Adília Lopes rereads Almeida Garret and inscribes freedom and the prevalence of feminine desire in Contemporary Portuguese Lyrics

Abstract

Adília Lopes poetry surprises with its capacity for communication. For the same reason, it enchants and (co)moves the reader along the paths of her multiperspectival writing, which brings together worlds that are at first disparate, such as erudite tradition and popular culture, prosaic and poetic, autobiographical and fictional. When revisiting Portuguese lyric, the theme of love and sexual desire seems inescapable. At various points in her vast work, Adília calls on the poetry of Almeida Garrett, because she identifies in it a dissonant voice, with which the author was able to problematize the contradictions of Portuguese romantic conservatism and propose a re-signification of the conventions about love and passion in 19th century society, which occurs not only in her poetry, but also in the love letters to the Viscondessa da Luz. It's as if, by inserting herself into contemporaneity as a dissonant voice, Adília was looking to tradition as a reference rather than an inspiration. As a result, she feels free to discuss how the freedom of the body and female sexual desire are still seen by society in a conservative way. In order to make this relationship between love and desire clearer, we turn to psychoanalytic theorizing about the conceptions of love, according to Freud and Lacan. Adília's poetic word, always heterogeneous and multiple, “words” in the plural, because they are constituted by dialog with so many others, presents itself, in this sense, as resistance, because, ultimately, it directs the reader towards a larger question: how and what can poetry say in the contemporary world?