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Luiz
Pacheco (May,
1925 - January, 2008) was a Portuguese writer, publisher, polemicist and
literary critic (mainly Portuguese literature).
He was
most proud of his work as a publisher.
In
fact, he released works by many Portuguese writers (Herberto Helder, Natália
Correia, Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos, Vergílio Ferreira, António Maria
Lisboa), at the time unknown, and was the first to publish Sade in
Portugal.
 Life
- He was
born in an old house in Rua da Estefânia on the São Sebastião da Pedreira
district. His father was public officer and amateur musician. An only child of
a middle class family with roots to Alentejo, Luiz Pacheco soon read all the
books of his family considerable size library. He was, since young age,
asthmatic and short-sighted, and later in his live it became impossible for
him to read, something cruel to anyone, but particularly to a person that
needed to read to be sane. He was arrested twice wile a minor for romantic
involvements with young girls. He compulsively married one of these girls who
became pregnant when he was 18-years-old. She was 15-years-old. After a year,
he turned to her younger sister. The three of them lived together during a
spell, with all his children. He then wrote A Comunidade (The Community), his
centrepiece; it portrays that period. His women were always his intellectual
inferiors, the first two were peasants. He loved to teach them to read. He had
eight children from three different wives.
He studied
in Camões high school, being the best student of his year, and latter enrolled
in the Faculdade de Letras of the University of Lisbon, dropping out due to
financial stresses. Mário Soares, Urbano Tavares Rodrigues e Artur Ramos were
his classmates. He used to say his high school grade was 18 (out of 20), while
Urbano Tavares Rodrigues’ was 12. Urbano, a somewhat popular Portuguese writer,
was one of Pacheco’s ‘favourite enemies’. After dropping out, Pacheco decided to
be an autodidact, and he did managed it. He was a compulsive reader and always
had an analytic point of view, as we could see from some of his books, always
underlined and with his own comments.
In 1946 got
a job at the Inspecção Geral de Espectáculos as a fiscal for theatre plays,
music shows and cinema. Some people say he was a censor, but nothing could be
farther from the truth! In fact, being as he was, he saw this as an opportunity
to see plays and films for free. Never was a play or a film prohibited or
altered due to his action. This was perhaps a way of antagonize a dictatorship
that he always condemned with all his strengths. But he then decided that he
couldn’t take it and left. Since then he never had a proper job. He wrote
articles for newspapersand magazines, including O Globo,
Bloco, Afinidades, O Volante,
Diário Ilustrado, Diário Popular and Seara Nova, he
made translations, and was an excellent proof reader. A libertine, ever poor, he
lived of his friends' goodwill; he classified them by the amount of money he
could borrow each time. He sold books and pamphlets from Contraponto to survive.
When he had money to spend he was extremely generous to his friends and people
in need.
During
years of financial instability, he lived in many houses, rented rooms, pensions,
all over the country, and many important documents were lost by this constant
moving. Charismatic places for Pacheco, where he wrote many of his works were
Caldas da Raínha and Setúbal, but, as he once said, being outside Lisbon blurred
his sight and critical sense. He never had an affiliation to any political
party, although in his late years he publicly asked the Portuguese Communist
Party to accept him, because he wanted to be warm when he died, and what better
than the Party’s flag! This irreverent posture, always laughing at stupidity,
made his life a living hell. But he couldn’t live it any other way. A dedicated
literary and cultural critic, he became famous (and feared) for its critical
sarcastic, irreverent texts. He denounced intellectual dishonesty and the
censorship imposed by the Salazar regimen.
High , thin
and bony, bald, using eyeglasses with thick lenses, dressing used clothes (for
ragged times and below of its size), hypersensitive to alcohol (he liked red
wine and beer), hypochondriac, always previewing his own death (due to asthma
and to a weak heart), cynical but honest, paradoxical, he is a worthy heir of
Luís de Camões, Bocage, Gomes Leal ou Fernando Pessoa.
[1][2]
Writings
- Luiz
Pacheco published many of his writings in Contraponto, mainly short stories
and critical texts concerning Portuguese literature. He wrote thousands of
letters to friends with enormous literary value and many of them were
published in different books. ‘Comunidade’, ‘O Libertino passeia por Braga, a
idolátrica, o seu esplendor’ and ‘Teodolito’ are his most acclaimed books. ‘
Pacheco versus Cesariny’ is an 'epistolary novel' of the surrealist movement
in Portugal. His frontal way of analysing a work was feared by many. Fernando
Namora, a known Portuguese writer, is an example of this: Luiz Pacheco heard
something about some coincidences in two books by Fernando Namora and Virgilio
Ferreira. Decided to decipher the mystery, he bought every edition of the two
books he could lay his hands on and compared, to find out if these where
coincidences and, if not, who copied who. The result was published by the name
of 'O Caso do Sonâmbulo Chupista'. Most of his books are currently not
available in book stores. Here is an incomplete list of his published
works.
- História antiga e
conhecida (1956)- republished
in ‘Crítica de circunstância’ in 2002 as ‘Os doutores, a salvação e o
menino Jesus’
- Caca, cuspo &
Ramela (1958)- with Natália
Correia and Manuel de Lima
- Carta-Sincera a José
Gomes Ferreira (1959)
- O Teodolito
(1962)
- Comunidade
(1964)
- Coro de escárnio e
lamentação dos cornudos em volta de S.Pedro (1966)
- Crítica de
Circunstância (1966)
- Textos Locais
(1967)
- O Libertino Passeia
por Braga, a Idolátrica, o Seu Esplendor (1970)
- Exercícios de
estilo (1971)
- Literatura
comestível (1972)
- Pacheco versus
Cesariny - folhetim de feição epistolográfica (1974)
- Textos de
Circunstância (1977)
- Carta a
Gonelha (1977)
- Textos
Malditos (1977)
- Textos de Guerrilha
1 (1979)
- O Caso das
Criancinhas Desaparecidas (1981)
- Textos de Guerrilha
2 (1981)
- Textos do
Barro (1985)
- O Teodolito e a
velha casa (1985)
- Textos
Sadinos (1991)
- Carta a
Fátima (1992)
- O uivo do
coiote (1992)
- Memorando,
Mirabolando (1995)
- Cartas na mesa:
1966-1996 (1996)
- Prazo de
validade (1998)
- Isto de estar
vivo (2000)
- Uma admirável
droga (2001)
- Mano forte
(2002)
- Os doutores, a
salvação e o menino Jesus (2002)
- Raio de Luar
(2003)
- Figuras, figurantes
e figurões (2004)
- Diário remendado
1971-1975 (2005)
- Cartas ao léu
(2005)
- O crocodilo que
voa (2008) -
interviews
Dictionnaire
Philosophique translation
- Circa
1965, Luiz Pacheco's friend Bruno da Ponte asked him for help translating
volume one of Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique. Even though
Pacheco was paid in advance for the job, he missed the deadline without
completing any of the work assigned to him. After much pressure from Bruno da
Ponte, he began typing away his translation as he read from the book, but not
having a dictionary at hand, he decided to temporarily replace every word he
didn't know with a vulgarism in red ink. Unfortunately, he forgot about it and
the draft was rushed to print without being proofed by either translator or
the editor. The printers obediently set every word given to them and, as was
common practice, used italics for those words typed in red. Pacheco eventually
realised he had forgotten to take out the vulgarisms and raced to the printers
in time to halt production of the book. However, his revisions weren't
thorough enough, and the first edition of the book still came out with a
footnote on page 273 bearing reference to "delicious shit
sandwiches".[3][4]
Death
- On 5
January 2008, Pacheco died in Montijo. The Portuguese television channel RTP 2
broadcast a biographical documentary about his life, filmed in his last years,
where Nobel laureate in Literature José Saramago, former Portuguese statesman
Mário Soares, and Luiz Pacheco himself, among other figures, commented the
writer's eccentric life and work.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Luiz
Pacheco - Manifesting Generator - Biography
