By João Delfim
On 9 November 1942, one António Botto – the bohemian son of a boatman, incipiently encroaching his midlife and quietly renowned for the dandyish fedora that always sat on his head – was ejected from the Portuguese civil service, charged with writing poetry during work hours and ‘wooing a male coworker.’ Under the contemporary fascist dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, such a linear charge would strike fear into the hearts of most men, flurry them into hiding. But Botto had been here before and, according to apocryphal sources, shrugged simply: ‘Now I’m Portugal’s only acknowledged homosexual.’ For, two decades earlier, he had been embroiled in similar scandal, outraging conservative Lisbon with a book of lyrical poems that announced his love of men…
‘And our bodies, clasped and tense / Like bodies without a sense / Rolled on the floor / and there was no more.’ So wrote a lascivious António Botto in the opening section of his magnum opus, Songs (Canções in his native Portuguese). Botto was one of Portugal’s first openly gay writers and wrote multiple poems about homosexual life and passion. Though these have been growingly praised, they were met with an incredibly negative response upon their second publication in 1922, resulting in a handful of controversies.
The poet’s voice is veritably inspiring and feels avant-garde in the way he describes intimacy between two men, ranging from descriptions of the sweetest form of adoration — ‘Listen, my angel: / What if I should kiss your skin / What if I should kiss your mouth / Which is all honey within?’ — to manifestations of an utmost untamed, though always poetic, bodily desire — ‘He came to me, and he sought / Wildly, hungrily and thirstily / My mouth, which he kissed and drained / My mouth which is like a flower / And from kissing back refrained.’ Moreover, Botto’s verses can either tremble with a whispering sensitivity — ‘His mouth smiled / Proudly / Condescendingly / As does a lover who hesitates In the gift / Of his body / When absent and far from him / To whom he had / Sworn to be true’ — or demonstrate a radical form of fatality, as in the line ‘I am leaving you forever.’
The author’s range is not only impressive but masterfully deployed throughout the ensemble, likening the gay experience to a forbidden love — as it was viewed by the Portuguese society of the time. Such portrayals of gay sexuality were seldom found in Portuguese literature in the early twentieth century, making Botto’s bold take on male-on-male yearning unprecedented in the country’s literary history.
It is important to note that we are referring to and quoting the Songs of Botto as they appear in the 1948 privately printed edition, translated from the Portuguese by acclaimed writer and poet Fernando Pessoa. A recovered note by the author indicates that these translations were completed in 1933. As disclosed in professor Josiah Blackmore’s introduction from the 2010 edition of Songs, Botto’s Songs would be privately published in this way and distributed several times throughout his life. From an early distribution in London to multiple reprints destined for a select elite of São Paulo, Brazil, the poet would periodically issue new editions until his death, while adding new poems, revisiting older ones, or incorporating smaller books of poetry previously published with their own titles — namely Aesthetic Curiosities or Olympiads. This goes to show that Botto’s writing process was an ever-evolving practice, passionate and untainted by the censorship it faced throughout the poet’s entire life.
In fact, upon the publication of its second edition at the hands of Fernando Pessoa in the early 1920s, Botto’s Songs were both praised and reviled. The bard’s intimate revels stepped in straight-forward eroticism (‘My glance goes / All over / The warm and flexible grace / Of the manhood that he shows’) were subjects to a public scandal amongst the Lisbon society. Despite Pessoa’s efforts to defend Botto’s pioneer take in a provocative article published in the press, conservatives complained to the authorities about the collection of poems — they claimed it to be immoral, calling it ‘Sodom’s literature’ — leading to the book being censored a year after its publication, in 1923. Moreover, a Catholic college student group, the Lisbon Students Action League, clamoured for a public burning of Botto’s book, going as far as to suggest the author should be hanged as punishment.
Botto’s confessional and personal tone in Songs symbolises an important, resilient voice in modern gay literature. Starting with Pessoa, Portugal’s preeminent modernist literary figure, who considered Botto the only Portuguese poet worthy of the label ‘aesthete’, multiple critics and literates have championed his rehabilitated work over the last few years, resurrecting it from the ashes of conservative censorship. Not only do the Songs of António Botto establish the author as a pioneering figure in modern erotic literature, but they place him, alongside the likes of E. M. Forster and James Baldwin, as one of the major poetic gay voices of the twentieth century.
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