Mário Cesariny

Portuguese poet, playwright, critic, essayist, translator and visual artist, born on 9 August 1923 in Lisbon, and died on 26 November 2006, also in that city.

After studying at the Liceu Gil Vicente, he enrolled in Architecture at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes de Lisboa, where he attended the first year, and then moved to the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts. After that, he continued his fine arts studies in Paris, and also studied music with the composer Fernando Lopes Graça.
A major figure of Portuguese surrealism, the influence he would have on the generations of poets who emerged in the decades after the 1950s, the period in which he published some of his most significant titles, has yet to be properly assessed.

He promoted the technique known as the "exquisite corpse", in which a work was created by a group of people in a creative chain, each one continuing from the previous person's contribution, resulting in a kind of collage of words based only on an initial agreement about sentence structure.

He contributed to several periodicals such as Jornal de Letras e Artes and Cadernos do Meio-Dia, among others. He was at first drawn to the neorealist movement (although that brief foray went no further than an ironic, parodic stance, set down in Nicolau Cansado Escritor) and then, in 1947, back from Paris, where he had attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and met André Breton, he founded the Portuguese surrealist movement.

His combative defence of an authentic surrealism led him, however, to leave the group the following year and create, with Pedro Oom and António Maria Lisboa, the dissident surrealist group.
As one of the main critics and theorists of the surrealist movement, throughout his career he kept up countless literary quarrels, both against the detractors of surrealism and against those who, in literary practice, distorted it.

His poetry first reflected, in Corpo Visível or Discurso Sobre a Reabilitação do Real Quotidiano, a taste for the ironic observation of urban reality which, echoing Cesário Verde, is still a minor phase compared with volumes closer to surrealist practice such as Manual de Prestidigitação. There, sharp wit and the absurd, the use of the unexpected, combined with a discursiveness that rarely tips into radical nonsense (as happens in the work of António Maria Lisboa), allow him, like no other author of the 1950s, to strike a balance between early modernism and the surrealist revolution.

In theatre, in Um Auto Para Jerusalém, a pastiche of a story by Luís Pacheco, he shows the influence of Pirandello and of Alfred Jarry's theatrical practice. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mário Cesariny set about restoring the historical truth of the surrealist movement, collecting its manifestos, publishing the unpublished poetry of some of its members, and bringing to press his own texts from the period of his deepest involvement with surrealist theory and practice, such as 19 Projectos de Prémio Aldonso Ortigão seguidos de Poemas de Londres (1971), Primavera Autónoma das Estradas (1980) or Titânia (1977).

In 2005 he received the Grand Cross of the Order of Liberty, presented by the then President of the Republic, Jorge Sampaio, and in November of that same year he was awarded the Grande Prémio Vida Literária, a tribute to his remarkable contribution to Portuguese literature.