que seja um bule ou uma chávena,
são loucos todos os objectos.
Uma jarra com um crisântemo transparente
tem um tremor oculto.
É terrível no escuro.
Mesmo o seu nome, só a medo o podes dizer.
A boca fica em chaga. 19

Although the final line of this book (‘Uma frase, uma ferida, uma vida selada’)

reiterates the sacrificial nature of the poet’s task, this is not the end of the journey. For the

18
Poesia Toda (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 1990), p. 423.
19
Poesia Toda (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 1990), p. 533.

14
poems of Do Mundo, he returns to Retrato em Movimento in a salvage operation, reworking

fragments, creating afresh from scattered hints or motifs. Unrecognisable yet somehow

familiar, the poems of the later book reflect back their models, a process that I find

epitomised in the line ‘Um espelho em frente de um espelho’. 20 This resurrecting of an earlier

creative phase is not a closed exercise but, as the facing mirrors indicate, an ever-open one. If

any conclusion is possible, mine would be that the poet is still on a mission, the nature of

which connects to the Charles Fort epigraph cited above. His ontological purpose, which is

also his ars poetica, lies beneath the surface, linking the poet to humanity at large. The

islander from Madeira has become a truly universal figure.

JULIET PERKINS KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

20
Do Mundo (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 1994), p. 74.

15
List of publications to date:

No. 1. The American Dream in Spanish Poetry: Some Early Twentieth-Century Visions of the United
States, Dr Terence McMullan, Queen’s University Belfast, February 2000.

No. 2. Autobiography and Intertertextuality in Carajicomedia by Juan Goytisolo, Dr Stanley Black,

University of Ulster, November 2000.

No. 3. Radical Propensities and Juxtapositions: Defamiliarization and Difficulty in Borges and
Beckett, Dr Ciarán Cosgrove, Trinity College Dublin, February 2002.

No. 4. Voices From Lusophone Borderlands: The Angolan Identities Of António Agostinho Neto,
Jorge Arrimar And José Eduardo Agualusa, Dr David Brookshaw, University of Bristol, March 2002.

No. 5. National Identity – a Revisitation of the Portuguese Debate, Professor Onésimo Teotónio
Almeida, Brown University, Rhode Island, USA. October 2002.

No. 6. Translation for the Stage: Product and Process, Professor David Johnston, Queen’s University
of Belfast, November 2002.

No. 7. Sujeto femenino en contextos de modernidad tardía, Professor Francisca López, Bates
College, USA, March 2003.

No. 8. Antonio Machado And The Royal Art: Fact And Fiction, Dr Philip Johnston, University College
Dublin, October 2003.

No. 9. The Censors’ Confusion: (Mis)Interpretations of the Works of Alfonso Sastre, Dr Catherine O’
Leary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, February 2004.

No. 10. East Timorese Poems of the Revolution and Beyond: The Poetry of Francisco Borja da Costa
and Celso de Oliveira, Mr Anthony Soares, Queen’s University Belfast, March 2004.

No. 11. Borders, batos locos and barrios: Space as Signifier in Chicano Film, Dr Catherine Leen,
National University of Ireland, Maynooth, November 2004.

No. 12. Camões, Portuguese War Propaganda, and the Dream of a Safe Colonial Empire, 1914-1918,
Dr Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, March 2005.

No. 13. Remembering the Spanish Civil War: Cinematic Motifs and the Narrative Recuperation of the
Past in Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida, Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salamina, and Manuel Rivas’ O
lapis do carpinteiro, Dr Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, University College Dublin, April 2005.

No. 14. Size Matters: The Satiric Body in Saramago’s Memorial do Convento, Dr Mark Sabine,
University of Nottingham, UK, April 2006.

No. 15. Spirituality and Society: Aspects of Religion in Early Twentieth-century Spanish Fiction,
Professor John Macklin, University of Strathclyde, February 2007.

No. 16. Madeira: the poetry of Herberto Helder, Dr Juliet Perkins, Kings College London, UK, February
2007.

No. 17. La isla inventada, Mr Juan Carlos de Sancho, Islas Canarias, España, March 2007.

No. 18. La inmensa minoría: Poesía y activismo por la paz en Colombia, Professor Enrique Yepes,
Bowdoin College, Maine, USA, May 2008.

16