Sá-Carneiro’s shelter and exile

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2016v21n2p42

Paris is a key space in Mário de Sá-Carneiro poetry, not only for most of his poems have been produced there, but as a symbolic reality. This paper aims to reflect on the symbolic role played by Paris in the work of Sá-Carneiro, based on the analysis of the poem “Shelter” (1915), its comparative approach with the poem “Memory”, by other Portuguese poet António Nobre, and the correspondence with his friend and colleague generation Fernando Pessoa. Transfigured by language, Paris is here focused both as an identification and otherness space: at the same time shelter to affects repressed in a lost past and internal exile in a imaginary present. This dream city, lavishly portrayed both in correspondence and in the author´s literature, contrasts with a serious and urgent historical reality. The poet admits, after all, that its Paris is a language space, product of his imagination nostalgia.