So orfeus de linhas descarnadas, gritos de saudade que se cruzam, entrelaam, nascem, morrem poeticamente sinteticos num labirintico cafe entre grades de bagao.

They are skinny Orpheus, cries of nostalgia who cross, intertwine, are born and die poetically synthetic in a labyrinthine coffe-house amidst grates of baga

Sono orfei di linee scarnez, grida di saudade che si incrociano, si intrecciano, nascono, muoiono poeticamente sintetici in un labirintico bar tra casse di grappa.

Son orfeos de lineas descarnadas, gritos de nostalgia que se cruzan, entrelazan, nacen, mueren poeticamente sinteticos en un laberintico cafe entre cajas de bagazo

Sont orfeus de lignes diaphanes, exhortations de nostalgie qui se croisent, s'entrelaant, s'eveillent et disparaissent poetiquement synthetiques, dans un labyrinthique cafe, parmi les barriques de tord-boyaux.

Miguel Barbosa

Titulo : Esboos Pessoanos/ Pessoanos' Sketches

Autor : Jose Jorge Soares (desenhos)/ Joaquim Evonio (poemas)

Posfacio : Paulo Brito e Abreu

Traduo : Antonino Peres Campio

Capa : Nuno Ferro

Paginao : Nunoos Profissionais de Pre-Impresso, Lda.

Paginador :Higino Pedro

ISBN : 972-700-176-9

Deposito Legal : 134743/99

Execuo Grafica : Hipergrafica, Sociedade Grafica, Lda.

Initial Sketch of Communication and Polyphony in aDarkroom

Bread broken or divided into small bits. This expression from a Portuguese priest and writer seems to me to be the best comprehensive definition of the work Pessoa- nos' Sketches, with drawings by Jose Jorge Soares and legends or readings by Joaquim Evonio. The ritualistic agape, or communitarian banquet for the communion, was thus the science or the sacral experiment that made possible the making of this work and that making is a charm... Two friends appear as having the same awareness of the project, we would almost say the prospect, in the prospective sense and that, as we said, is revealed in the science of togetherness or in the consecrated and shared wording... As if, after all, and according to folk wisdom, the life's or spiritual bread stood for culture itself, for the humanisation or attainment which always imply the existence of a cult or of a sacral ceremony and that cult's ceremonial performance, like a sensible and symbolic verb's incarnation in the finite, is today called Pessoanos' Sketches, because the idea's fire renews itself indefinitely.

Therefore, we would almost say that Synthesizing, the poem on page 44 which we now cite, assumes in this sketch as if a form of syncretism or synchrony.

Two strokes make a cross...* / And as much random / The knot's shape may be / It will always be poetry / A poem / A Pessoa / Alone!. By the force of charity or of friendship, the same spirit, the same Idea, vibrates and qui-vers, feverishly, in two charachters or masks of one and only drama: this drama, according to the ancients, is called Myth and Poetry, taken as a ritualistic and common play thanks to which Joaquim Evonio receives today, we believe on the vigour of his fiction, the coat of arms and the seal of the one who, forger of myths and shadows, became himself a myth and a paradigm for the Portuguese culture: we speak of, and call for, Fernando Pessoa.

But Eduardo Loureno says somewhere that the soul's nudity, as happens with the body's, does not admit of idolatry; we say, however, that it admits of Love, as a form of signal, signature or signalization. And though the kaleidoscopic Fernando Pessoa did not, as far as we know, denude his body before Ofelia, he did however denude his wounded Soul, his raw wounded Soul, before the Orpheus companions and most particularly before his double, his ghost, his shadow: obviously, we speak of we speak of and call for Mario de Sa-Carneiro. We believe it is in that sense, and in a metaphoric sense, that Jose Jorge Soares delineates or sketches the Moon-King or the Fat Sphinx as evolving, in a line progressively den-ser and, enigmatically, from the tobacco smoke and the proletarian cigarette of the Black Virgin, under whose auspices this book was printed. Or, in the very words of Joaquim Evonio who, to start with, seems to me to officiate and serve in the Verb's army, with the neophite's characteristic adventurous spirit and zeal: From the ash / The poem drops / From the smoke / Mario evolves!

The fact that in that verbal army or campaign serve, contrary to what happens in the real, not metaphoric army, the said proletarians or outsiders, as Pessoa results from the historic and regrettable devaluation, in action since the pre-socratic in ancient Greece, of the Mythos versus the Logos' empire, of the subjective spirit versus the reign of the objective one; what we mean is that in our Western society the magical and poetical mentality was progressively drowned and crushed by the pragmatic or scientific mentality. And this was so to a degree such that the Poets will be ousted from the Republic by Plato, Camoens and Bocage will go hungry and be seen as alienated or uncaring individuals, and a French rationa-list will even say, because the craving for enlightenment does not dwell in every man, that imagination is the fool of the house. The case is that, contrary to what Descartes, Malebranche and later, in the 19th century, the positivist current thought, power to the imagination has always been the reign preferred by the club or confraternity of the illuminated by the Muses... So much so that in his time Fernando Pessoa developed and ope- rated the pantomime of genius which resulted in a drama in people Jose Jorge Soares, collecting those images, and Joaquim Evonio, conceptualising the play and the drama in their divine sense, have, we believe, received from Pessoa the theatricality and the mask displayed in the mimesis. And if Sa-Carneiro was, as we have said, the lost double or the ghost of Pessoa, Jose Jorge Soares, on his part, appears at the end of the 20th century as the shadow of Evonio, his mythical lost paradise, or his persona pasted and placed before his face.

Two new poems, Heteromorphism and Letter to Paris, introduce us again into the oneiric phenomenology, as a non-formal form of purging an novelty, and we would not be far from the truth if we said that the drawing on page 49 reproduces, after all, a powerful dance at the brink of a volcano or mimicry performed in an alchemists laboratory or in a factory of dreams... Such a factory is, we believe, the Poet's destiny as a maker of fictions; Joaquin Evonio's destiny too, as a promoter of navigation and legend, or of legends favourable to the course traced and followed by an entranced Jose Jorge Soares. The supplies this latter endows us with for the journey are thus a way, favourable too, to the argonautic unders-tanding of Pessoa. And in Heteromorphism Joaquim Evonio says the following. To endure / The nausea of living / The mirror you must break / And each shard / Will reflect the other side / Where dreams abide.

It is exactly because they fight Logic's dictatatorship, it is exactly because they break with the immaculate hands the mirror of conformity, that all true Poets have, sooner or later, to come up against the jailers of the Soul or the inevitable guardians of the spirit; and the policemen who in France attacked the yesterday young people of May 68 are. Are, after all, the same club swingers who, according to Alfredo Pedro Guisado, were hired in 1915 to punch and kick the now venerated members of Orpheus.

Therefore, history repeats itself eternally; only, as Alvaro Campos would say, there are few people who notice it... Historically and symbolically, it is always the same fight, also expressed in this book, between the naut and the Restelo grudging old man, between the prophets of dreams and the high priests of the letters, in a word, between the magic peculiar to artists and those Sa-Carneiro called leptidoptera: the fabulous wigs often succumb to the law of the whip and the grenade...

We are not losing track of our subject, tergiversating or forcing these authors into the phenomenology of our own ideas. On the contrary, we open up Pessoanos' Sketches in page 54 and see written there: l've been thinking / My dear Mario, / Why is it that poets / Have always died / And still die / Of cirrhosis, overdose, tuberculosis / And other forms of programmed suicide! / Their unconformity and fight / Make them lead a bastard life.

A possible answer to this? Imagination, in spite of Poetry, children of the flowers and May 68, continues to be seen in this western and technocratic society as dangerous, subversive, or else, as the fool or the garbage of the house. Fernando Pessoa, Rimbaud, Mario de Sa-Carneiro and Allen Ginsberg stand as a proof to this; and, sitting on their shoulders, receiving thus my dear cherubim's sword, are Jose Jorge Soares and Joaquim Evonio, who with Pessoanos' Sketches want to give us today, right away, one more hand or one more addition to the rosary of Poets. Thanks, then, for the flower, and may it turn in the wind with the passing of lustrums and moons, in a vast and sidereal, huge florilegium!

Paulo Brito e Abreu

Tomar, 19/03/94

I told you once

dying is just not being seen...

Therefore

this I leave to you:

Poems, words said

by the fire I wrote.

Today, even not appearing so,

I remain here,

walking, smoking, drinking,

cleaving the road

I chose.

joaquim evonio