Adília do Outro Lado do Espelho (o lírico e o grotesco na poesia de Adília Lopes)

Abstract

Adília Through the Looking-Glass (Lyricism and Grotesque in Adília Lopes’s Poetry)

This brief study aims to follow the pathways and varieties of humour in the poetry of the contemporary Portuguese writer Adília Lopes. Her poetry is very specific and, at first sight/reading, it is not the sort of poetry connected with beauty or tenderness. The poetess herself speaks of her poetry as prosaic poetry or poetry of everyday life. The study shows that the poetry of Adília Lopes has its side of beauty and tenderness, since it strips human life through black humour, but in a benevolent way, although we may not always want to see life portrayed like that and such descriptions may thus be far from pleasing us. Our analysis will follow the possibilities of creating grotesque situations and sensations of tenderness and horror likely to cause laughter and shiver at the same time. Our work is divided into parts according to how the poetess achieves the comic effect - banalization of the so-called great subjects: love, death, solitude, poetic anecdotes and the trivialization of mythical poems. In the analysis of the chosen poems, we intend to show that, despite being rather crude and sometimes even cruel, Adília Lopes’s poetry possesses an unprecedented charm, very close to the poetic atmosphere in Alice in Wonderland. Both the characters in Alice and those in Adília´s work reveal certain characteristics of the grotesque, but not without lyrical and fairytalistic counterparts.