José Régio

This collection of stories, José Régios controversial masterpiece Histórias de Mulheres, is here translated for the first time into English. Régio creates a gallery of women - women who are outsiders, born into a society in which they are constrained by class, education, money and social expectations.Dulce is the pawn of feckless guardians. Miss Olimpia is trapped by poverty and her own pretensions. Rosa, for her part, refuses to conform to the stereotype of saccharine femininity, with serious consequences for herself and for her world. Some of the women cope, others go under. A few, in unexpected ways, triumph. Regio gets extremely close to his subjects, evincing a rare negative capability and, in creating their worlds, effaces his own which is, after all, the very world that has confined them.Regio, one of the outstanding Portuguese writers of the twentieth century, combines psychological subtlety and social satire. Like that great Portuguese ironist of the century before, Eça de Queiros, Regio evokes the prison-house that society is for men and women alike, and in doing so rattles the bars on the cage. If his narratives were taken to heart, radical change might ensue.Margaret Jull Costa was a joint-winner of the Portuguese Translation Prize in 1992 for her version of Pessoas The Book of Disquietude, and with Javier Marias won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White in 1997.

Poemas de Deus e do Diabo es el primer poemario de José Régio. Publicado en 1925, fue muy bien acogido por lectores y crítica. En él aparecen y se celebran las grandes preocupaciones metafísicas y vitales que nunca abandonarian al autor. Contiene su poema Cantico negro, todo un referente (bandera poetica, se ha dicho de el) y el que mejor muestra sus palpitos mas originales.Obra canonica y central de la poesia portuguesa del siglo xx, en ella el lector asiste al desfile de imagenes entre aterradoras y salvificas acompañadas por los sencillos pero certeros dibujos del propio poeta, que muestran un inevitable equilibrismo pagano entre los costados humano y divino de la existencia y el sufrimiento de quien erige y soporta tales imagenes. El clima, dulce y tragico en la lectura, nos situa en una complicidad romantica y perdurable con el poeta.

O grande clássico de José Régio, obra maior da literatura portuguesa, que integra entre outros a bandeira poética Cântico Negro. Com este livro Régio define todo um programa de uma estética e assume-