Requiem (11 page)

Amor de Perdição
is the title of the most famous novel (1863) by
Camilo Castelo Branco, a great writer of the Romantic era. Fernão Mendes Pinto (c.
1510—83), navigator and adventurer, lived mostly in the Far East and wrote the
Peregrinação
, a sort of grandiose epic poem in prose. Still in the
area of seaborne adventure is the
História trágico-marítima
, a
miscellany ascribed to various authors, giving the accounts of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century shipwreck-survivors. “Interseccionismo” was an artistic
movement founded by Fernando Pessoa in 1914 with the publication of his poem “Chuva
oblíqua” (“Slanting rain”). The “Cantigas de escárnio e
mal-dizer” (“Lays of slander and disdain”), are the satirical,
comic-realistic form of the Galician-Portuguese lyric tradition between the late twelfth and
early fourteenth centuries. As for the lake at Gafeira, it is a fantasy location in which
José Cardoso Pires sets his novel
0 Delfim
(1968). The recipe for
enguias
da Gafeira à moda do “Delfim”
happily coincides with the traditional
recipe for
enguias à moda da Murtosa
and is described in the text.

SERGIO VECCHIO

Letter from Casablanca

(Translated by Janice M. Thresher)

Little Misunderstandings of No Importance

(Translated by Frances Frenaye)

Indian Nocturne

(Translated by Tim Parks)

The Edge of the Horizon

(Translated by Tim Parks)

Pereira Declares

(Translated by J. C. Patrick)

The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

(Translated by J. C. Patrick)