Luiz Pacheco

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (January 2008)

Luiz Pacheco (7 May 1925 - 5 January 2008; full name Luiz José Gomes Machado Guerreiro Pacheco) was a Portuguese writer, publisher and literary critic. He founded the Portuguese book publishing firm Contraponto.^[1][2]

Contents 1 Life 1.1 Dictionnaire Philosophique translation 1.2 Death 2 References

[edit] Life

Luiz Pacheco was born in Lisbon. He enrolled in the Faculdade de Letras of the University of Lisbon, dropping out due to financial stresses. Pacheco was a Portuguese writer of José Saramago's generation. A libertine, ever poor, he loved very young women. Getting a fifteen year-old pregnant, he was forced to marry her; the only one who was close in age to his. After a year, he turned to her younger sister. The three of them lived together during a spell, plus other lovers and all his children. He then wrote A Comunidade (The Community), his centrepiece; it portrays that period. His women were always his intellectual inferiors, the first two were peasants. He loved to teach them to read. He lived of his friends' goodwill; he classified them by the amount of money he could borrow each time.^[1][2]

[edit] Dictionnaire Philosophique translation

Circa 1965, Luiz Pacheco's friend Bruno da Ponte asked him for help translating volume one of Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique. Even though Pacheco was paid in advance for the job, he missed the deadline without completing any of the work assigned to him. After much pressure from Bruno da Ponte, he began typing away his translation as he read from the book, but not having a dictionary at hand, he decided to temporarily replace every word he didn't know with a vulgarism in red ink. Unfortunately, he forgot about it and the draft was rushed to print without being proofed by either translator or the editor. The printers obediently set every word given to them and, as was common practice, used italics for those words typed in red. Pacheco eventually realised he had forgotten to take out the vulgarisms and raced to the printers in time to halt production of the book. However, his revisions weren't thorough enough, and the first edition of the book still came out with a footnote on page 273 bearing reference to "delicious shit sandwiches".^[3][4]

[edit] Death

On 5 January 2008, Pacheco died in Montijo. The Portuguese television channel RTP 2 broadcast a biographical documentary about his life, filmed in his last years, where Nobel laureate in Literature José Saramago, former Portuguese statesman Mário Soares, and Luiz Pacheco himself, among other figures, commented the writer's eccentric life and work.

[edit] References