Goya’s Cry in Portuguese poets: Sena, Amaral, Jonas and Braga

Abstract

It is not uncommon to find, in modern and contemporary Portuguese poetry, a dialogue with other arts, especially painting and music. A source for poets and philosophers, pictorial art sometimes engenders a thought that stops at the materiality of the canvas, but that can expand to other paths, especially when it comes to a work that preserves decisive historical elements for our Western world. This is the case of the famous painting by Francisco de Goya, from 1814, entitled “Three of May, 1808”, which acquired the status of the Spanish national emblem, safeguarding a cry that echoes strongly to the present day. It is, therefore, in face of the recognition of the importance of this painting that some poets will write evoking its presence, in a productive dialogic gesture for poetry. For this reflection, it is therefore interesting to analyze poems by Jorge de Sena (“Letter to my sons on the shootings of Goya”), Ana Luísa Amaral (“A little lonely from Goya: a letter to my daughter”), Daniel Jonas (“ Of the shootings of the Príncipe Pío mountain”) and Jorge Sousa Braga (“Tired of being...”) which very directly refer to Goya’s painting, reverberating his silent scream in different ways, both as iconotexts (LOUVEL, 2006) as well as cultural documents that focus on the individual in modernity.