Adolfo Casais Monteiro

Adolfo Vítor Casais Monteiro ( born July 4, 1908 in Porto, Portugal, † July 24, 1972 in São Paulo, Brazil) was a Portuguese writer who has worked primarily as a poet and essayist. He also was a literary scholar and political activist.

Life

Adolfo Vítor Casais Monteiro, known as Adolfo Casais Monteiro, was born in 1908 in a liberal portuenser parents house. At the Literary Faculty of the University of Porto, he studied philosophy and history, and later came in Coimbra still studying education to do so. In 1933 he finished his studies and worked at various high schools in Porto as a teacher.

His literary career began in 1929, with Confusão, which he published in the then leading Portuguese literary magazine A Aguia. His own first book was 1933, the volume of essays Considerações Pessoais. From 1931 to 1940 he was one of three editors of the second great literary newspaper of Portugal, the Presença. Throughout his life he formed a deep friendship with the Portuguese philosopher Leonardo Coimbra, whose work strongly influenced Monteiro.

At the same time he was also active in politics and became a member of the movement " Renovação Democratia " and since then has been strong repression of the Salazar regime exposed. Therefore, he had to emigrate to political asylum in Brazil, where he da Bahia worked as a university professor of Portuguese literature at the universities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador from 1954. At the same time he continued to write for major newspapers and literary magazines in Brazil, where he was a member of the " Movimento da Unidades Democratia - MUP " which strongly argued for the democratization of Portugal from abroad.

As a translator, he translated among others Tolstoy, Unamuno, Balzac, Sartre, and Kierkegaard Diderot into Portuguese.

Its also long-standing friendship with the professor and writer Jorge de Sena brought him a visiting professorship of one semester at the University of Madison, USA, a.

Literature History is important, however, his correspondence with Fernando Pessoa, who are revealing information about the work of Pessoa.

Casais Monteiro was married and had a son. He died in 1972 in São Paulo from heart ailments.

Works

Posthumously published:

Obras completas in the Imprensa Nacional - Casa da Moeda:

Letters

• Cartas a sua mãe. Imprensa Nacional - Casa da Moeda, Lisboa 2008, ISBN 978-972-27-1623-9.
• Cartas em família: Correspondencia entre o escritor e seus pais; 1929 - 1943 Imprensa Nacional -. Casa da Moeda, Lisboa, 2008, ISBN 978-972-27-1624-6.