Un viaggio nei sonetti di Manuel Alegre

Written under the sign of travel, of the political persecutions of Salazar’s dictatorship, of colonization and war, of emigration and exile, Manuel Alegre’s verses, as a syntagm that allows us to reconstruct the isotopy of the wandering of the Portuguese people, seem to continue these (un)finished stories – a story of travel and transformation and, paradoxically, of the search for an inherited, reinterpreted and rewritten Western literary universe. Condemned to the diaspora, the poet reads the official history of the Portuguese people with dismay and rewrites it in lands of exile and war, as well as their loneliness, bitterness and disenchantment, through a kind of “synchronic poetics”. From this perspective, this article proposes a reflection on the Portuguese Manuel Alegre’s sonnets, in particular those in the anthologies Atlântico (1981) and Sonetos do Obscuro Quê (1993) as a political gesture of rupture with the Portuguese imperialist tradition and its impact on the author’s poetic creation.