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Synopsis

The Songs of António Botto recovers this important, urgent voice in modern poetry by making available—for the first time since its private publication in 1948—the English-language translation of Canções that António Botto’s friend and artistic collaborator, Fernando Pessoa, completed in 1933. Pessoa, Portugal’s preeminent modernist literary figure, considered Botto the only Portuguese poet worthy of the label “aesthete” and, as a critic and publisher, championed his work. Featuring an introduction to Botto’s work and Pessoa’s previously unpublished foreword to the 1948 edition as well as a new translation of Botto’s 1941 elegy to Pessoa, The Songs of António Botto establishes Botto as a pioneering figure in modern gay literature and places him alongside Constantine Cavafy and Federico García Lorca as one of the major poetic voices of the twentieth century.