Exiladas (Exiled), by Alberto Osório de Castro: orientalism and the plurality of the languages of modernity

Abstract

Alberto Osório de Castro (1868-1946) was a Portuguese poet, scientist, and scholar. Like his relative and friend Camilo Pessanha, he worked as a magistrate in the colonial administration and lived away from the metropolis for many decades, in Goa, Angola and Timor, where he published his poetic and scientific work at intervals. In this text, we are interested in studying the poems collected in his first book, entitled Exiladas (Coimbra, 1895), Exiled, in search of a poetry that can be read as being, on various levels, plural, in which we propose a critical repositioning of Alberto Osório de Castro as a leading figure in the renewal of Portuguese fin-de-siècle poetry, through his orientalizing aspect, which was constant, continuous, and central to his aesthetics. By integrating into the hermeneutics of Osório de Castro’s work the evidence of his handling of varied aesthetic-ideological registers, we will point to an experimentalism that works on a good number of poetics that can be situated between Parnassianism and the fin-de-siècle currents, already touching on Modernism. It is this experimentalism that most strongly links the poet’s name to aesthetic modernity, especially in the sense that the chaotic and irresolute character of this gesture would be essentially modern. Orientalism emerges in fin-de-siècle Portuguese literature as a strong symptom of this modernity we’re talking about, being, after all, an aesthetic/poetics that provides ‘exotic’ material, which is essential for Osório de Castro’s literary proposal.