I poeti del Minotauro: Jorge de Sena & Sophia de Mello Breyner

Abstract

Jorge de Sena, the poet who needs to question himself in the mirror of poetry in order to give and leave a testimony, this being the true act of freedom, not to say an act of “madness”, is forced to go back to his origins, that is, to respond to the impulse to question the very archéof Western culture that the poet himself feeds on. In doing so, he follows the same path, namely the dialogue with the ancients, in this case, with Greece, which had undertaken its “querida / caríssima Sophia”, with whom he exchanges an almost maniacal correspondence and to whom he dedicates a poem as an epigraph to the book he gives her. The dialogue that both establish with the same source leads them to approach Grecism from two perspectives which, in a certain sense, could be said to be almost antagonistic. The vision that the two ‘pen friends’ have of the cradle of Western culture, subsequently transformed into Lusitanian, starts from the relationship they establish with a locus and a being characterizing them as before their time: Crete and Minotaur, and the goal of this contribution is precisely to analyze the vision that both have of Grecism.