President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa expressed his condolences to the family of Fernando Guimarães, emphasizing the seriousness of his intellectual work and his generous affability, in a note published on the official website of the Portuguese Presidency.
Fernando Guimarães passed away on Friday, as announced by the publishing house Afrontamento on its Facebook page.
Born on February 3, 1928, Fernando de Oliveira Guimarães graduated in Historical and Philosophical Sciences from the University of Coimbra. He served as a secondary school teacher and a researcher at the Center for the Study of Portuguese Thought at the Catholic University.
He published his first poetry book in 1956 and built a literary career that established him as one of the greatest Portuguese poets of recent generations, highlighted the publisher, which has been publishing his work for decades.
“Fernando Guimarães was the dean of Portuguese poets,” noted Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, adding that he “always maintained a strong reflective dimension, moving from ‘poem about the poem’ to meditations in a Romantic style, inspired by objects or historical figures.”
Guimarães published dozens of essays on literary theory and criticism, addressing the evolution of Portuguese poetry from the late 18th century to the present day.
As a translator, he rendered works by Byron, Shelley, Keats, Dylan Thomas, and D.H. Lawrence, among other renowned poets and writers, into Portuguese.
“For both activities, he received the main Portuguese literary awards,” Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa noted.
Throughout his life, Fernando Guimarães was honored with various literary prizes, both for specific works and translations, as well as for his entire body of work, notably from the Portuguese Writers’ Association, International Association of Literary Critics, PEN Club, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Casa de Mateus Foundation, Luís Miguel Nava Foundation, Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra, and the University of Évora.
He contributed to several newspapers and magazines, such as O Comércio do Porto, Árvore, Estrada Larga, Eros (which he co-directed between 1951 and 1958), Bandarra, Colóquio-Letras, Persona, Sema, and Jornal de Letras.
On June 9, 1995, he was appointed Commander of the Military Order of Saint James of the Sword, and earlier this year, in April, he received the Vítor Aguiar e Silva Life Literary Award, a distinction established by the Portuguese Writers’ Association with the support of the Municipality of Braga, “for the rigor and coherence of his essayistic reflection and poetic work.”
Among his main published poetry and literary essay works are titles such as ‘O Anel Débil’ (1992); ‘Uma Homenagem a Guilherme de Castilho’ (1994, with Isabel Pires de Lima); ‘Limites para uma Árvore’ (2000); ‘Os Caminhos Habitados’ (2013); ‘A Terra Se É Leve’ (2017); ‘Junto à Pedra’ (2019); ‘Os Outros Movimentos Literários. Encontros e roturas a partir do século XIX’ (2020); ‘Poética do Modernismo. Entre a Modernidade e a Pós-Modernidade’ (2023); ‘Das Mesmas Fontes’ (2023); ‘Sobre a Voz (2024)’, among others.
