To be free in Portuguese

Luiz Pacheco’s work was developed over more than half a century, unfolding in facets as diverse as autobiographical prose, fiction, memoir, literary, political and cultural criticism, and extensive epistolary and diary writing. A writer capable of creatively appropriating aspects of the various literary movements with which he lived and of rehabilitating literary genres considered minor, Pacheco built a body of work with an unmistakable style and enduring relevance.

Ser Livre em Português offers a possible approach to the various angles of the creative constellation of an inescapable name in twentieth-century Portuguese literature, offering the reader renewed access to iconic texts—such as Comunidade, Crítica de Circunstância, or O Libertino Passeia por Braga, Idolátrica, and Seu Esplendor—and to others that, less remembered, help to measure the scope of a coherent literary project, produced mostly in the adverse context of the Estado Novo.

This anthology is published simultaneously with a volume of unpublished works.

“I know nothing. I doubt everything. I descended to the bottom of the bottom, down there where mud is confused with blood, excrement, pus, vomit; I went into the bowels of the Beast and I do not repent.” — Comunidade