Raul de Carvalho was born in 1920 in Alvito. From a very humble background, he worked in a pharmacy from a young age. Later in life, as an adult, he would finish high school and end up, very proudly, taking a law degree. He wrote and painted since childhood. In Lisbon, he became friends with all the major figures of the Portuguese literary world. He started, with Ramos Rosa and José Terra the important poetry magazine, Árvore, in the 1950s. Between 1942 and 1984, he published twenty-five books and won a prize in Italy, but always struggled to make ends meet. A member of the Communist Party, a photographer and a painter, he was a tormented aesthete of loneliness. He seemed to live on a knife’s edge because of heart problems and an exuberant lifestyle. On 3rd September 1984, he died from a heart attack in Porto at the house of a friend. He would have celebrated his 64th birthday the following day. The work of Raul de Carvalho has been somewhat forgotten and is hard to put into a single box. His work draws simultaneously on Neorealism, popular song and medieval poetry, Surrealism and Romanticism. His erotically-charged, self-reflexive, political writings also have a metaphysical dimension. The sheer abundance of his poetry and its range make him a sort of synthetic figure, whose work brings together so many different strands.
You may find his poetry in…
Si hay en Portugal un lugar donde el tiempo y el espacio se disponen de forma diferente, con una pulsación peculiar y una luz esencial que parecen llevarnos fuera del propio tiempo y el espacio, ese lugar, sin duda, es el Alentejo.
If there is a place in Portugal where time and space work differently, where things have their own unique rhythm, and where the quality of the light seems to transport the visitor to another realm, then that place is most certainly the Alentejo.
